Playing with Fire Quotes

“Eugene McCarthy was the last American presidential candidate who thought flattering an audience’s intelligence was the way to win their hearts and their votes.”
― Lawrence O'Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

“In order for nonviolence to work,” Stokely Carmichael said in 1967, “your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
― Lawrence O'Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

“Nixon’s second inauguration drew a hundred thousand protesters to Washington. The next inauguration protest was in 2017, when Donald Trump’s inauguration was followed by at least half a million protesters in Washington and millions more in all fifty states and around the world.”
― Lawrence O'Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

“John Lindsay was the last liberal standing at the Republican convention of 1968. He was literally the last liberal to stand at a Republican convention podium. When John Lindsay finished speaking that night, liberalism in the Republican Party died.”
― Lawrence O'Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

“Most politicians are more frustrated by the way their own party disappoints them than the way the other party opposes them. They expect opposition from the opposing party. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Dealing with that opposition is a full-time job, and they expect to have the support of their own party in that eternal struggle. But when their own party turns against them, disagrees with them, or just goes off in another direction, they feel unsupported by their party and sometimes betrayed.”
― Lawrence O'Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

“NBC News reporter Douglas Kiker observed, while covering the Wallace campaign, “It was as if somewhere, sometime a while back, George Wallace had been awakened by a white, blinding vision: they all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern! Anybody who travels with Wallace these days on his presidential campaign finds it hard to resist arriving at the same conclusion.” Wallace voters who agreed to be interviewed sounded like Trump voters in 2016. Most of them denied race had anything to do with their choice of candidate. They said they supported Wallace because he told it like it was and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.”
― Lawrence O'Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

“The war “has made the Great Society a myth,” King said, “and replaced it with a troubled and confused society. . . . How can the administration, with quivering anger, denounce the violence of ghetto Negroes when it has given an example of violence in Asia that shocks the world? . . . I have been working too long against segregation in public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.”
― Lawrence O'Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

“Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, it was commonly known as MOBE. The key words were mobilization and end. MOBE was not going to listen to a three-point plan like Bobby Kennedy’s. Nothing less than a definitive and absolute end to the war in Vietnam was acceptable. David Dellinger was MOBE’s main coordinator. Dellinger was not one of the kids. He was Gene McCarthy’s age, fifty-two, a lifelong pacifist. During World War II, when nothing like the antiwar fervor of the 1960s could have been imagined, David Dellinger refused to serve in the military and was imprisoned. He had a history in radical pacifism like no one else in the anti-Vietnam movement. By 1967, Dave Dellinger’s time had finally come. Dellinger coordinated the October 21 march with a man of a totally different stripe, twenty-nine-year-old Jerry Rubin, whose activism was born in the Berkeley Free Speech movement of 1964. Rubin dropped out of Berkeley then and had been making trouble for establishments ever since. Rubin’s radical style seemed frivolous compared to Dellinger’s. Jerry Rubin mixed stunts, costumes, nudity, drugs, music, and jokes. Rubin concocted a theatrical potion intended”
― Lawrence O'Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics