Bruce Riedel > Quotes

“Indeed Kennedy told Galbraith privately in December 1962 “with much feeling and some anger of the recklessness of much of the professional advice he had received during the missile crisis, in particular the proposal to bomb the missile sites.” The president told Ken, “The worst advice as always was from those who feared that to be sensible made them seem soft and unheroic.”17”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and Sino-Indian War

“In May 1959 Kennedy gave another major foreign policy speech, this time on India and China. Galbraith had helped draft it before leaving on his second visit to India. Kennedy began by saying that “no struggle in the world today deserves more of our time and attention than that which now grips the attention of all Asia. That is the struggle between India and China for leadership of the East, for the respect of all Asia, for the opportunity to demonstrate which way of life is the better.”13”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War

“He promised himself never to trust either the CIA's or Joint Chiefs’ advice again. He told Ted Sorenson, “All my life I've known better than to depend on experts. How could I have been so stupid to let them go ahead?”23”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and Sino-Indian War

“When the communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949, they accepted neither the semi-independence of Tibet nor the boundary lines drawn by British imperialism between Tibet and India.”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and Sino-Indian War

“Mao was the only real decisionmaker in Beijing and that he was making his decisions based not on Western thinking about global politics but on his own view of China’s interests.”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War

“Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War

“The Saudi government paid slave owners to encourage them to free their slaves: $700 for a male slave and $1,000 for a female, until July 7, 1963, after which all slaves were considered free and there was no further compensation for owners.33 This was a unique example of an American president convincing a Saudi leader”
― Bruce Riedel, Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States since FDR

“In the same week, on almost the same day that the two great western powers confronted each other over Cuba, the two great Asian countries went to war in the Himalayas.”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War

“Wyden, Bay of Pigs, p.”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War

“According to another account, Nehru was much more interested in Pat Kennedy, JFK’s attractive twenty-seven-year-old sister, than”
― Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War