Sublime

None has the skill to force a compromise when compromise is needed.

His accomplishments at home and abroad were great: opening up China, achieving arms control with the Soviet Union, ending (if too slowly) the Vietnam War, desegregating the Southern schools, increasing benefits for the elderly and the disabled, creating the Environmental Protection Agency.

As the Athenian historian and general Thucydides concluded twenty-five hundred years ago, conflict is driven by fear and honor as well as interest.

Where war is considered tantamount to national suicide, surrender may appear the lesser of two evils.”

Weakened by the challenge from technology, the state will treat increasingly autonomous individuals, its former citizens, with the same range of ruthlessness and diplomacy it has heretofore displayed in its dealing with other governments.

peremptorily.

If a people are free to initiate warfare, sue for peace when they lose, then expect to be treated at the negotiating table as the moral equals of those they attacked, there will be little disincentive to aggression. Why not start a war?

he had often, as in the case of the “Armageddon” memo, given heavy weight to Rowe’s opinions. But this time, when Rowe gave his advice, Lyndon Johnson rejected it—all of it. He wasn’t going to enter any primaries, he told Rowe. He wasn’t going to run around the country giving speeches. He was going to make no overt move at all to get the nomination