Chalmers Johnson Quotes
No one ever resigns from the Council on Foreign Relations. They die.
Chalmers Johnson, Political Scientist & Historian, Chairman, Center for Chinese Studies, Founder, Japan Policy Research Institute, C-SPAN, Book TV, March 7, 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation shows American tolerance and freedom of speech even for our head of state.
This quotation is important for two reasons. First, this is one of the most negative attacks on an opponent in a Presidential election in all of American History—to call the opponent ‘dangerous’ to the nation. Second, it is a classic example of two close political friends and allies, after a falling out. Roosevelt had in effect made Taft President in 1908, but Roosevelt was extremely disappointed as Taft was controllable by the Republican Party bosses, who hated Roosevelt. TR then challenged the then sitting President for the Republican Presidential nomination. At that time there were 12 states that had primary elections and Roosevelt won 9 of them. La Follette won 2 and Taft only 1. The majority of the states did not then have primaries allowing the party bosses to make the decision of which candidate to support. Party leaders generally did not like Roosevelt who was a major reformer, so they voted for Taft at the convention pushing him over the top when he clearly was the less popular of all 3 candidates. Roosevelt, outraged by the party bosses overriding the will of the people, then walked out of the convention and organized his own convention and TR ran as the Progressive Party (Bull Moose Party). In the general election Roosevelt got more votes than Taft, but the two of them had split the majority Republican vote and the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson was the winner.
Carter, who had his own share of blunders, may well have been right about this. History will have to judge.
The feeling was mutual. These two men hated each other as much as any two individuals in politics.
While Jones and Falwell were both fundamentalist, conservative Christians, Jones was very concerned that the Falwell propensity for being active in partisan politics would undermine Christian duty and faith as political compromises are always made and alliances require not attacking or criticizing political allies. Jones wanted Christians to be comfortable attacking the Republicans when they were morally deficient just as well as Democrats. He thought that Falwell’s approach was tempting for Christians but would undermine and destroy the integrity of Christians in America. Hence Falwell was dangerous.
Baldwin when Prime Minister would not arm England to stop Germany and after he left office, supported his successor, Neville Chamberlain, in his peace efforts which turned out to be appeasement, See {626936}.
This quotation is very interesting in that it shows a President who was not very happy with the policies of his own Secretary of State. This would never have happened overtly after the FDR presidency. Prior, the Secretary of State had a great deal of independence of operation, which was one of the reasons that it was such a prestigious position. However, on modern times President’s would never publicly criticize their own Secretary of State. They would either control the policies directly, accept his/her actions as their own, fire the Secretary, for force him/her to resign as George W, Bush did with Colin Powell. Also, most Secretaries of State, spending most of their time on foreign affairs, become much more sensitive and sophisticated to the intricacies of the world situation, that their nuanced views are very often not viewed by American public opinion as sufficiently pro American. At the same time, there has been a tradition in America that the Secretary of State does not engage in domestic politics, so does not always seem to be pro American.
A few days before Romney was calling the Lybian Consulate in Bengazi our Embassy when Embassies are only on capital cities.
Metternich, the Chancellor of Austria under the Emperor was a very gifted and imposing diplomat. However he had little vision of the inevitable progress towards democracy and the liberalization of and limitation of the power of monarchs. His advice was on how to be better autocratic monarchs, not on how to reform and he saw no need for absolute monarchy to reform. He advocated press censorship and saw the press as a major enemy. See {630724}. The result was most of the monarchs who took his advice ended up being forced from power or required to cede much of their powers and “rights”. The English monarchs, after their disastrous civil war and its aftermath, in contrast, often led the reform to a constitutional monarchy where the powers and rights of the monarch was defined and limited by a Constitution. Victoria was one of the greatest of the English reforming monarchs, and saw Metternich’s conservatism as responsible for most of the disasters that befell the crowned heads of Europe while she had no such problems. See {607340} for Metternich’s negative view of Constitution.
Jessie Helms was thought to be a by many a racist, misogynist, chicken hawk Senator from South Carolina.
Bill Casey had an individual ideology of the world and being a strong administrator imposed that on most of intelligence analyses that the agency did during his tenure.
Chalmers Ashby Johnson was an American political scientist and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean War, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972. He was also president and co-founder with Steven Clemons of the Japan Policy Research Institute (now based at the University of San Francisco), an organization that promotes public education about Japan and Asia.
