Tracy Daugherty recounts the rapid rise of Catch-22 and its linguistic legacy:
[Joseph] Heller appeared on NBC’s Today show with interim host John Chancellor, projecting congeniality, confidence, and an adman’s smoothness. He talked about the universality of his characters
and said, “Yossarian is alive somewhere and still on the run.” After the show, “in a bar close by the studio, where I found myself drinking martinis at an earlier hour than ever in my life,” Heller said, “[Chancellor] handed me a packet of stickers he’d had printed privately. They read: YOSSARIAN LIVES. And he confided he’d been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the executive rest rooms of the NBC building.” Eventually, similar stickers appeared on college campuses along with copies of the paperback. Professors assigned the book, using it to discuss not only literary modernism and World War II but also current American policy in Southeast Asia, which dominated the news more and more. The war that he was really dealing with turned out to be not World War II but the Vietnam War, Heller once told an interviewer.
Richard King has more on the enduring impact of the "catch-22" phrase:
When Nixon’s attorney told the Supreme Court that you cannot impeach a president without evidence, and that collecting such evidence is a Federal crime, one knew where to look for the appropriate analogues, just as one knows where to look today when politicians attempt to justify the curtailment of our civil liberties in the name of the struggle against intolerance. Catch-22 is a tool to think with, to press into service whenever the cause of political perspicuity demands it. Heller has given us a concept, and a language, with which to lampoon obfuscation.
The Dish 