Word: adept
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Legerdemain on the Ledgers. Since the Budget and Accounting Act, requiring the President to submit to Congress an annual estimate of receipts and expenditures, was passed in 1921, every Chief Executive has practiced a bit of legerdemain on the ledgers. Johnson is as adept as any at the art, and he has in a measure practiced it in his first budget. A couple of billion-dollar items...
...sincere, low-keyed reavowal of U.S. dedication to the cause of peace, without any headline-catching promises of bold new breakthroughs. And afterward, at a reception, Johnson wowed the delegates with a virtuoso display of his handshaking techniques. Those techniques are really a modern marvel-Lyndon is equally adept at shaking two people's hands at the same time, or shaking one person's hand with both of his, or shaking a hand while patting an elbow or a shoulder, or using the handshake to hurry someone past him in the reception line. After viewing the performance...
...naval attache, Admiral Alberto Lais, was so scuppered by her that he surrendered the code with hardly a murmur. Italian apologists maintain that Lais, who died in 1951, was actually so ungallant as to give his mistress a fake cipher book. Undeniably, however, British Intelligence thereafter proved uncannily adept at forestalling Italian fleet movements, notably in the March 1941 sea battle off Greece's Cape Matapan, where the Royal Navy crippled Italy's numerically superior force...
Prosperity's wand seems to have touched almost every kind of business man in the Common Market - even the smugglers. Europeans have always been adept at slipping all sorts of contraband across their tangle of national boundaries, but the smugglers were usually small-time dealers in such items as coffee and cigarettes. Today's smugglers are sophisticated businessmen who shun 50 lbs. of coffee in favor of 50 tons of steel, or deal in complex electronic calculators rather than cigarettes. Nowhere in Europe do these "white-collar smugglers" thrive more than in West Germany, where harassed customs officials...
Most of the book reviewing done in the past century was outright puffery. Fields was especially adept at planting puffs. He would write reviews himself and mail them to editors ("It may serve your tired brain some purpose. No one need know that I wrote it"), or he would ease a reviewer's critical burden by explaining that "the moral of the story lies at the bottom of page 168." Journals in which Fields advertised were expected to discover rare qualities in Fields's authors, but on one notable occasion the system of back-scratching broke down...