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Winchell was enormously entertaining to the common man, his harsh and staccato voice wrapped in a fearless facade. He saw himself as a “protector of little people,” wrote Dickson Hartwell in a 1948 Collier’s profile. “Nobody browbeats a waiter in his presence.” He took on Hitler, Congress, and the president, and he wasn’t afraid to lambaste by name prominent Americans he suspected of a pro-Axis attitude. At various times he heaped scorn upon Huey Long, Hamilton Fish, Charles A. Lindbergh, Martin Dies, and the Ku Klux Klan. He sometimes referred to Congress as “the House of Reprehensibles,” and he got in trouble with his sponsor and network (one of many such troubles) when he characterized as “damn fools” voters who had returned isolationists to office.
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