Bernard Baruch Quotes
I will not be a party to any attacks upon your personal integrity or personal life. We seem to have different views regarding the philosophy of government and on that alone am I willing to contend against you.
Some Democrats had been making personal attacks on Herbert Hoover, Baruch a Democratic supporter was outraged and put a stop to much of it. His letter to Hoover is the high water mark in the ethics and methods of Presidential campaigning. 80 years later, there was a Republican Presidential Nomination contest in which there was almost no content other than personal attacks on the other candidates interspersed with personal attacks on the incumbent President. It was one of the low points of Presidential campaigning.
Bernard Baruch, 1870-1965, Businessman & Chairman, War Industries Board, U. S. Delegate to U.N. Atomic Energy Commission, Letter to Herbert Hoover, 1928
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He was the only candidate who was not visciously attacked and slandered by the others, and he did no attacking himself. However, he simply did not attract the voters as did the other candidates who were so negative about their opponents. The Republican party primary voters were so insistent on political party purity that most of the candidates were reduced to the lowest forms of debate and standards of veracity. All the candidates were weakened and diminished by that form of negative primary process. Mitt Romney finally won the nomination but had been bruised badly by the Republican primary election. He last the general election badly.
In 2011 and 2012, there were several candidates vying for the Republican Nomination for the Presidency. The contest was close, and the candidates unleashed on each other the negative advertising and outrageously false accusations which they had previously only reserved to attack Democrats. They were so good at it, that they all drove up each others’ negatives—so much so that the potential Republican Candidate would be permanently scarred in the minds of the public. More mature and senior Republicans like McCain urged an end to the face to face confrontations of debates.
Most American politicians and citizens, unlike DeLay, believe that arguing against the opponents’ political philosophy should be done with debate, civil argument, advocacy, speechmaking and writing and not by attacking opponents and confronting them whenever possible. Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
“Liberalism” was a catch all Chinese term at the time which was very derogatory in Communist vernacular very much like the negative connotation of liberalism to American Conservatives at the turn of the millennium 1990-2010.
After amassing a fortune on the New York Stock Exchange, he impressed President Woodrow Wilson by managing the nation's economic mobilization in World War I as chairman of the War Industries Board. He advised Wilson during the Paris Peace Conference. He made another fortune in the postwar bull market, but foresaw the Wall Street crash and sold out well in advance. In World War II, he became a close advisor to President Roosevelt on the role of industry in war supply, and he was credited with greatly shortening the production time for tanks and aircraft. Later he helped to develop rehabilitation programs for injured servicemen. In 1946, he was the United States representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, though his Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy was rejected by the Soviet Union.
