David Talbot > Quotes

“Our country’s cheerleaders are wedded to the notion of American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us. There is an implacable brutality to power that is familiar throughout the world and throughout history.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest.
These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of tea. “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.”
He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters,” he said. “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.”
Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. “I guess I will see them there soon.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“If Dulles could use a person, that person was somehow real for him. If not, that person didn’t exist.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“After a long discussion of the country's woes, the interviewer asked Bobby, "But you are an optimist?" Kennedy nodded and smiled his weary-eyed smile. "Just because you can't live any other way, can you?" he replied.”
― David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

“It took me a long time to realize that when he talks it is only for the purpose of obtaining something.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“That little Kennedy... he thought he was a god.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

“few of the some five thousand convicted Nazis were still in prison after 1953. A number of the interventions on behalf of fortunate war criminals could be traced to the quiet stratagems of Allen Dulles.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Everything leads me to believe it,” he replied. “They got their hands on this communist who wasn’t one, while still being one. He had a sub par intellect and was an exalted fanatic—just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. . . . The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the way they had probably planned it would. . . . But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin—supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory! “Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder. “America”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Frisco”—a violation of local custom that, as Herb Caen had impatiently explained for many years, was committed only by clueless rubes.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Moscone and Milk were the dynamic duo of San Francisco’s progressive revolution. They never forgot what they were elected to do: to fight for the burdened and afflicted, for those whose voices were never heard in the halls of power. They fought for the rights of workers, minorities, gays, and renters. And they made the same enemies: the chamber of commerce, developers, realtors, the SFPD.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“I never could stand racism or indifference to poverty. That doesn’t make me a lefty ideologue. It makes me an ordinary American.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, don’t you want somebody to love.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“city’s anthem, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” was written in 1954 by two gay lovers who were pining for “the city by the bay” after moving to Brooklyn Heights.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“In San Francisco, racism came at you with a smile.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Sister Boom Boom—a half-Catholic, half-Jewish drag queen named Jack Fertig, who wore a whore’s makeup and a nun’s habit and vamped it up with the other political pranksters in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—was an especially aggravating thorn in Feinstein’s side. Boom Boom ran a remarkably aggressive campaign against Feinstein during her 1983 reelection bid, under the slogan “Nun of the Above,” eventually winning twenty-three thousand votes.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“I now live in a ghost world, and not everyone who was once close to me wants to venture into this shadowy place to hang out with me. Some people are clearly spooked. I remind them of their own frailty and mortality. I get it; it’s understandable. But it confirms my spectral status to me.”
― David Talbot, Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke

“San Francisco’s battles are no longer with itself but with the outside world, as it exports the European-style social ideas that drive Republican leaders and Fox News commentators into a frenzy: gay marriage, medical marijuana, universal health care, immigrant sanctuary, “living” minimum wage, bicycle-friendly streets, stricter environmental and consumer regulations. Conservatives see these San Francisco values as examples of social engineering gone mad. But in San Francisco, they’re seen as the bedrock of a decent society, one that is based on a live-and-let-live tolerance, shared sense of humanity, and openness to change.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war’s mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena. In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“It’s vital that you remind everyone around you at the hospital that you’re still a human being, even when you feel like a gravely wounded animal. The hospital care providers were not my family, but I soon realized that I needed them to care about me as if we were connected by blood.”
― David Talbot, Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke

“alarmed zoo guards by sticking his hand through the bars of a cage to pat the cheek of a Bengal tiger. “This is like prison—I have been in prison, too,” said Fidel, who had survived Batista’s cages.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“The Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner—San Francisco homeboy, and a shrewd product of Bay Area Catholic schools—got it. “The difference between San Francisco and Berkeley was that Berkeley complained about a lot of things. Rather than complaining about things, we San Franciscans formed an alternative reality to live in. And for some reason, we got away with it. San Francisco became somewhere you did things rather than protesting about them. We knew we didn’t have to speechify about what we should and shouldn’t do. We just did.”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.)”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Bobbi Campbell—a boyishly handsome hospital nurse who led a second life as a drag queen nun (Sister Florence Nightmare) in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—was”
― David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love

“The country’s fledgling democracy was dismantled, and members of oppositional parties and the press were rounded up or driven underground.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“As director of the CIA, Allen Dulles liked to think he was the hand of the king, but if so, he was the left hand—the sinister hand. He was master of the dark deeds that empires require.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“As Jung observed, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Under dictatorship, people are enslaved but they know it. Here, the politicians constantly lie to people ad they become immune to these lies because they have the privilege of voting. But voting is rigged and democracy here is a gigantic profusion of lies and clever brainwashing." Oswald worried about the FBI's police-state surveillance tactics. And he believed that America was turning more "militaristic" as it increasingly interfered in the internal affairs of countries. Someday, he predicted, there would be a coup d'etat.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“Undaunted by Washington bureaucracy, Donovan had recruited an impressively eclectic array of talent for his new spy agency—from Ivy League adventurers and society girls to safecrackers and professional killers.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

“The White House wanted Dulles in clear contact with his Nazi clients so they could be easily identified.”
― David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government