Anthony Summers > Quotes

“Honey, we all got to go sometime, reason or no reason. Dyin’s as natural as livin’; man who’s afraid to die is too afraid to live, far as I’ve ever seen. So there’s nothing to do but forget it, that’s all. Seems to me”
― Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

“I cannot believe we want our great nation to become a land where our personal privacy and our personal freedom are jeopardized by the abuse of power by a police official who seems to believe he is a law unto himself ~ George McGovern”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“There’s something in her that’s looking for the basic reality of a given situation.”
― Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

“Anything worth having is worth waiting for. Love, Marilyn.”
― Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

“On May 8 Edgar went to the White House to discuss the problem with the President and senior members of the cabinet. The outcome was that for the first time, Edgar gained official sanction to conduct political intelligence.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“O’Donnell later told a friend, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, that he had been pressured by the FBI not to say what he firmly believed, that gunfire had come from in front of the motorcade.”
― Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

“Far from starting with the premise that the authorities tell the truth, a depressingly large number of people now accept as a given that the government constantly lies. If it does not actively lie, many are persuaded, it conceals the truth.”
― Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

“(they would cost $30,000 each by the end of his career)”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Edgar behaved at the track as though he did not know what everyone in law enforcement knew, that racetrack gambling was the single most important source of revenue for organized crime.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“In his day, as is still often the case today, anything other than evident heterosexuality could destroy a public official. Acutely aware of the danger, Edgar overcompensated. Like several other public figures with a secret homosexual life, Edgar often behaved viciously toward fellow homosexuals.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“apparition”
― Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

“The British had vastly more experience in the field than their U.S. counterparts – a fact of life that Donovan appreciated. Edgar, however, burned with resentment.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“We are a fact gathering organization only. We don’t clear anybody. We don’t condemn anybody. Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.’ J. Edgar Hoover, July 14, 1955”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“The Constitution has never been in such danger …”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Unfriendly’ witnesses and those who opposed the hearings, such as John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, were vilified.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“There were Hoover blankets, the newspapers used by the destitute to ward off the cold; Hoover flags, pockets empty of money; and Hoovervilles, the shantytowns of the homeless.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“It seems almost certain, however, that they did not receive the crucial backup information that went with it – Popov’s report on the statements of Jebsen, Baron Gronau and Major von Auenrode. Without those factors to put the questionnaire in perspective, its impact must have been greatly diminished.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Hoover had shown his total incompetence for sophisticated wartime intelligence early on. His handling of the “Popov Affair” might well have been a tip-off for his future legendary secretiveness and over-simplified way of thinking.’ William Casey, CIA Director”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“The Bureau boasted thirteen blacks by the end of that year, out of a total agent force of 6,000 men.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“You must understand that you’re working for a crazy maniac and that our duty is to find out what he wants and to create the world that he believes in, and to show him that’s the way things are”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“When Popov’s memoirs were published in 1974, two years after Edgar’s death, the FBI flatly rejected his allegations. Edgar’s successor as Director, Clarence Kelley, said the Bureau ‘certainly did not receive information which indicated the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Roosevelt and his advisers soon fell into the habit of calling for Bureau reports on matters that had little or nothing to do with law enforcement.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“For once, by sheer weight of numbers, Edgar’s wrath was thwarted.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Edgar had been playing a double game all along,”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“Welles had allegedly tried to bribe several black male Pullman staff members to have sex with him in his compartment”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tolson a blowjob,’ said Novel. ‘There was more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover’s head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tolson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me …”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“I came to America,’ he said in 1947, ‘because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.’ At the time of his death, the FBI dossier on him had grown to thousands of pages. They contain no evidence that he was ever disloyal.”
― Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“On November 22, at a further meeting in Paris—with FitzGerald’s knowledge and approval—CIA case officer Nestor Sanchez handed Cubela—the presumed traitor—an alternative assassination device with which to kill Castro, a Paper Mate pen modified to serve as a poison syringe. Just two days earlier, barely twenty-four hours after John F. Kennedy had approved pressing on with peace feelers toward Castro, CIA technicians had worked through the night preparing the weapon. As Sanchez and Cubela ended their meeting, news came through that the President had been shot dead in Dallas.11 Desmond”
― Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

“The family’s rented villa was, moreover, in Praia da Luz, where all six other ‘orphanage’ incidents had been reported – one of them, the week before Madeleine went missing, at the Ocean Club’s Apartment 5A, where the McCanns were to stay.”
― Anthony Summers, Looking For Madeleine: Updated 2019 Edition

“The drive and determination and need inside Marilyn could not be halted.”
― Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe