James Baker Quotes

One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.

I don't go to war for the adrenaline rush. I cover wars because that's what I've ended up doing.

God, why do I give interviews to 'the Guardian'? They always try to dissect you, and I don't really think about stuff in the way that you're asking me these questions.

There's two kinds of press that you get when you put out a TV show: The reviews, and the people that just decide what the reviews say.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

Our embedded reporters during the war agreed to guidelines established by the military.

The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.

Whatever the critics make of 'Maestro,' I hope they don't call it a reality show.

I'd like to say I'd like to be as big as a Gwen or a Madonna, but I think those days of achieving that level are over. The media is bringing everybody down.

Can there be allowed - are we allowed to have any more in the military, General, the element of surprise? You know, I would think it would be a good thing. It's called an ancient strength and we don't use it anymore.

When it comes to our military, what we have to think about is not, you know just budgets, we've got to think about capabilities.

I'm no military expert, and these figures might not be exactly right,' I said. 'But as best I can tell, we've launched 114 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missiles, tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced, non extremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure?

Asking the question whether the mainstream media has a liberal or conservative bias is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus. I might think they use a little bit too much oil; some people might think it's a little dry. But the problem with al Qaeda is they want to kill us. And the problem with the mainstream media is that it has these other biases that are much more important.

It's why I left TV. I couldn't handle everybody telling me what I should have done after they watched me on TV. I said, "You're not even watching what I think I'm doing, so I'm out."

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump basically share a policy of brute military strength. And both, I think, make a lot of Americans uneasy about our foreign policy going forward, which needs a frank discussion. Likewise on the issue of student debt and the future of our younger generation.

I think a lot of the media love the game and hate the people who play it.

Donald Trump in Philadelphia, and he's delivering a very substantive speech on military preparedness, the status of the current military. He detailed the deterioration of the U.S. military in the past eight years and explained how he's going to rebuild it and why we need to, and it's a very tough audience. It's an expressly military audience, and they are of course listening for any sign that he's not really genuine here. I think, knocking this out of the park as far as that audience is concerned.

In the army we are drilled into execution and then supervision, to make sure everything goes the way you planned it. But there is another thing that we do in the military, that I think perhaps isn't done enough in corporate life: As soon as you have made that decision, you start on the contingency planning. Because there is, as we like to say, a thinking, breathing enemy out there, who is not going to let you do just what you want.

If somewhere is a deficiency the normal American answer would have been well then, let's spend some more money, build some more weapons and deploy them. That's the normal way of thinking of the military, in America not only but also all over the place, but America or Russia or other countries.

So that all the people who say, you know, "All the media hates America." A lot of the media does hate America but this is a case of, actually, the press doing its best, I think, to do the right by national security. So good for them.

I accept that friends of ours have decided that the President's non-strike has somehow impacted perceptions of us. But I believe they are dead wrong and I think the critics are dead wrong, and here's why. The President [Barack Obama] made his decision to strike. He announced his decision to strike publicly. And the purpose of the strike was to get the chemical weapons out of Syria. That's the purpose.

It is thus more potent, as well as more economical, to disarm the enemy than to attempt his destruction by hard fighting ... A strategist should think in terms of paralysing, not of killing.

The metal press has a certain type of audience, and I think most of them support the magazines' negative focus on me.

I think that [Obama] sees the military actually as something that is more dangerous to the world. I think that he looks at the United States military and sees it as a threatening application around the world than actually as a useful tool.

It hurts that, you know, the media's made me into sort of this like punching bag or cartoon character-they think that I don't have any feelings, and, you know, it hurts like anyone else.