The Nightingale's Song Quotes

“Corson arrived at the Academy in September 1964 as an instructor. His course in guerrilla warfare quickly became a midshipman favorite. His teaching methods were unconventional. He had books imported from mainland China, including three volumes of Mao’s writing. To Corson, the lesson was clear: if you can’t outlast the guerrilla, don’t get in the game.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song

“Hemingway writes of people becoming stronger in the broken places, which is a heartening thought, and sometimes true. All too often, though, it belongs in the file that Jim Webb labeled typical Hemingway bullshit.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale's Song

“The carpetbagger issue plagued him from the start of his campaign, became the killer question at the candidates’ forums to which the four hopefuls dragged themselves two and three nights a week. You’ve just lived here a year, how can you know Arizona or the district? Aren’t you just an opportunist? At first he explained that, having never lived anywhere permanently, he moved to his wife’s home state when he retired from the Navy, just as many others had settled in Arizona in recent years. It was a weak response and he knew he was getting beat up. One night he turned it around. This time his face grew red as he listened to the familiar question. “Listen, pal,” he replied, “I spent twenty-two years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. “As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” The audience sat for several seconds in shocked silence, then broke into thunderous applause. “The reply was absolutely the most devastating response to a potentially troublesome political issue I’ve ever heard,” said political columnist John Kolbe, of the Phoenix Gazette.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song

“Reagan’s second chief of staff, said it best: no other President of the modern era was so much a presence in the affairs of state without being an actual participant.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song

“He was a very private person, unemotional and undemonstrative in public. To a great degree he was unconcerned about his image, caring little for “glory” in the conventional sense. His gods were logic and reason. The character of Mr. Spock in the popular science-fiction series“Star Trek” could easily have been patterned after Spruance. The admiral competed not with others but with his own impossibly high selfexpectations, and that is the way he judged his successes and failures. A man who relied on deeds rather than words to make his mark, Spruance seemed oblivious to what posterity would think of him. He did not like to speak publicly, nor did he do much writing if he could avoid it. He authored no wordy, self-justifying memoirs. His achievements, intellect, and integrity were responsible for the great respect accorded him by his peers.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song

“A favorite story concerned a prisoner who built himself a motorcycle only he could see. When he finished, he took it out each day for a spin around the courtyard. At times it broke down and he would have to repair it. Give me a wrench, he would demand of the guards, give me a screwdriver. Crazy, crazy, the guards would say, shaking their heads. One day, though, he hit a curve too sharply, taking a nasty spill. Racing over, the guards assisted him to his feet, picked up the motorcycle, and helped him remount.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song

“The antiwar movement was of little interest for Webb in those days. He did not recognize the strength and depth of it. As a platoon leader in the bush, he did not have much time for reflection or intellectual musings. There was also a credibility problem. In the America in which Jim Webb grew up, it was inconceivable that the nation could be at war and tens of thousands of men his own age might connive to avoid it, knowing all the while that other young men of similar promise and equally lofty dreams risked living out their futures in darkness,”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song

“Milt Copulos, a friend of Jim Webb, spent three and a half years in the hospital and received the last rites seven times as a result of his Vietnam service. He put it this way: “There’s a wall ten miles high and fifty miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn’t, and that wall is never going to come down.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song

“A sampling of the more important statistics: •​About 27 million men came of draft age between 1964 and 1973, roughly the decade of the Vietnam War. Of that number, 11 million entered the service either as draftees or volunteers. More than 2 million served in the war zone. •​Of those who went to Vietnam, 58,000 died. Another 270,000 were wounded, 21,000 of whom were disabled in some manner. Five thousand lost one or more limbs. •​Sixteen million, or 60 percent, of the 27 million draft-age men escaped military service by a variety of legal and illegal means. Sixteen million.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song

“Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”
― Robert Timberg, The Nightingale’s Song