The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot

The opposite of love is not hate, he said. It’s power. Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.

Nixon reminded himself. “One of the most trying experiences an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or fly from it,” Nixon wrote in Six Crises. “It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers.” A leader acted decisively. The failures are “those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee.”

Joseph Stalin, too, understood the power of words, calling writers “the engineers of the human soul.”

“When one struggles for one’s country,” he said as he got back into the canoe, “one has to expect a tragic end.”