Alexander Woollcott Quotes
One listens to one's lawyer prattle on as long as one can stand it and then signs where indicated.
Woollcott, Alexander. The Letters of Alexander Woollcott. Edited by Beatrice Kaufman and Joseph Hennessey, Viking Press, 1944.
Webster had been a lawyer his entire professional life and served as a distinguished Federal Judge and later as Director of the CIA and FBI. He was a stickler for adhering to the law. Casey, in contrast, was very frequently trying to get around any legal or Constitutional restrictions that might prevent him from doing what he liked. Since most of the CIA activity is secret and not amenable to oversight, his violations were not known to Congress and the public until years after his service.
He was reacting to the fact that in the George W. Bush administration, they found a few lawyers in the Justice Department that they put into key positions and they wrote legal opinions stating that many commonly used forms of torture were not torture and therefore were legal. Of course the legal opinion was secret so other lawyers could not fault it, and the CIA actually used that as justification for the torture of some of the enemy combatants in the War on Terror.
Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was an American critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality.
