Russell Baker Quotes
My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.
Baker, Russell. "Observer." The New York Times.
It is onerous for most governments to have one of their secret programs exposed by the press. But what is much worse for the government is the exposure of a secret program whose legality is not on a firm foundation.
A very passionate minority of India’s Muslims demanded a separate Islamic State (that would become Pakistan) but Hindu’s and Muslims were mixed throughout India and many Indians and British were concerned that there would be a bloodbath if the plans for independence went forward. When the decision had been made to partition India, Radcliffe had the unenviable task of deciding where the boundary was to be between Pakistan and India. No one on either side was satisfied with his effort. So, realizing that violence was about to break out, he packed quickly and went back to England. Over two million Indians were killed in the violence that broke out in the next weeks as there was a huge migration and ethnic cleansing to implement Radcliffe’s boundaries. Fifty years later, both India and Pakistan acknowledge that Radcliffe did a very reasonable job.
Russell Wayne Baker was an American journalist, narrator, writer of Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical commentary and self-critical prose, and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up (1983). He was a columnist for The New York Times from 1962 to 1998, and hosted the PBS show Masterpiece Theatre from 1992 to 2004. The Forbes Media Guide Five Hundred, 1994 stated: "Baker, thanks to his singular gift of treating serious, even tragic events and trends with gentle humor, has become an American institution."
