Donald Rumsfeld Quotes
When I served as US Ambassador to NATO in the 1970s, the center of gravity in Europe was France and Germany.
Rumsfeld, Donald. Known and Unknown: A Memoir. Sentinel, 2011.
The then Attorney General had established a back channel to the Russian agent. There was genuine fear by the Russians and some in America that there were still many Nazis and German nationalists who would try and influence, if not take over, German politics to produce another aggressive German fascist state. The Russians had lost 22 million citizens to the Germans in the war and had faced a defeated Germany where virtually every German over the age of 30 had been cheering for and supporting Hitler a decade ago. Neither the Russians nor we and the other allies had not yet seen the remarkable turn-around that the German nation would make and the intense anti-fascist, non-military ethos that would be brought by the younger German generations. The direction of Germany was then very unpredictable.
They were both children of Queen Victoria of England.
Many Americans were paranoid about Democratic Socialism being a stalking horse or front organization for Communists. Similarly, many Socialists were paranoid that the American and European (and other) capitalists were out to destroy them in their conflation of socialism and communism.
Senator Burton was using this quotation to support the Republican isolation policy that they were advocating at the time. This quotation has been cited by almost every American politician advocating isolationism. Generally it was the Republican party that has been the isolationist advocates in America. However, after the Second World War that began to change, and in the beginning of the 21st century, the George W. Bush Administration, without any declaration of war by Congress, attacked and invaded two different countries starting the Iraq and the Afghanistan Wars. Meanwhile, the Democrats, who had been advocating American activism in foreign affairs also flip flopped and opposed foreign military intervention as Democratic President Obama withdrew American troops from the two Bush wars. The Afghanistan War was the longest war in American history.
Donald Henry Rumsfeld is a retired American politician. Rumsfeld served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under Gerald Ford, and again from January 2001 to December 2006 under George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the second-oldest person to have served as Secretary of Defense. Additionally, Rumsfeld was a three-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois (1963–69), director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (1969–70), counsellor to the president (1969–73), the United States Permanent Representative to NATO (1973–74), and White House Chief of Staff (1974–75). Between his terms as Secretary of Defense, he served as the CEO and chairman of several companies.
