Affection and Trust Quotes

“We cannot seem to understand that we are playing for keeps in a deadly serious operation in which there are no rules, no umpire, no prizes for good boys, no dunce caps for bad boys. In this game good intentions are not worth a damn; moral principles are traps; weakness and indecision are fatal. This is what Americans have been taught since they went to Christian Endeavor meetings cannot and must not happen — “the law of the jungle,” where the judgment of nature upon error is death.

And so we commit every error of every sort against nature. We make ourselves unworthy of the trust of our allies, we disregard their interests, we join with their and our enemies to weaken, humiliate and destroy them and our alliance with them. We believe for some incomprehensible reason that the U.N. is some disembodied moral force apart from ourselves. We are elated when it serves as the front for the combination of Russian and American power which crushes our allies. This is principle. We turn away when American desires running counter to Russian have no more effect than a peashooter on a tank.

Dean Acheson to Harry S. Truman
December 4, 1956”
― Dean Acheson, Affection and Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, 1953-1971