Word: doubletalked
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...problem is that too many people are still taking it on themselves to speak for the Administration. Says one British Cabinet minister: "The disarray and doubletalk at the higher levels of American foreign policy has become so pronounced as to make us wonder who really is in charge." Another problem is that the State Department has not coordinated well with the White House staff; as a result, National Security Adviser Richard Allen is not laying before Reagan the detailed analyses of foreign policy problems and options that previous Presidents got from stronger aides. A third difficulty is that Secretary...
Marchais bills himself as the "anti-Giscard candidate," but the non-Communist French press routinely describes his speeches as "doubletalk." One prominent Socialist leader goes so far as to call him a "Janus, who has two faces: one the anti-Giscard candidate, the other turned against François Mitterrand." Pundits insist that Marchais actually has a carefully masked preference for the re-election of the conservative Giscard over the leftist Mitterrand. His main reason, they reckon: the fear that a Socialist victory would severely undercut the influence of the smaller Communist Party and relegate it to a helpless neither...
...DOUBLETALK by Gerard Smith Doubleday; 556 pages...
...title has a double meaning. Doubletalk refers first to the windy Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, now approaching their twelfth year and fourth American Administration. Gerard Smith recounts numerous instances of frustration in the course of his 2½-year stint as the principal talker on the American side during the first Nixon Administration, but he also argues energetically that the negotiations have become a salutary fixture in the superpower relationship. For even when talks are stalled and not producing agreements, they serve as a safety valve for the pressures of intensifying competition and mutual misunderstanding; diplomats and generals are forced...
...Doubletalk also refers to the role in SALT I of Henry Kissinger, who conducted his own, not always parallel, negotiations with Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin in Washington. The first volume of Kissinger's own memoirs, White House Years, published in 1979, exuded contempt for the SALT bureaucracy headed by Smith; Doubletalk retaliates with an agenda of rebuttals and countercharges. Smith, for example, accuses Kissinger of attempting "a one-man stand, a presidential aide against the resources of the Soviet leadership...