Eleventh Commandment of Politics (dead woman or live man)

[Baker, John]

        This appears to be an antedating.  YBK quotes Louisiana
politician Edwin Edwards, from his 1983 run for governor of Louisiana:
"The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with
either a dead girl or a live boy."  Incidentally, YBK gives a 1985 cite
to The Economist.  There are various other sources that quote him, with
minor variations in wording.  The earliest I see is from the
Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/11/1983:  "The only way I can lose is if I'm
found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy."

        Slightly earlier, but still quite a bit later than the Dallas
quote, is this version from the August 1983 Atlantic Monthly, in an
article by Seymour Hersh that gives a different take on Gerald Ford from
what we have heard in the past few days:

        <<Watergate was the predominant issue for the staff members of
the House Judiciary Committee in the fall of 1973, as they prepared for
their exhaustive hearings on Ford's vice presidential nomination. The
committee's focus, inevitably, was not on Ford's past record but on the
impeachment proceedings against Nixon--which, many in Congress believed,
would get under way once Ford was confirmed and sworn into office. "All
of the Democrats understood what we were doing,' William P. Dixon, one
of the senior Democratic committee investigators, said in a recent
interview. "We needed to put him in so we could remove Nixon. We
couldn't get Nixon out until we got Ford in. We weren't just making Ford
President--we were saving the presidency.' There were few illusions
among the investigators about Ford, whose main asset was that he was not
Richard Nixon. The staff's inquiry into Ford, Dixon says, produced
evidence of unexplained cash transactions involving the Ford family's
personal finances, some instances of double billing of airline flights,
and what were considered to be technical violations of federal
campaign-finance laws. Far more troubling to many committee
investigators was a closely guarded Internal Revenue Service audit of
Ford's finances for 1972, which showed that he and his wife, Betty,
managed to live on between $5 and $13 per week in pocket money. "Ford
couldn't buy his tobacco on $5 a week,' one committee investigator says.
"That was just total bull, as anyone who read the report knew.' The
investigator says that he and others shared many reservations about
Ford, but viewed them as insignificant compared with the problems at
hand. "We were saving the country. For God's sake, the other man was a
lunatic. We had a thorough investigation of the guy and we didn't find
any dead women or live boys. He was a known quantity: k-n-o-w-n; and
let's get on with it.'>>


John Baker



-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Bapopik at AOL.COM
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 2:39 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Eleventh Commandment of Politics (dead woman or live man)

I was just looking through the internet movie database's "memorable
quotes from DALLAS" and came across the 11th Commandment of Politics.
Did we establish  a date on this? Is there a date of this episode? Did
Grant Barrett research it  for his book?
...
...
...

_http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077000/quotes_
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077000/quotes)

Memorable Quotes from
"Dallas" (_1978_ (http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Years/1978) ) _J.R._
(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001306/) : Barnes just broke the cardinal
rule in politics: never get caught in bed with a dead woman or a live
man.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org