The Devils Chessboard¶
Metadata¶
- Author: David Talbot
- ASIN: B00SFZB93Y
- ISBN: 0062276174
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SFZB93Y
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
at the end of his presidency, Ike concluded that Dulles had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left him nothing but “a legacy of ashes.” — location: 614 ^ref-13362
One of the triumphs of German engineering was to devise a convenient incineration process whereby the burning of the corpses provided the heat for the furnaces. — location: 1267 ^ref-3297
was Joseph Stalin who insisted that the Nazi leaders be put on trial, lecturing his Western allies on the merits of due process. “U[ncle]. J[oe]. took an unexpectedly ultra-respectable line,” — location: 1489 ^ref-2750
According to Mills, power in America was not solely in the hands of Marx’s “ruling class”—those who owned the means of production. Nor was it a balancing act of competing interests, such as big business, organized labor, farmers, and professional groups. — location: 3652 ^ref-19209
Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite, America was ruled by those who control the “strategic command posts” of society—the big corporations, the machinery of the state, and the military establishment. — location: 3656 ^ref-56295
“The long-time tendency of business and government to become more intricately and deeply involved with each other has [now] reached a new point of explicitness. The two cannot now be seen clearly as two distinct worlds.” — location: 3666 ^ref-56054
The Power Elite — location: 3684 ^ref-54982
Elevated to the pinnacle of Washington power, they continued to forcefully represent the interests of their corporate caste, conflating them with the national interest. — location: 3728 ^ref-28832
Eisenhower was deeply beholden to the Wall Street Republican power brokers who had not only recruited him for the presidential race but had helped finance his electoral battle, loaned him one of their own—white-shoe lawyer Herbert Brownell Jr.—to run his campaign, — location: 3834 ^ref-46457
As America extended its postwar reach around the world, with hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries and U.S. oil, mining, agribusiness, and manufacturing corporations operating on every continent, Eisenhower saw the CIA (along with the Pentagon’s nuclear firepower) as the most cost-effective way to enforce American interests overseas. — location: 3840 ^ref-53018
Eisenhower participated in his own cover-up. His presidency involved a thorough and ambitious crusade marked by covert operations that depended on secrecy for their success.” — location: 3845 ^ref-577
A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did. . . . What was evolving was a closed state within an open state.” — location: 3851 ^ref-45698
he was constantly on the defensive against Republican charges that Communists were honeycombed throughout the federal bureaucracy. In response, Truman imposed a loyalty test on federal employees and created an extensive surveillance apparatus to go with it, which turned up few real security threats. He also shredded the Bill of Rights by unleashing a wave of prosecutions against Communist Party officials, thereby effectively outlawing the party and demolishing much of the organized left. — location: 3889 ^ref-37910
The civil service apparatus was supposed to protect respected officials like this, many of whom had made valuable contributions to the U.S. government’s understanding of the world. But ideology trumped ability in Foster’s intensely politicized State Department. — location: 3984 ^ref-47850
He was, in Adlai Stevenson’s words, “McCarthy with a white collar.” — location: 4026 ^ref-12642
After enduring years of relentless harassment from Red hunters, many Washington liberals cheered Dulles as a savior. His CIA became known as a haven for the intelligentsia and for others looked on with suspicion by McCarthyites. — location: 4149 ^ref-32782