A.J. Baime > Quotes

“Mark Twain: ALWAYS DO RIGHT. THIS WILL GRATIFY SOME PEOPLE AND ASTONISH THE REST.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“ALWAYS DO RIGHT. THIS WILL GRATIFY SOME PEOPLE AND ASTONISH THE REST.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“The job was “a graveyard of politicians” in Washington parlance, traditionally disparaged by the men who held it. The VP before Truman, Henry Wallace, bragged that he had never had so much time to work on his tennis game. “The Vice President has not much to do,” Truman said, referring to himself as a “political Eunuch.” When asked what he would do with his “spare time,” he answered: “Study history.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“We must be,” the President said, “the great arsenal of democracy.”
― A.J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Ford Motor Company, and Their Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

“Stalin revealed at the table that he did not believe Adolf Hitler was dead. “I think he’s loose somewhere,” Stalin said—maybe in Argentina or Spain.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“The sooner you people find that you can't depend on David and the Lord," Darrow said, "but get busy yourselves, the better off you will be. If the Lord was going to do anything for you, he would've done it already." (Clarence Darrow)”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

“I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll [be] no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll [be] a reckoning—who knows?”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“authorities, and so the army had put out a faux press release to throw off any suspicion”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“movement”
― A.J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Ford Motor Company, and Their Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

“We now have ample proof that the Soviet government views all matters from the standpoint of their own selfish interests,”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“The secret Yalta agreements caused one major problem, however. Roosevelt’s commitments would require large concessions on the part of the Chinese. Nobody had informed the Chinese.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“The central figure is Walter Francis White, born in Atlanta in 1893 and raised there as well. Both of Walter’s parents came from enslaved families in Georgia, and while they were African American, they had skin so pale, they and their children could have passed for white. “I am a Negro,” Walter himself explained. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” The family’s complexion represented a shameful truth: that generations of enslaved families were born out of illicit encounters between Black women who had no rights to their bodies and white male slave owners, who had full legal impunity. Walter’s great-grandmother on his mother’s side, in fact, birthed six children in the 1830s, fathered by her owner, William Henry Harrison, who later became president of the United States.”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“Can he swing the job?”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“He had only a few classes of formal education beyond high school, but as Washington officials were soon to find out, he was remarkably educated. His lifetime’s reading had familiarized him with the triumphs and tragedies of innumerable world leaders. Now he had become one of them.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“The whole industrial strength of the United States, should it be directed toward war-making, would constitute power never dreamed of before in the history of Armageddon. . . . It would be a struggle in which all our strength would be needed—and the penalty for being unable to use all our strength would be the loss of everything we had.”
― A.J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Ford Motor Company, and Their Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

“As my father lay dying in a jimcrow hospital in Atlanta he put into words for my brother and me the faith which had sustained him throughout his life. “Human kindness, decency, love, whatever you wish to call it,” he said, “is the only real thing in the world. . . . It’s up to you two, and others like you, to use your education and talents to make love as positive an emotion in the world as are prejudice and hate. That’s the only way the world can save itself.” — Walter White, A Man Called White”
― A.J. Baime, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret – An Investigative Biography of Passing, Lynching, and Civil Rights Activism

“In France, according to the nation’s Ministry of Public Health, more than 50 percent of children in industrial areas had rickets, while 70 to 80 percent suffered diminished growth due to malnutrition.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“The army ranked eighteenth in the world in size at the beginning of 1940 (smaller than Belgium’s, Portugal’s, even Switzerland’s), with fewer than 200,000 men, compared with nearly 7 million trained Nazi soldiers.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“If mankind continues to make the atomic bomb without changing the political relationships of States, sooner or later these bombs will be used for mutual annihilation .”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“Truman spent the afternoon catching up. He signed the United Nations Charter on August 8. (On this same day, the Allies signed the London Agreement, which officially set the stage for the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.) He had been gone a long time, and with Bess also absent from the White House, he had bills stacked up on his desk, many for White House groceries. He sat at his desk writing out no fewer than a dozen checks from a special White House account he had opened at Hamilton National Bank. He owed the Metropolitan Poultry Company $5.03, and the General Baking Company $1.44.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“While he was president, he kept a quotation of Abraham Lincoln in a leather portfolio on his desk. It read, “I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so to the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won’t make any difference.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“Youth, the hope of the world.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“noble in motive’ but disastrous in result.”
― A.J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Ford Motor Company, and Their Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

“Stimson’s visit with Truman on July 24 lasted not longer than an hour. But it was a critical hour for humankind. No piece of paper documents Truman’s official decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“This is a nickel and dime business all the way through,” Ford vice president Lewis Crusoe said. “A dime on a million units is $100,000.”
― A.J. Baime, Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans

“Whole Nation Reflects Era of Good Feeling Inspired by President”: “The mood of the United States is one of extraordinary friendliness. Americans appear to be more at ease with each other. They are more inclined to talk about national affairs, less inclined to argue. In short there is a cordiality in the air that this country hasn’t known in years.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“Ferebee let the bomb loose. “For the next minute,” Lewis wrote, “no one knew what to expect.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“After a few minutes Truman went back inside the White House, so he could call his mother and personally deliver the news: World War II was over. ("That was Harry," ninety-two-year-old Mamma Truman said after hanging up. "Harry's such a wonderful man... I knew he'd call.")”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“Truman is now considered one of our most successful presidents, rating in the top 10 in every historical survey.” Ironically, Truman’s greatest strength came from what was perceived, on April 12, 1945, as his greatest weakness: his ordinariness. As Jonathan Daniels wrote of Truman, “Americans felt leaderless when Roosevelt died. Truman taught them, as one of them, that their greatness lies in themselves.” Harry S. Truman died twenty years after leaving office, the day after Christmas in 1972, at age eighty-eight. Bess Truman followed ten years later, and they are buried next to each other in a courtyard of the”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“We are on the threshold of possibly the most exciting racing era in history. —Sports Illustrated, May 11, 1964”
― A.J. Baime, Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans