Mayday Quotes

“Cooking was therapy for Eisenhower: on hearing about Pearl Harbor, he went straight to the kitchen and made vegetable soup.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“You are very lucky. You are a poet. You can tell the truth. But I was a politician. I had to shout to hold my job.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“ce qui est déféré est perdu”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“when a President lost his credibility, “he has lost his greatest strength.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“After the April 9 U-2 flight, Eisenhower was impressed by the fact that Khrushchev, “for his own reasons,” did not protest. As Kistiakowsky later said, “This was virtually inviting us to repeat the sortie.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“John D. Rockefeller”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“extrade”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“At times, he was almost seductively charming. At other times, he was boorish and obtuse. Some visitors came away swearing that he was the devil incarnate. Others came away swearing that he was just a drunk. All thought he was a bully.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“God help the nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“Any person who doesn’t clearly understand that national security and national solvency are mutually dependent and that permanent maintenance of a crushing weight of military power would eventually produce dictatorship should not be entrusted with any kind of responsibility in our country.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“Khrushchev sat next to the Secretary of State, whom he elsewhere called the “chained cur of capitalism”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“Eisenhower liked his memos in military fashion: Conclusion, Fact One, Fact Two, Fact Three.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“Eisenhower once wrote in his diary that in Knowland’s case, there seemed to be no final answer to the question, “How stupid can you get?”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“new spy plane that would fly over seventy thousand feet for as much as four thousand miles.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.… We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“Georgi Malenkov, the heir apparent; Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Minister; Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police. Nikita Khrushchev,”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“The previous day, Richard Nixon had called the President from New York and asked if it was “imperative” that he go to High Point. Eisenhower had excused him.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“Years later, on first meeting Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger was not prepared for the “cold, deep blue, extraordinarily penetrating eyes.”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair

“Eisenhower knew that keeping the U-2 pilots from wearing military uniforms was a contrivance, but he knew that one day, the program would be revealed: that the fliers were civilians would carry weight with world opinion. A nonmilitary President might not have been so sensitive to the distinction. As”
― Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair