Quotes from David Halberstam

What had happened in the Chinese civil war as much as anything else reflected those changes, something MacArthur never chose to understand. Part of that was his very nature, and what had become the nature of his mystique. He did not ask questions; that would imply there was something he did not know. Instead he was oracular, the man that others came to hear. Major

he sensed that his own reticence would make it easier to restrain others.

Dean Rusk was a man without a shadow.

Young man, Mr. Aubrey has made us so rich that we can now afford to worry about our image.

It was the kind of country that made you feel better about yourself.

Officers came and went and were never a part of daily life.

The problem with police work, he once told Ray Jenkins, was that by its nature it tended to attract a certain percentage of sadistic people, who enjoyed the job because it legitimized their natural meanness. So, he added, the first thing any good police chief had to do was set the limits for his

It was the responsibility of a senior fireman to teach as well as to do.

If you have to write it down, you don't know it well enough

The Rouge was Henry Ford's greatest triumph, and with its completion he stood alone as the dominant figure in America and the entire developed world. He

He was ever conscious of his obligation to play well. Late in his career, when his legs were bothering him and the Yankees had a comfortable lead in a pennant race, a friend of his, columnist Jimmy Cannon, asked him why he played so hard—the games, after all, no longer meant so much. "Because there might be somebody out there who's never seen me play before," he answered.

Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.

They (the media) found little quality of depth to him, that when she said on the platform with that which he said to them in private. The qualities of introspection and reflectiveness that they particularly treasured were missing.

He [Dean Rusk] was a rare person in that era... "Well, of course, in the South, most of us as we were growing up just took for granted that if there was to be trouble, if the nation was at war, that we would be in it. The tradition of the Civil War was still with us very strongly... We assumed there was a military duty to perform... We took that as a perfectly natural part of being an American." p315

Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.

Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

Being above the petty factional and emotional fights of the bureaucracy, being of course neither a man of the right or of the left but disinterested and realistic, which meant that all things being equal, he was more a man of the status quo than anything else.

the thirty-eighth parallel, selected by the Americans and the Russians back in 1945 as the dividing line between the two Koreas, as a border at all.

That year Agase was a little surprised when he received in the mail, unsolicited, an unusual document, beautifully bound as if it were a college thesis.

He and Willoughby preferred that the Pentagon and the Truman administration be completely dependent upon them for any information about what was going on in their area of Asia—with no countervailing intelligence to limit his hand. Control intelligence, and you control decision-making.

Was he the kind of man you wanted next to you in a foxhole?—a saying used almost always by men who had never been in foxholes about other men who had never been in foxholes either.

particular rootlessness of the society had always lent itself to powerful extremes of both the left and the right, there was, in the volatility and evanescence of the culture an atmosphere ripe for extremism, each side with its own Utopian dreams, each side driving the other to a more polarized position.

A legitimate government does not lose face easily, but an insecure government with little in the way of indigenous roots takes its image very seriously.

The UN of 1950 was still very much a reflection of American and Western European interests, the only significant dissent coming from the Soviets and their satellites. It was in some ways very much a last vestige of a white man's world.