Word: ploy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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139th Session. Last month, Porter shocked the North Vietnamese by announcing a boycott of the negotiations-a ploy that had always been their specialty. When he returned to the Majestic last week, Porter jousted with the Communists for four straight hours. He warned them against trying any "military adventures" in Indochina, adding that the result could only be "the loss of many more lives." The Communist delegates accused him of not "responding positively" to their proposals, but Porter rasped back that Communists made a practice of turning "proposals into ultimatums, and you are in no position to issue ultimatums...
...most prosaic of milk runs. It started in Washington, D.C., at 8:30 a.m. last Wednesday, with scheduled stops at Minneapolis, Great Falls and Missoula, Mont., Portland, Spokane and finally Seattle. What happened en route rivaled Alfred Hitchcock's more baroque fantasies. In the most elaborate skyjacking ploy in the bizarre history of air piracy, an inconspicuous middle-aged traveler identified on the manifest as "D.B. Cooper" extorted $200,000 from the airline, and apparently foiled any plan of capture by parachuting to safety over southwest Washington State...
Most advertisers lure young customers to their products with offers of model racing cars or "surprise" toys. Hunt-Wesson Foods has a different ploy: trees. In the wake of a wave of forest fires that swept the Pacific Northwest, last December the California food-processing company offered to plant a seedling tree in the fire-ravaged forests in the name of anyone who sent in a label or code number from a can of its Big John's Beans 'n Fixin's. More than 200,000 requests were received in ten months, and an equivalent number...
...opponents. Paradoxically, his celebrated killer instinct was the one trait that seemed to threaten his chances against Petrosian. Prematch speculation had it that Fischer, the only grand master who consistently prefers to risk defeat rather than settle for a tie game, might be a setup for the Petrosian ploy of forcing draws. Said U.S. Grand Master Larry Evans, who served as Fischer's second in Buenos Aires: "The only way Petrosian can beat Bobby is by boring him to death...
...past, firmness would have produced material rewards, in 1962 the U.S. pushed the world to the brink of the apocalypse and came out with little to show for it. If Ulam is right, and the Russians were after a treaty, we might all be better off had the ploy worked. The only beneficiary was Kennedy's prestige, and an assassin's bullet the following year made that gain negligible...