Lester B. Pearson Quotes
The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.
Pearson, Lester B. "The Four Faces of Peace." Les Prix Nobel en 1957, edited by Göran Liljestrand, Imprimerie Royale P.A. Norstedt & Söner, 1958, pp. 219-236.
Theodore Roosevelt was the Presidential nominee. Johnson was a leader of some members of Congress some of whom were extreme isolationists and some of whom were Nazi sympathizers and Hitler admirers. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor later that year, Germany, fulfilling its treaty with Japan, declared war on America, Johnson’s group no longer mattered. Before WWII most Republicans were opposed to Defense Spending and accused the Democrats of being war hawks. After WWII, they flip flopped and became more hawkish than the Democrats who they accused of being soft on defense for years thereafter. See {631380} for President Roosevelt’s different view.
At first glance, the reader might think that this quotation in a leading university newspaper was from the Vietnam War era. However, it was argument against U. S. involvement in World War II. There was a very negative reaction to Wilson’s visions and claims for the First World War which never did come to pass that stuck with many.
Lester Bowles Pearson PC OM CC OBE was a Canadian scholar, statesman, soldier, and diplomat, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for organizing the United Nations Emergency Force to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis. He was the 14th prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968, as the head of two back-to-back Liberal minority governments following elections in 1963 and 1965.
