David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.
All professions have some element of theater to them.
His counterpart at Chevy, a man named Bill Holler, had once gathered all of his regional salesmen around a brand-new model, opened the door, looked at them all long and solemnly, and then slammed the door as hard as he could. “Boys,” he announced, “I’ve just slammed the door on the best goddam car in the world” – and a huge cheer went up.
When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.
One percent of the population ruled – and they were all grafters – while the other ninety-nine percent live under the worst kind of feudalism.
Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.
She was young and scared, and hadn’t realized there was time to spare.
He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.
When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. “Make something,” he admonished. “Create something.
Listen, girlie,” said one of the executives of Cadillac, a particularly troubled company, to Maryann Keller, an astute and skeptical financial analyst on Wall Street, “it’s ready to turn around, and it’s going to be bigger than ever.
I still like boiled potatoes with the skins on,” he said, “and I do not want a man standing in back of my chair, laughing up his sleeve at me while I am taking the potatoes’ jackets off.” Of pleasure and material things he was wary. “I have never known what to do with money after my expenses were paid. I can’t squander it on myself without hurting myself,” he said, “and nobody wants to do that.
It hung heavily albeit secretly over the internal calculation of Democratic leaders of the period. But of course it was never discussed in the major newspapers and magazine articles that analyzed policy making in Vietnam. It was a secret subject, reflecting secret fears.
A good team was simply a group of very disparate athletes who assembled each day from radically different lives and – with luck – for one shared moment put aside their differences, their dislikes, their egos and their rivalries, harnessing their energies towards a common goal.
Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.
Mr. Ford, here is our new plant,” Lord Perry, who was the head of Ford in Europe, said proudly. “Where is the water?” the old man asked. “There isn’t any water,” Lord Perry replied. “Well, let’s get out of here,” Ford said. “I don’t even want to look at it.” That had ended the ceremony. Ford had driven off, and they had torn down the plant and moved it to a deep-water site.
The problem with military policies that are built to domestic specifications and do not take into account the complexity of the real world is that eventually the real world intrudes.
He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.
The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.
He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.
She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself.
He understood that the key to success, the secret to it, was the mastery of the grunt work, all the little details.