Quotes from David Halberstam

He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.

The Tydings Committee eventually criticized McCarthy for his behavior and exonerated most of those attacked by him. McCarthy's accusations, it reported, "represented perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruths in the history of the Republic.

His failure to adapt to new techniques, to pander (his own word), probably made his supporters love him all the more, and probably also narrowed his political base.

The job of the union, he insisted, could be reduced to a simple idea: the protection of the slowest and least efficient worker.

In a new, modern, industrial, demographically young society, this was symbolized by nothing so much as congressional control by very old men from small Southern towns, many of them already deeply committed, personally and financially, to existing interests; to a large degree they were the enemies of the very people who had elected John F. Kennedy. He was caught in that particular bind.

Nothing appalled Deming more than the idea of the interchangeable manager. "What is the motivation and purpose of men like this?" he would say with contempt. "Do they even know what they do anymore? What do they produce?" All they knew about was numbers, not product. All they thought about was maximum profit, not excellence of product.

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.

The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it.

because love is a critical ingredient in the fireman's code, which demands that you are willing to risk your life for your fire-house brothers.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence," he liked to

The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.

The difference between a topflight creative man and the hack is this ability to express powerful meanings indirectly

he was almost joyously what he had always been, a lot of gee whiz, it was all new and fresh even when surely he had seen much of it before, and it was as if he took delight in not having been changed externally by all that he had seen.

It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.

There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts.

he was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.

What the President was learning, and learning to his displeasure (once again, the Bay of Pigs had been lesson one), was something that his successor Lyndon Johnson would also find out the hard way: that the capacity to control a policy involving the military is greatest before the policy is initiated, but once started, no matter how small the initial step, a policy has a life and a thrust of its own, it is an organic thing.

One of their best customers was an executive at Texaco, and one day Harry Ferkauf casually asked him about the possibility of a summer job for his son. "Harry, you know how I feel about you and Gene," the man replied, "but Texaco doesn't hire Jews." From that day Gene Ferkauf knew that if he was to be a success, he would have to do it on his own; the world's great companies were not interested in the likes of him.

The men were always wary of an officer who took form more seriously than function.

If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.

Events," wrote George Ball, paraphrasing Emerson "are in the saddle, and ride mankind.

His body language was that of someone frozen and not yet thawed out.

He was not what gentlemen usually thought a gentleman was.

Béla Kun, a disciple of Lenin, created the first version of a Communist Hungary in 1919