Erwin Hargrove Quotes
This is the sort of decision that presidents must make: Hard choices with insufficient information.
The reality is that if there were sufficient information, the issue would likely have been resolved at a lower level. See Adam Yarmalinsky’s quotation {38346} .
Erwin Hargrove, Political Scientist, Speech, Nashville, February 25, 2008
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
O’Donnell said this after informing Joe Califano and Cyrus Vance that President Kennedy would not be returning to a meeting about a proposal they had made to start a misinformation campaign to keep Cuban forces on a constant state of alert in February, 1963. The memo had sparked argument between Vance and State Department representatives.
Bush assumes that this meant that all the people agreed with his decision to invade Iraq. While that might have been the case, there are other possibilities that many historians, journalists and other analysts have suggested. The Vice President, and his personal staff, were known to have visited them all and lobbied for the invasion. They pressured several of them who may have not wanted to run afoul of what seemed to be the most powerful vice president in American History. Or they may have thought that the decision had already been made, and it was time to join together and loyally support the policy decision that had been made. There were few strong independent thinkers in the top tier as Bush was not intellectually or emotionally inclined to have open staff arguments to work out a policy or very strong advisors with different points of view. The strongest of the advisors like Secretary of State Colin Powell had been lied to and persuaded there was “clear evidence” that Iraq was about to deploy a nuclear weapon. This made Powell an advocate. The intelligence given to Powell and the others was wrong and much was fabricated or obtained from an unreliable source who had been pushed as trustworthy by the Vice President. The CIA Director, had told those all that the evidence and case for the fact that Iraq was developing and close to deploying a nuclear weapon was a “slam dunk”.
