Quotes from David Halberstam

The intelligence people at State were not the only ones who knew the French would have trouble. In Vietnam, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, De Gaulle's favorite general, landed to take charge of French forces. After a tour of the country he was fully aware of the political-military problems that lay ahead. Turning to his political adviser, Paul Mus, he said, "It would take five hundred thousand men to do it, and even then, it could not be done.

the ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter's career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.

Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.

In 1947, Kennan wrote, "The men of the Kremlin would suddenly discover that this fluid and subtle oriental movement which they thought they held in the palm of their hand had quietly oozed away between their fingers and there was nothing left there but a ceremonial Chinese bow and a polite giggle.

had thought, "can easily be an isolationist in an era when you can cross the Atlantic between lunch and dinner and when the atomic bomb can make mincemeat of an ideology. Chicago is as near Moscow as New York. Foreign policy is, or at least should be, as much a matter

I. F. Stone had once called it an exciting paper to read because you never knew on what page you would find a page-one story)

The telephone was a sign of being rushed.

He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.

The problem with a great democracy like the United States, George Kennan once noted, was that it was almost always like a sleeping giant, impervious to its surroundings until suddenly and belatedly awoken, when it proved so angry about what it discovered that it started lashing out wildly.

The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.

If she was making the right and courageous decisions, he thought, she was nonetheless unhappy and somewhat resentful about doing it

He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.

Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.

He wanted to be respectable rather than powerful; he did not want the controversy that went with power.

Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.

The Kennedys demanded loyalty out of confidence, Johnson demanded it out of insecurity.

Perhaps the greatest illusion was the idea that we cared more for what was going on than they did, that we would pay a higher price, that they would feel the threshold of pain before we did. It was of course an obvious lie; but the principals had, in their desire no to come to real decisions, painted themselves into a corner where lie followed lie.

what had kept Lewis going all those years with so little outside support was the idea of improvement as an end in itself.

had come all this way and this was what I get paid to do. So I went out and found his home and for four hours it all poured out, what had happened in those three days at Chipyongni when he was a young platoon leader. It was if he had been waiting for me to come by for fifty-five years, and he remembered everything as

The early Washington years seemed to confirm the Bundy legend. He was at the center of things, darting in and out of the President's office ("Goddammit, Mac," someone heard Kennedy say, "I've been arguing with you about this all week long," and that was power—being able to argue with the President all week long).

It reflected the belief that a largely uncontrolled capitalism such as existed in America might be ruinous for Japan, that without sufficient controls too few men would become too rich in too poor a nation. That would create intolerable tensions and divisions, so the state and the capitalists themselves had to regulate it.

Perhaps the greatest illusion was the idea that we cared more for what was going on than they did, that we would pay a higher price, that they would feel the threshold of pain before we did. It was of course an obvious lie; but the principals had, in their desire not to come to real decisions, painted themselves into a corner where lie followed lie.

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation's literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.