William L. Shirer Quotes
I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it.
Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon & Schuster, 1960, p. 247.
Most CIA Directors have not had this extreme attitude, but because Casey did, journalists, members of Congress, other government officials and even Presidents have often distrusted the CIA and their personnel more than was necessarily warranted.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
There is a great irony to this quotation. Here we have a communist propaganda agent using the extreme excesses of an American Anti-Communist fanatic to the Communist advantage by associating them with McCarthyism. It supports the view of many political scientists and historians that McCarthyism was in the long run more beneficial to the Communists than not.
This quotation illustrates that government use of censorship and classification to cover up errors and mistakes in not just a modern phenomenon. It is a technique that government’s will gravitate to whenever they have the chance.
William Lawrence Shirer was an American journalist and war correspondent. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany that has been read by many and cited in scholarly works for more than 50 years. Originally a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the International News Service, Shirer was the first reporter hired by Edward R. Murrow for what became a CBS radio team of journalists known as "Murrow's Boys". He became known for his broadcasts from Berlin, from the rise of the Nazi dictatorship through the first year of World War II (1940). With Murrow, he organized the first broadcast world news roundup, a format still followed by news broadcasts.
