Word: columnist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Deprived of the customary briefings and backgrounders, correspondents were forced to fall back on color and trivia, including the length of Mao's handshake with Nixon and the width of Chou En-lai's grins as portents of how the talks were going. Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. fumed about the low-key reception and grumbled that the sole Chinese concession seemed to be that "they did not make President Nixon stop for red lights." Buckley eventually suggested in print that some slight was also intended because Chou drank "to the health" of President Nixon instead...
Back in Washington Columnist Art Buchwald seemed happy enough to be left behind. Comfortably reflecting on the fact that Chairman Mao writes uplifting verse, Buchwald offered a collection of poems that President Nixon might quote back at him, in Mao's own florid style. To the harried word reporters in Peking, one was especially to the point...
...though, it was none of the legions of WWrongos, the swasti-cooties, Chicagorillas, pinko stinkos or presstitutes who did in Winchell. In the end it was his own "little people," Mr. and Mrs. America, who dealt him the crudest blow a gossip columnist could suffer. They stopped listening...
Forsaking the footlights in 1922, Winchell began to pound the backstage beat in earnest for the New York Vaudeville News. He joined the New York Mirror as a columnist in 1929 and began enticing his readers with the latest on what moom pitcher star was seen handholding what sweedee pie at El Morocco. As his following grew, so too did his impudence. Throughout the 1930s, the gang at Lindy's and housewives everywhere sniggered at such items as "Edna St. Vincent Millay, the love poet, just bought a new set of store teeth...
...perhaps President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an avid listener and confidant, was safe from the Winchell shaft. He railed against "Hitlerooting" U.S. Senators, accused Defense Secretary James Forrestal of plotting a Wall Street dictatorship. Once, when a lengthy study of Winchell in The New Yorker reported that "41.2% of the columnist's items are completely inaccurate," he blasted back that the magazine's editor Harold Ross did not wear underwear. (100% inaccurate...