Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes
The different forces, however, which are doing secret service work, or investigation of different kinds are not the parts of the government which it would seem wise to me to consolidate. There have grown up under various forms of government in different parts of the world, secret investigation branches under one head, and they times have practically superseded all the other arms of the government and have spread terror among the population …. As long as they remain separate there will, however, be no danger of a secret octopus growing up to control in harmful ways.
Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1962, First Lady (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), U. S. Delegate to the United Nations, Column, My Day, July 16, 1937
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
There had been a proposal to consolidate the secret service and the FBI into a single organization. What is fascinating, over and above her very sophisticated reasoning, is that fact that the First Lady not only takes a position but writes about it in her daily newspaper column, but she did this while the Congress and her husband the President were weighing the issue. This is another example of Mrs. Roosevelt’s unique role in American politics. To many feminists, they find the fact that the President could and would function with his wife making all these public, independent and uncoordinated judgment, almost unique in political history. He was an admirable role model of a relationship with a wife from a gender equality point of view.
For example, most of the documents that are classified as secret in the CIA are so classified because the censor thought the information might be damaging to the CIA’s interest, not the American citizen’s. However, there is a strange logic that is sometimes given to justify censoring material that would embarrass the agency: If the agency is embarrassed, public support and confidence in the agency will be eroded, and that in turn will cause investigations, reviews, and possible diminished budgets. This would be distracting from the agency’s mission of keeping Americans safe, so the public should be kept in the dark about embarrassing material.
The FBI was accused of tapping congressional phones and infiltrating college campuses:
Madison went on to observe that in a democracy, the real power may reside in the majority of the population, and in such a case the tyranny of the majority is the danger.
The FBI director had become so powerful and unchecked by Congress or the President he used the FBI to assemble files on those whom he wanted including political figures. On many occasions he used these for various forms of blackmail, never for money, but to solicit compliance or support or obtain silence or cessation of opposition to positions he favored—especially the prerogatives of the FBI.
Historically, most dictators have announced their worst intentions and in many cases were not believed by much of the world who then learned that they had made a serious error.
At the time of this statement most people thought that Bush was joking. But by the end of his Presidency many looked back on the quote and thought that Bush had such preferences. He unilaterally took the country into the Iraq War and assumed Presidential Powers that no other president had ever attempted. Most serious, his administration actually took the formal legal position that the President did not have to obey the law if he unilaterally thought that it was not in the nation’s interest from the point of view of the Commander in Chief. So many debate whether this quotation was a light hearted joke of a harbinger of his real feelings about the Presidency.
Oswald was the assassin of President John F. Kennedy.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American political figure, diplomat and activist. She served as the First Lady of the United States from March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, making her the longest-serving First Lady of the United States. Roosevelt served as United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952. President Harry S. Truman later called her the "First Lady of the World" in tribute to her human rights achievements.
