Bill Dedman Quotes
Although some Clinton biographers have been quick to label Alinsky a communist, he maintained that he never joined the Communist Party.
Dedman, Bill. "Reading Hillary Rodham's hidden thesis." msnbc.com, 2 Mar. 2007.
Attacking fellow priest, Monsignor John A. Ryan of Catholic University, who had criticized Coughlin's vituperative assaults on the Roosevelt administration: The Priest was the right wing demagogic radio host of his day. Virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Black, he was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, which finally ordered him to cease us weekly radio show and stop the political hate.
After JFK’s assassination, many of his appointees who were liberal Democrats, were concerned that LBJ was a Southern conservative and might not want to serve in a conservative administration. Johnson satisfied Heller and all of the other Kennedy appointees who he asked to stay on. Actually, Johnson was more liberal than JFK, and proved it during his Presidency.
So often in America, citizens and government officials have made alliances or joined organizations under the theory that “the enemy of my enemy must be my friend.” It has almost always been a mistake ranging from joining the Communist Party in the 1930s to supporting the dictators or the Middle East, Asia, and South America. In the 1930s Fascism was growing and already on the march and neither America nor England—the leading democracies were not doing anything to combat the threat. America was emerging from the Great Depression, had a string Isolationist movement, and a small but influential group of Fascists and Hitler enthusiasts. Also, no one outside of Russia knew about the Stalin atrocities.
The word “smashing” is a literal translation from the Khmer language. It is not used in the metaphorical sense as we are used to. To save money, arms, bullets and resources the Khmer Rouge method of execution was to “smash” the victim’s head in with a shovel or other implement. This slogan told people literally to murder their political enemies in this brutal way.
Bill Dedman (born 1960) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, an investigative reporter for Newsday, and co-author of the biography of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.
