Ooh I Love to Dance a Little Sidestep

Percy Eugene Foreman

The inimitable Charles Durning sang a song in the Burt Reynolds/Dolly Parton film, "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," that should be the theme song for every shady politician that ever concocted a response to an awkward question from a reporter that delivered an intricate, nuanced explanation and yet said exactly nothing he could be pinned down for. In the song, the Governor played by Durning delivers one of those non-answers then waltzes back up the steps into the governor's mansion singing, "Ooh, I love to dance a little sidestep."  Check out the video below.

Erle Stanley Gardener's famous tricky defense attorney Perry Mason epitomized this style of practice. It is said that Perry Mason was modeled after one Percy Foreman, a shady Houston lawyer noted for getting criminals off through sly courtroom shenanigans. 

I got to see Percy in action my senior year at Valley Grande Academy in Weslaco, Texas. Our history professor, Jacinto Cobos, took us to observe the trial of Charles Harrelson (actor Woodie Harrelson's dad) for the murder of federal judge John Wood. A man near me in the gallery, evidently a veteran Percy watcher tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, "Watch how Foreman distracts the jury. Check out the cigarette."

Foreman was smoking a cigarette (you could do that in courtrooms in that day). Actually he wasn't smoking it, just holding it in front of him, elbow on the table in full view of the jury. As the prosecutor droned on the ash on the end of the cigarette grew longer and longer. Percy didn't flick the ash into the ashtray on the desk, he just let it grow. Someone later told me that Percy would insert a wire through his cigarette to support the elongated ash. 

Throughout the last probably three-quarters of the prosecutor's examination of the witness, the jury watched that ash, mesmerized, waiting for the ash to fall. Foreman left it hanging precariously from the end of the cigarette until the prosecutor announced, "Your witness," Whereupon Foreman flicked the ash into the ashtray, laid down his smoke and rose to cross-examine the witness. The jury sort of shook itself as though waking from a dream and turned its full and rapt attention to Foreman. 

Harrelson got life, dying in prison in 2008 I believe it was. He was up for the death penalty, so I expect he got credited for a win. It was an interesting look. for a high school senior like me. at how lawyers manipulate juries. It set me up to see through the way politicians (by and large members of the lawyer class) manipulate what people see and hear. It certainly explained to my satisfaction, how we wound up with the likes of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barak Obama and the truly dismal Joe Biden. 

I think they would all have used Percy's cigarette trick had the Democrat party not set its cap against smoking. Instead beleaguered politicians had to do things like bomb aspirin factories and Yugoslavian villages to draw attention away from getting caught with nubile female interns who were providing, shall we say services not covered by the White House Intern's Handbook under the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, while the president was on the phone to the defense secretary. It would explain why Bill Clinton chose the military as his proverbial long ash cigarette.

Political B.S. is little more than the cigarette game just on a larger more expensive scale. And, of course, it's the taxpayer who pays for the ruling class's Marlboros.

Charles Durning's as Texas's side-stepping governor

© 2022 by Tom King