Keith June

“Khrushchev backed down, Kennedy wisely instructed his staff not to betray any hint of gloating—a provocation to Soviet credibility and pride could lead to a later war. Similarly, he rejected additional plans for an invasion, which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put before him in case the Soviets did not honor a promise to remove their missiles. Kennedy continued to see an invasion as carrying huge risks: “Consider the size of the problem,” he told McNamara, “the equipment that is involved on the other side, the Nationalists [’] fervor which may be engendered, it seems to me we could end up bogged down. I think we should keep constantly in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans.” Given his concerns about getting “bogged down” only ninety miles from U.S. shores, would Kennedy have been as ready as Lyndon Johnson to put hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Vietnam?”
― Robert Dallek, The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope 1945-53

“This would be the first, but hardly the last, American invasion of another land under the pretext of bettering life for the invaded.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die,” even if the soldiers did not know the source. Those on Omaha Beach who had committed the poem to memory surely muttered to themselves, “Some one had blunder’d.”)”
― Stephen E. Ambrose, D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II

“Democratic government that relied on direct representation and universal suffrage could not succeed, since it assumed an equality within the Volk that did not exist. To a certain extent, scientists and engineers—like women, the working class, churches, and so on—gained access to power through the Führer. This was the “leader principle” that operated in all Nazi institutions and drew strength from the tradition of monarchic authoritarianism in Germany. In 1934, Hitler declared himself not only chancellor but “leader.” This meant he claimed not only constitutional powers but extragovernmental powers that required his followers to declare their allegiance to him. He expressed the true will of the Volk so that any opposition or criticism was precluded. No interests or groups or ideas existed alongside him: “In place of conflicts and compromise, there was to be only the absolute enemy on whom the sights of the unified nation were fixed” (Bracher 1970, pp. 340–44). Since authority and power originated with Hitler, the fate”
― Paul R. Josephson, Totalitarian Science and Technology