Henry A. Kissinger Quotes
I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.
Kissinger, Henry. Years of Upheaval. Little, Brown, 1982.
He was not referring to economic corruption but intellectual and moral corruption. Regan who appointed many excellent key officials picked a very unfortunate choice to lead the CIA. William J. Casey had many faults and weaknesses—See {637472}, {636743} and {637469}. But the worst of his damage was imposing his ideology on the agency and having the intelligence analysts shape their intellectual product to conform with a particular world, political, and religious view. See {634408}. This became acceptable and as future administrations took power their ideologies were considered by the CIA professionals and reports were edited and shaped accordingly. Reform was instituted by some of the future CIA directors but there were precedents from the Casey days for years. One particularly bad manifestation of this intellectual corruption occurred when Vice President Richard Cheney imposed a neocon world view on the agency with a pliant CIA director and the agency gave the President a totally inaccurate assessment of Iraq nuclear capability and intention which triggered the disastrous Iraq war, made all the worse when there were not only no nuclear weapons in Iraq as had been reported, but there was not even a single laboratory trying to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear power.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had more influence and visibility than any other first lady, before or since. She was First Lady for 3+ terms—longer than any other, and in addition to her official duties, she wrote a very popular daily newspaper column. As FDR was handicapped and could not travel much, she traveled all over the nation and the world. She was also very outspoken and no one ever knew whether or not she was speaking with the President’s concurrence or was on her own. She tended to be very liberal—especially in terms of the evils of racial segregation—then legal, and the problems of workers. Her broad influence was very damaging to Southern Segregationist groups and arch Conservative economic groups, who realized that her influence in the change of public opinion was much more effective at changing America than were the socialists and communists who were calling for revolution and were so unappealing that they could easily be attacked. Mrs. Roosevelt was for them more dangerous than Communism.
Henry Alfred Kissinger KCMG is an American politician, diplomat, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938, he became National Security Advisor in 1969 and U.S. Secretary of State in 1973. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances, with two members of the committee resigning in protest.
