The Trollope Ploy
To interpret - or willfully misinterpret - a message in the most favourable manner to oneself.
The Trollope Ploy was popularised by a critical diplomatic manoeuvre during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. On October 26th, President Kennedy received a long rambling but basically conciliatory private letter from Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The next day, however, the Russians publicly released a second letter which took a much harder line. This left Kennedy and his advisers in a quandary. Had Khrushchev changed his mind? Was he really in control of events on the Soviet side? Or had the second letter perhaps been composed first but delayed in transmission as it passed through different levels of approval in the Russian foreign office?
At this point the president’s brother and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy came up with what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “a thought of breathtaking simplicity and ingenuity: why not ignore the second Khrushchev message and reply to the first?” (A Thousand Days, 1965). The president delegated his brother and his special counsel Theodore C. Sorenson to prepare a reply to the first letter. The terms of the American reply were accepted by Khrushchev on October 28th and the two nations backed away from the brink of nuclear war.
The manoeuvre was not characterised as the Trollope Ploy in the heat of the moment; the name came later after the participants in the crisis had time to analyse what had happened. As Sorenson reported: “Much misinformation has been written about who said what and about such terms as ‘hawks and doves’, ‘think tank’, ‘Ex Comm’, and ‘Trollope ploy’ ,which I never heard used at the time” (Kennedy, 1965).
The ‘Trollope’ here comes from the novelist Anthony Trollope whose Victorian heroines were inclined to interpret a slight squeeze of the hand as a proposal of marriage. The ‘Ploy’ part - the gambit or manoeuvre - was popularised in this sense by Stephen Potter, wiley author of Gamesmanship or The Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating (1947) and several sequels in which he showed how the principles explained in the first breakthrough work about games could be applied to the smaller world of life.
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