Word: legerdemain
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...even supplies a woman: the city's leading whore (Chris Richard). Morley is aghast. "To marry a woman would be a betrayal of my identity," he whines as he minces about in an elephantine parody of homosexuality. But marry he does, and he is transformed by Chayefskyean legerdemain into a happy, prospective father. To his considerable grief, the child is stillborn. Meantime, with his tax man spurring him on, Morley has acquired a corporate identity, liens on real estate, a sub rosa connection with the Mafia, a Lichtenstein subsidiary. The erstwhile writer becomes monomaniacally absorbed in profits...
Insurance Policy. Dirksen, for all his gifts of legerdemain, found himself without a solid two-thirds majority for cloture. Therefore he and his son-in-law, Tennessee's Senator Howard Baker, sought to mollify the conservatives by introducing new amendments, this time to weaken the open-housing section. Together, their amendments would exclude from the ban on dis crimination all single-family, owner-occupied housing-potentially 30 million units...
...Iowa's truculent H. R. Gross came within five votes of relegating the bill once again to a Senate-House conference with the stipulation that the U.S. cut off aid to Poland as long as that country continues to trade with North Viet Nam. By some adroit parliamentary legerdemain, House leaders delayed a final tally until they could persuade a crucial handful of members to defect to their side...
...Legerdemain of this sort is the special talent of 29-year-old Joyce Carol Oates. As she demonstrated in an earlier novel (With Shuddering Fall) and two volumes of short stories (By the North Gate, Upon the Sweeping Flood), she is a literary oddity. An upstate New York Yankee, she creates countrified characters who burn with the kind of short-fused violence and curious pride of privacy that have always been the exclusive hallmark of writers from the South...
...loudly regrets, claiming that the President has taken the measure as a blank check to wage unlimited war without any further consultation with Congress. For his part, President Johnson argued at his last press conference that Congress could vote to rescind the Tonkin resolution-but that also was legalistic legerdemain, since the President insisted at the same time that he had had no constitutional need for the Tonkin resolution in the first place...