Word: stratagem
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...much of his effort. "Hidden-hand leadership," says Greenstein, permitted Eisenhower to maintain his own dignified aura and personal authority with the nation (a moral authority never even approximately regained by his successors), while actively managing his presidency. Even those garbled answers at press conferences, Greenstein thinks, were a stratagem meant to conceal, soothe and deflect. Once, when Hagerty advised Ike to refuse to answer any questions about the Formosa Straits, the situation being especially tricky then, the President replied: "Don't worry, Jim. If that question comes up, I'll just confuse them...
Hellman convincingly portrays herself as someone who would tell more if she only knew more. Pose or not, the stratagem works and the surface holds. People meet, get drunk together, exchange pleasantries or insults, separate, come to various bad or unhappy ends. Mobsters mix with writers, money is thrown around, beauty saves the last waltz for evil. All this is transmitted through a literary imagination clearly shaped by the 1930s. The wastrels and addled debutantes whom Hellman keeps bumping into could have been, perhaps were, created by F. Scott Fitzgerald...
ROSOVSKY'S JUSTIFICATION for the remoteness of these courses veils a bureaucratic stratagem for getting professors to teach them. In the generation since Harvard's first curriculum overhaul, the dean intones, man's knowledge has grown so vast that "there is just too much information" for any current course to use the survey approach implemented in 1945. The new Core course, in contrast, is meant to forsake breadth of scope in order to emphasize the various methodological perspectives on a given subject--"modes of thought" in the Core vocabulary...
...duty is to import trucks in two parts, in which case only a 4% tariff applies. After clearing customs, the chassis (including the cab) is joined to the cargo bed, a process that a Datsun spokesman concedes "can be performed in a matter of minutes." Toyota has a different stratagem: it builds the cargo beds in California and imports the cabs and chassis. The most ingenious ploy is GM's. Chevy Luvs are sent from Japan to Tacoma, Wash., with the chassis and bed loosely attached. The two parts are separated in a warehouse and, after being moved through...
Cukor stages the story well enough against lush Welsh landscapes, but there are very few openings for his usual flourishes of wit and romance. James Costigan's mechanical teleplay often italicizes plot developments; a second-half plot stratagem, in which Morgan fathers an illegitimate baby, comes across as crude turn-of-the-century melodrama. One also wonders why Costigan has not bothered to open up the play's naturally constricted action. When Morgan travels up to Oxford to take his exams, the audience expects to go with him: the Welsh boy's first encounter with upper-crust...