Don't Ask Quotes



This quotation may be apocryphal and not real. We have not been able to find an eyewitness or even a quotation the citation of which gave a date or suggested how the quote was ever made public given that it passed between these two men. However it is so frequently quoted that we have decided to include it. A further argument in its favor is that it fits the circumstances of the time. FDR had given Hopkins a huge budget and told Hopkins to get the American people working again. Hopkins did not believe in payments to the able bodied unless worked and his programs created an astounding array of jobs for the unemployed to do ranging from fixing benches in parks to writing poetry about poverty. He spend more money than any human being in history and started and implemented a nationwide program at a pace that has never been matched, Incredibly, no one was ever able to find any dishonesty in the administration, but it took years for the information of exactly what had going on at the local level to filter back to Washington. So the quote is plausible factually. Style-wise Hopkins was brutally honest with Roosevelt and others so well might have admitted that he did not know all that was going on in his programs. See {642829}.


At the time this quotation was created, the Chinese hacking had done no harm in the sense that they did not destroy the data in any of our computers or render some computers non-operational. We actually had done that and more – using hacking to affect destroy part of an Iranian nuclear fuel processing facility, but we had never done that to China, nor had China to us. A difference that outraged some Americans is that they viewed it as “fair game” to do espionage on military and political secrets. The Chinese however, in addition to that, did much industrial spying on American commercial innovations and manufacturing techniques. The French and the South Koreans, however, had been doing this for years, and American politicians were careful not to make a public issue about it and try to minimize it with diplomacy. However, all this makes a solution hard to come by as Liebenthal explained in his quotation.


SHS was operating information clearinghouses for the Federal Governments and applying cutting edge technology to heath information services to consumer. See Steve Jobs view of consumer research which is the most eloquent statement of this idea—{635780}.