Steven Travers > Quotes

“Brezhnev and Nixon flew by helicopter down the coast south to San Clemente. Brezhnev stared out the window at the magnificent estates dotting the beaches for mile after mile. He remarked to Nixon that surely this was a trick, a “Potemkin village” of a sort, or special “dachas,” where only the elites of the U.S. government were able to live in such luxury. Nixon smiled and said, no, these were middle-class families who, by dint of the capitalist work ethos, owned these homes and raised families there. Brezhnev was dumbstruck that average people lived like that.”
― Steven Travers, The Duke, the Longhorns, and Chairman Mao: John Wayne's Political Odyssey

“This was the big trump card of Marxist-Leninist theory, the idea that people in the present were never more important than the goal, the plan, or the future—some utopian land that everybody would occupy once “purification” had rid it of the bourgeoisie.”
― Steven Travers, The Duke, the Longhorns, and Chairman Mao: John Wayne's Political Odyssey

“Never lose the common touch,” he told her afterward. “Never think anyone is better than you, but never assume you’re superior to anyone else. Try and be decent to everyone, until they give you a reason not to.”
― Steven Travers, The Duke, the Longhorns, and Chairman Mao: John Wayne's Political Odyssey

“He did not appreciate the fact that his own fishing trip to Florida, coinciding with his wife giving premature birth, was splattered all over the front pages while Kennedy’s tryst with girls on friend George Smathers’s boat in Florida, while Jacqueline Kennedy was giving well-planned birth, was treated like a national secret by his media protectors.”
― Steven Travers, The Duke, the Longhorns, and Chairman Mao: John Wayne's Political Odyssey