Word: barbed
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More Than Time. In Round 2, Harriman abandoned his earlier geniality and matched Thuy, barb for barb. Particularly pointed was his use of a 1956 admission by Hanoi's Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap: "We executed too many honest people. Terror became far too widespread. Torture came to be regarded as a normal practice." Harriman also sought to sound an upbeat note by declaring that he had been "struck by some similarities in our respective positions," notably expressions of hope for an independent and peaceful South Viet Nam. But the North Vietnamese swiftly rejected the overture, declaring: "In fact...
...more restrained. On hand were only a few French protocol officials, newsmen and the new U.S. ambassador, Sargent Shriver, who was hurriedly sworn in earlier in the week. Where Thuy's arrival statement was characteristically windy and polemical, Harriman's was crisp and noncommittal. His only barb, in fact, was aimed not at the North Vietnamese but at the French. He reminded them that the first Paris conference he attended helped set up the Marshall Plan, "20 years ago almost to the day." Added Harriman: "I have many warm memories of those days, and of the close cooperation...
Amusedly saddened by his own middle-aged moral spread, Mailer moves with almost prissy distaste among the rabble. His sharpest barb is reserved for Poet-Polemicist Paul Goodman, who "looked like the sort of old con who had first gotten into trouble in the Y.M.C.A., and hadn't spoken to anyone since." Arrested himself during the opening hours of the Pentagon siege, Mailer winds up in the same paddy wagon with a tall, ferocious American Nazi, and stares him down in the inevitable Mailerian confrontation of wills. "You Jew bastard," shouts the Nazi. "Kraut pig!" replies Norman, only...
...manages to deliver a barb without offending is a matter of chemistry that he himself cannot define precisely. "I think it conies from experience," he says. "I know most of these people personally and I know when something will hurt them. I can get away with nuances and insinuations that will sting them a little." He is, says a friend, "lethally neutral." Every target -tycoon or President, Republican or Democrat, general or sergeant, victor or vanquished-gets equal time...
...another compound, hundreds of the rank and file of the PLA pressed against the barbed-wire and called to reporters; Israeli soldiers sporting sub-machine guns converged on them and forced them back to a white, chalk line several feed from the barb wire. One of the prisoners, their spokesman, held up a piece of paper which he promised would prove that they were refugees on the U.N. payroll and not soldiers. The contract, upon closer examination, had expired on May 31, five days before the battle for Gaza; U Thant's withdrawal had left them in the hole...