Henry Cabot Lodge Quotes
I should like to do something to quiet the alarm about our ... vulnerability to aircraft attack ... is it not much better, if we are threatened by an attack from the air, to go directly and try to root out the land base from which the attack comes, and be equipped to do that, rather than to sit back and wait for them to be on top of us and then shoot at them?
This quotation has significance for two reasons. First, Lodge was one of the leaders of the conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party which generally only wanted to provide the military with weapons to defend the mainland. However, the technology of the airplane caused much rethinking. Americans had seen what German bombing had done to Spanish cities and Italian air power in Ethiopia. This followed by Germany bombing city after city throughout Europe. There were huge calls for antiaircraft guns to be placed around all American cities so that Americans might be defended from air attack. However, Lodge supported another strategy that was a first for America: retaliation. From this point forward, America would rely primarily on retaliation rather than massive defense until President Ronald Reagan proposed his ill-fated Star Wars defense scheme. The second significant factor is that the senator suggested preemption—the attack on a military air base is that threatens us. This appears to be another first.
Henry Cabot Lodge, 1850-1924, U. S. Congressman & U. S. Senator (Republican, MA), Senate Committee Hearing, May 1940
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The “adversary” was Pakistan, which was frequently sending military and terrorist attacks into Kashmire much if which has been disputed by Pakistan ever since the Partition of India in 1949. India had a very disciplined and well led military and like most sophisticated military powers did not immediately retaliate for military incursions despite the public pressure to do so. Instead they gave themselves time to plan and organize the logistics for a series of surgical strikes at the terrorist and/or military concentrations Pakistan had deployed close to the border which they launched several days later.
New York Governor Hugh Carey made extensive use of state airplanes and was discovered to have 31 pilots on the state payroll:
He served Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes
Henry Cabot Lodge was an American Republican politician, historian, and statesman from Massachusetts. He served in the United States Senate from 1893 to 1924 and is best known for his positions on foreign policy. His successful crusade against Woodrow Wilson's Treaty of Versailles ensured that the United States never joined the League of Nations and his reservations against that treaty influenced the structure of the modern United Nations.
