Command Control Quotes
Stevens was totally burned out and quit. His predecessor had also been burned out at the enormous scope of the task. TR had gone to Panama himself to boost morale—the first time a President had ever left the United States. He wanted a manager who would stick with the job. An army engineer, Colonel George Washington Goethals was appointed and he became a general when he finished the long incredible job. The famous graphic was when the President mounted and took the controls of one of the huge steam shovels on the canal.
This seemingly prosaic quotation is one of the most significant quotations in history. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the telegraph was rapidly developing as a communications technology. One of Lincoln’s greatest achievements was the appreciation of the new technology and the deployment of it to gain an immense strategic advantage which was a major factor in all warfare thereafter. Lincoln placed ALL telegraphy of the North under the control of the military. He then had a telegraph terminal installed in the War Department right next to the White House. He would spend many hours in the Telegraph Room reading dispatches as they were coming in. To the distress of some of his military commanders, the Commander in Chief actually, for the first time in history, received virtually real time intelligence about a battle, and issued orders to the commanders in the field in real time. The quotation is one of the early examples. Ironically, Lincoln had more real time battlefields information in the Civil War than most of our Presidents did until the Vietnam War when digital, radio communications were exploited for the purpose.
One of the many Goldwater statements that made most Americans believe he was not prudent enough to trust with the nuclear “trigger”, See {622850}.
