Or: money, sex and power.
Watched Booknotes episode Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century with David Aikman. Mentioned A WORLD SPLIT APART Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978
Filtering by Tag: booknotes
The Inquiring Mind of Brian Lamb (VIII)
When interviewing Mark Edmunson on Booknotes:
LAMB: Do you have a favorite, or favorite words that you like to use when you write?
The Tragedy of the Commons
From Eleanor Randolph’s interview on Booknotes:
“… the old saying in the Soviet days was, ‘What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours and what's ours is nobody's.’”
Read:
Ruby Ridge Roadblock
Jon Ronson on Booknotes:
“… it [was] at that roadblock that the militia movement really began in the United States. This became the touchstone. Timothy McVeigh visited Randy Weaver's cabin a couple of years later. And -- because the government had become just what the conspiracy theorists have always said the government was, out of control, determined to destroy the lives of simple people who wanted to live free. The government had fitted into that stereotype. They became the monsters that the extremists always said that they were.”
Perhaps That Was A Mistake
I love the typically British understatement:
MacDONALD: I was very surprised to hear General Westmoreland tell me that he had not studied the Indochina War, because he ...
LAMB: He never did?
MacDONALD: Apparently not. And I liked him; I admired him. You know, I don't want to say anything just hurtful to him, but it did surprise me that he had not studied this, because after all, he was fighting the same people and the same general, and they had fought the French for nine years. So I asked him, actually, if they had studied it at Ft. Leavenworth or at the war college and they hadn't. And so I think perhaps that was a mistake.
The Inquiring Mind of Brian Lamb (VII)
In his interview with Philip Taubman on the development of the U-2 spy plane and reconnaissance satellites:
LAMB: … what did the "U" and the "2" stand for?
Sumner Welles and the BBC
From Joseph Persico’s interview on Booknotes:
“… what you're referring to is the fact that Sumner Welles, who was the undersecretary of State in the Roosevelt administration and who was an important figure, he was Roosevelt's man. The secretary of state was Cordell Hull, and Roosevelt pretty much circumvented him and--and worked through Sumner Welles, who was an old family friend. Welles had made some sexual advances on trains, part of his--his business trips, to black porters on these trains, who reported him. This was concealed for a long time. It was two or three years before it finally erupted. Roosevelt is under tremendous pressure from people who fear that having a man with homosexual tendencies in such a sensitive position at State--we have to remember we're not talking about the current world; we're talking about the attitudes of the--of the 1940s. He's looked upon as a--as a--a security threat, and Roosevelt very unhappily eventually dismisses Sumner Welles.“
The Inquiring Mind of Brian Lamb (VI)
In his interview with Dana Priest on mission creep in the US military:
LAMB: I can`t leave this without me asking you why your first name is pronounced “Danna?” and did [your parents] want a boy?
The Inquiring Mind of Brian Lamb (V)
In his interview with Stuart Rochester on the experience of American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia (mainly Vietnam):
LAMB: Here's another line in the book and it just--I was taking these out of context. `I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but the atmosphere was changing for the worse. By November, for starters, food rations at the Zoo were cut drastically and kitchen staff were no longer washing off the human fertilizer the Vietnamese used for their crops.' A lot of reference to human feces being in--in rice, you know, all over these cells. How much--explain the human fertilizer business.
The Inquiring Mind of Brian Lamb (IV)
In his interview with Bryan Burrough on the crime wave of 1932-33 and the rise of the FBI:
LAMB: Why do movies change the facts?