Fall guy

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. President Warren G. Harding (1921–1923), when Albert B. Fall, a U.S. 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.[4]

Legitimization occurred in the 1940s, primarily with the meaning of "take on work/responsibility". 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". 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.

By the 1950s and 1960s, "fall guy" came to mean public "whipping boy" in the abstract, metaphorical sense. 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.[5] Other abstract 'fall guys' included the railroad and bank capital. Use of the political "fall guy" is exemplified in the following three events:

1. The Assassination of John F. 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?. Oswald "was ‘a fall guy’" to use the parlance of the kind of men who must have planned the details of the assassination".[6]
2. The Watergate Scandal: Former Attorney General John Mitchell claimed he was being set up as a "fall guy".[7] In Public Doublespeak: On Mistakes and Misjudgments Terence Moran uses the term in reference to a transcript of both Richard Nixon and Dean. He also cites a scene from The Maltese Falcon, in which Wilmer, the gunman is sold out.[8]
3. Iran Contra Scandal: The term entered into public consciousness, if not quite into everyday parlance. Before this scandal Richard Safire seems to have kept the phrase alive.[9][10] The phrase's use increased after Iran-Contra in 1987; Representative Louis Stokes' used the phrase during a session of Congress in regard to Oliver North's steadfastness and loyalty during the hearings.[11]

In corporate managerial classes, by 1988 the "fall guy" was institutionalized as a principle, a component of what every good manager needed.[12]

A few examples of fall guys:[13]

• George Tenet: pre-Iraq war intelligence
• Scooter Libby: Valerie Plame affair
• Michael D. Brown: federal response to Hurricane Katrina
• Col. Janis Karpinski: mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison
• Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman: improper treatment of soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital (Walter Reed Army Medical Center neglect scandal)
• Bong Revilla, Juan Ponce Enrile and Jinggoy Estrada: PDAF scam fall guys.