“You Americans feel you have been fighting this war for seven years. You have not. You have been fighting it for one year, seven times.” — : 3560
This was a time when I, like others, couldn’t act on what I didn’t know. In — : 4293
Cast your whole vote…your whole influence. — : 5050
He talked about nonviolence as a way of life, about hope, about two worlds both existing just now, a waning world dominated by fear, an emerging world becoming more and more like a family. What I remember most vividly is not the content of what he had said so far but the impression he made on me as he spoke without preparation from the platform. Listening to him was like looking into clear water. I was experiencing a feeling I don’t remember having had in any other circumstances. I was feeling proud of him as an American. I was proud, at the end of this conference, that this man on the platform was American. — : 5184
“Inside” consulting and advice, as in the Rand mode, or the normal practices of the broader “establishment” withheld from Congress and the public the facts and authoritative judgments needed for the self-confident exercise of such a power. By that very silence—no matter how frank or wise the “private” counsel—it supported and participated in the structure of inordinate, unchallenged executive power that led directly in circumstances like Vietnam to its rigid, desperate, outlaw behavior. — : 5258
The president was part of the problem. This was clearly a matter of his role, not of his personality or party. As I was beginning to see it, the concentration of power within the executive branch since World War II had focused nearly all responsibility for policy “failure” upon one man, the president. At the same time, it gave him enormous capability to avert or postpone or conceal such personal failure by means of force and fraud. Confronted by resolute external resistance, as in Vietnam, that power could not fail to corrupt the human who held it. The only way to change — : 5265
It was a surreal experience, after a morning of mobile tactics on Fourteenth Street, to be sitting in a room surrounded by my fellow war criminals, listening to Johnson’s assistant for national security tell lies about the war. — : 7163
The freedom of the President to pursue his chosen foreign policy was seen as the essence of national security. — : 8265
I threatened, to the best of my ability, to make public a strategy that our democratic system was not likely to permit him to pursue freely, if it was correctly understood. — : 8283