James Forrestal Quotes
If all Europe lies flat while the Russian mob tramps over it, we will then be faced with a war under difficult circumstances, and with a very good chance of losing it.
Forrestal, James. The Forrestal Diaries. Edited by Walter Millis, Viking Press, 1951.
The line was delivered by Sellers playing the President of the United States in a War Room crisis.
Compare this to Bernard Baruch's quotation about a cold war the year before.
Boggs was working on some compromise positions that could be taken by the party at the 1968 Democratic National Convention to provide the anti war wing of the party with something. The President found out and met with Congressman Boggs.
Russia announced ballistic missile testing in response to NATO announced deployment of a missile shield across Europe. It was the first mini arms race since the fall of the Soviet Union.
At first glance, the reader might think that this quotation in a leading university newspaper was from the Vietnam War era. However, it was argument against U. S. involvement in World War II. There was a very negative reaction to Wilson’s visions and claims for the First World War which never did come to pass that stuck with many.
Like many in the 1920s, Dewar saw the Communist Soviet Union as the biggest potential risk to peace. However, although the Russian leaders constantly castigated the West, they did not have a large military, and were for the most part highly anti-war as they saw war as the product of Capitalistic competition and the tool of the aristocracy. They had little military equipment and almost no training or officer corps with which to build any Army. Germany in contrast had the skill, experience, officers, a history of aggression, and huge resentment over what they considered their humiliating WWI defeat and peace terms. They would start WWII, not Russia.
The War Plan that the Germans had developed--{642092}—had gone awry at the battle of the Marne in late 1914.
The Germans did not believe the British would send land troops. See {642105}.
James Vincent Forrestal was the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense.
