Quotes from John A. Farrell

The most virtuous hearts have a touch of hell's own fire in them.

Television cameras should be banned from fund-raisers: donors were "rich and fat and drunk and dumb," Nixon said. "You want to get on TV with the real people, not these sodden looking bastards.

This is life … to play the game, to play the cards we get; play them uncomplainingly and play them to the end. The game may not be worth the while. The stakes may not be worth the winning. But the playing of the game is the forgetting of self, and we should be game sports and play it bravely to the end.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed," Eisenhower said. "This is not a way of life….Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Yet few came so far, so fast, so alone, as Nixon. Not the governor of California or his aides, nor any member of the state's delegation to Congress knew Richard Nixon's name. He was, he would remember, "somebody who was nothing.

A few were men and women of quality. But many were losers: a motley collection of self-aggrandizing utopians and mushy-headed sentimentalists, adrift in the drama of their lives.

The closer he got to succeeding in his presidential campaign, the more Ted Kennedy fumbled.

I brought out the dark side of Nixon," Colson recalled, though "you didn't need to work very hard to bring it out—it was always close to the surface." The president was "a gut fighter….His first reaction was to fight back…to get even.

Henry Lloyd was with Darrow when they toured the mine. It was a dreadful experience, Lloyd said, "like a foretaste of the inferno." "You might as well get used to it," Darrow told him. Heaven was reserved for Wall Street financiers. Infidels like themselves would be rooming with Satan.

Chicago is a pocket edition of hell," he wrote, "and if it is not, then hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.

piratical instincts,

as thin as piss on a rock.

Stevenson and Sparkman were candidates for august offices, Nixon said. They needed to "come before the American people as I have and make a complete financial statement as to their financial history," he said. "And if they don't, it will be an admission that they have something to hide." There

Given the lives and human suffering at stake, and the internal discord that was ripping the United States apart, it is hard not to conclude that, of all of Richard Nixon's actions in a lifetime of politics, this was the most reprehensible.

Those on the right can do what those on the left talk about," Nixon replied.