However at the end of that season university administration, with whom Woodson had a contentious relationship throughout his career, invoked a clause requiring state employees to retire at age 65.

As Randal observes, the American invasion succeeded "in creating the deadly reality that the administration in far-fetched allegations months earlier had invoked to justify extending the war on terrorism to Iraq."

Since 9/11, the administration has invoked national security to justify this secrecy, but it actually began the day President Bush took office.

Carlos M. Gutierrez, the commerce secretary, said late Friday that the administration was invoking its right to impose quotas, or safeguards, because the imports were disrupting the American market.

Observe how often the present administration is invoking "the public interest."

The administration, like its predecessors, has invoked executive privilege to block the release of information on internal White House deliberations and advice to the president.

The administration invokes the possibility that an American on international police or peacekeeping duty in Bosnia could be maliciously accused and hauled off for prosecution in The Hague.

The administration invoked the deficit earlier this year in explaining the size of its proposed 2004 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency, which was 5.5 percent less than this year's spending.

The administration has also invoked another tool: shifting its appointees back to Civil Service titles that protect them from dismissal, a process that may bump current employees into lower-paying jobs.

Later administrations, says Mr. Slotkin, would invoke the frontier myth to justify the use of counterinsurgency measures in the cold war and to rationalize America's growing involvement in Vietnam.