Quotes from David Halberstam

QUESTION: Do you know what the greatest test is? ANSWER:Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

Iacocca made his pitch: He wanted Ford to build the Fiesta, but with a Honda engine and transmission in it. Honda was delighted: He would like nothing better than this joint production with an American company, whose very name he revered. The price of the Japanese parts would be only $711. He could deliver 300,000 and do it quickly. Iacocca was even more delighted; he had an instant car and an unbeatable one at that. It could be in the dealers' showrooms in only eighteen months.

The fury with which Japan unleashed itself upon international trade, the kind of economic Darwinism that was at the center of its impulse, originally came not just from each company's desire to conquer the world but from its desire to take market share away from domestic competitors. In Japan there was always someone ready to undersell someone else, and there was always someone on the edge of bankruptcy.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

He was "more passionate than most intelligent men, and more intelligent and reasoned than most passionate men.

When you are discussing a successful coach," sports psychologist Bruce Ogilvie once said, not of Ramsay but of the entire profession, "you are not necessarily drawing the profile of an entirely healthy person.

The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.

He was the rarest of things, a Republican with sex appeal.

I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.

Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.

Day after day we read about them, each new man more brilliant than the last. They were not just an all-star first team, but an all-star second team as well. There were counts kept on how many Rhodes scholars there were in the Administration, how many books by members of the new Administration (even the Postmaster, J. Edward Day, had written a novel, albeit a bad one).

In 1953, at the beginning of the Eisenhower era and the glory years of the auto industry, Hudson's had done $153 million in retail sales; in 1981 the downtown Hudson's had done only $44 million—a figure, if adjusted for inflation, about 6 percent of the 1953 total.

Theodore Sorensen wrote for [Robert Kennedy's 1968] announcement speech: "At stake is not simply the leadership of our party, and even our own country, it is our right to the moral leadership of this planet." The sentence absolutely appalled all the younger Robert Kennedy advisers, who felt it smacked of just the kind of attitude which had gotten us into Vietnam. Nonetheless, despite their protests, it stayed in the speech.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.

Toyota would be credited for its just-in-time theory of manufacturing, in which parts arrived from suppliers just in time to be part of the final assembly. But in any real sense that process began at the Rouge. Toasting Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford who in 1982 was visiting Japan, Eiji Toyoda, of the Toyota company, said, "There is no secret to how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell. We learned it at the Rouge.

The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.

It was one of the great myths of that time that foreign policy was this pure and uncontaminated area which was never touched by domestic politics, and that domestic politics ended at the water's edge. The truth, in sharp contrast, was that all those critical decisions were primarily driven by considerations of domestic politics, and by political fears of the consequences of looking weak in a forthcoming domestic election.

he [Robert Lovett] knew that those whose names were always in print, who were always on the radio and television, were there precisely because they did not have power, that those who did hold or had access to power tried to keep out of sight. Halberstam, David; John McCain (2002-03-26). The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library) (Kindle Locations 448-449). Modern Library. Kindle Edition.

He did not like Europe, which he regarded as a lesser continent, populated with people significantly greedier and more materialistic than Americans. It was a place, he noted, where

Research is an organized method of finding out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now.

They cut the menu from twenty-five items to nine, featuring hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and they made the burgers a little smaller—ten hamburgers from one pound of meat instead of eight.