Word: hobgoblin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...past ten years. Dirksen commanded the power to alter the directions of the nation, and sometimes he almost gave the impression of whimsicality in the causes he embraced. At times, he was a man of stupefying inconsistency. But then Dirksen always was fond of quoting Emerson on the hobgoblin of little minds. It was Dirksen, an old supporter of Joe McCarthy. who almost singlehanded kept the utterly superfluous Subversive Activities Control Board in business two years ago. It was Ev, too, who had been seeking a constitutional convention to overturn the Supreme Court's one-man one-vote decision...
...that war; the North Vietnamese and Chinese Communists raptly read the tea leaves of presidential pronouncements for clues to the seriousness of the U.S. resolve. Yet precisely because what the U.S. President says in one place is instantly replayed in many others, consistency becomes not a hobgoblin but a necessity in the sober conduct of foreign affairs...
...anything, Everett Dirksen's performance in the Senate last week was entirely too improbable to have been sinister. Never notably troubled by the hobgoblin of little minds, the minority leader executed one of his more spectacular political somersaults in becoming once again the champion of the civil rights bill...
Romney's judgment has never been noticeably clouded by the hobgoblin of little minds. He strongly endorsed the war in July 1965 (before he first visited Viet Nam); he lent qualified support to the Administration's policy at Hartford last spring (17 months after his return from Saigon); and, most recently, he unequivocally denounced the U.S. commitment as a "tragic" mistake. Last week, during a Labor Day interview on Detroit's WKBD-TV, Commentator Lou Gordon wanted to know how Romney squared his current conviction that the U.S. should never have got involved in Asia with...
...bribe their judges. The investigation was dropped to allow Dzu to run for the presidency. The most energetic and eloquent of the eleven candidates, he daily unleashed a barrage of invective at Thieu and Ky, all the while claiming plots and sabotage meant to damage him. Consistency was no hobgoblin; he first said that he had met with Tri Quang to join forces, then denied it. He said Viet Cong sympathizers had been encouraged by the N.L.F. to vote for him, then he denied that. Everywhere he "demanded" an end to the war, pushing peace like a patent medicine...