The IranвЂ“Contra scandal: The term entered into public consciousness, if not quite into everyday parlance.He also cites a scene from The Maltese Falcon, in which Wilmer, the gunman is sold out. In Public Doublespeak: On Mistakes and Misjudgments Terence Moran uses the term in reference to a transcript of both Richard Nixon and Dean. The Watergate scandal: Former Attorney General John Mitchell claimed he was being set up as a 'fall guy'.Oswald 'was вЂa fall guyвЂ™' to use the parlance of the kind of men who must have planned the details of the assassination'. Kennedy: Oswald was not commonly referred to as a 'fall guy' until 1964 when Joachim Joesten used the term in his book title Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy?. Use of the political 'fall guy' is exemplified in the following three events:

Other abstract 'fall guys' included the railroad and bank capital. In a 1960 paper called the 'Politics of Pollution', Robert Bulard writes public officials, to deflect criticism over landfills, found a 'fall guy', but they blamed abstract, faceless bodies: 'the federal government, state governments and private disposal companies' rather than an individual.

Д«y the 1950s and 1960s, 'fall guy' came to mean public 'whipping boy' in the abstract, metaphorical sense. By 1950 in the context of unions and industrial society, the term referred to the low man on the totem pole, to whom the unpleasant tasks would be assigned, specifically that of filling out questionnaires. A paper on 'Isolationism is not dead' quotes an anonymous editorial from a paper in the Pacific Northwest on the topic of the Bretton Woods and the Food Conferences upon which the US became the 'fall guy, the one to carry the load'. Legitimization occurred in the 1940s, primarily with the meaning of 'take on work/responsibility'.

Senator from New Mexico who served as Secretary of the Interior during Harding's years in office, became notorious for his involvement in the infamous Teapot Dome Scandal. One suggestion that has been made in popular culture is that the word's origin dates to the 1920s, during the administration of U.S. In April 2007, William Safire promoted a search to unearth its origins. Many sources place its origin in the early 20th century, while some claim an earlier origin. The origin of the term 'fall guy' is unknown and contentious.

Who was the fall guy