Deborah Wiles Quotes
I would lie in bed at night composing letters to Kennedy and Khrushchev, trying to convince them that they really didn't want to blow up the world. It seemed so simple to me that we just shouldn't hurt each other.
Wiles, Deborah. Countdown. Scholastic Press, 2010, p. 384.
The President had asked for the views of the Joint Chief’s of Staff. At the time, the major U. S. defense doctrine depended on our nuclear deterrent which if used against the Russians would have meant mutually assured destruction since they had enough of a nuclear arsenal to destroy America as we know it.
His appeal was also in the name of concurring heads of state of Finland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxemburg, and Sweden.
At the beginning of his Presidency Roosevelt urged Congress to disarm. A few years later he was urging heavy expenditures for armaments and Congress was then reluctant.
Goldwater had predicted that the LBJ campaign would attack him for some of his warlike and aggressive statements and try and depict him as someone not responsible enough for the Presidency. He was personally convinced that his hard line policies would inhibit Russian aggression. He prepared this and other ads, but the voters were not persuaded and Goldwater was trounced.
This was in the middle of the Cold War and the political leaders had to face the fact that their major military nuclear weapons, as a practical matter, could not be used. The result was not only too destructive but retaliation would produce MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction.
Deborah Wiles is a children's book author. Her second novel, Each Little Bird That Sings, was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Her documentary novel, Revolution, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Wiles received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2004 and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award in 2005. Her fiction centers on home, family, kinship, and community, and often deals with historical events (Freedom Summer/Civil Rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War), social justice issues, and childhood reactions to those events, as well as everyday childhood moments and mysteries, most taken directly from her childhood. She often says, "I take my personal narrative and turn it into story."
