The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.
If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.
I don’t have a brief for every single reaction of Israel, but I think it is important that the political negotiations occur free of the threat of terrorism.
The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.
People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
In my view, there’s no doubt that the Soviets had infinitely greater trouble holding their structure together than we did.
The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
In crises the most daring course is often safest.
For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Who controls money controls the world.
Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.
One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That’s Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality.