John Brunetti

“If the Chiefs had successfully pressed with the president their position that the United States needed to act forcefully to defeat the North, they might have forced a difficult choice between war and withdrawal from South Vietnam. Through their own actions as well as through the manipulation of Taylor and McNamara, the Chiefs missed their opportunity to influence the formulation of a strategic concept for Vietnam, and thereafter always found themselves in the difficult position of questioning a policy that the president had already approved. The intellectual foundation for deepening American involvement in Vietnam had been laid without the participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 5”
― H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam

“The explanatory panel adds that because the Temple of the Tranquil Seas was “the former site of negotiating the Treaty of Nanjing, the first unequal treaty of modern China, [it] has become a symbol of the commencement of China’s modern history.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“him took place all over the country. And—for better or worse—his conviction that Chinese needed a protracted period of firm, authoritarian political tutelage before democracy could be risked has become the template for reform ever since. As”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“For much of the Communist era, scholars tended to look back on Sun as one more unsuccessful, reform-minded leader, and his Three People’s Principles as just another of modern China’s many dead-end political experiments. As one biographer wrote: “If Sun Yat-sen had one consistent talent, it was for failure.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century