A Quote by Henry Kissinger
I don't see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.
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Dean Acheson was one of the very best and brightest of the men who ever came to Washington.
And I don't say that we didn't expect it, but we were pleasantly surprised to see the generosity of their foreign policy; and the generosity of their foreign policy at that moment was expressed through the Marshall Plan.
The State Department desperately needs to be vigorously harnessed. It has too big a role to play in the formulation of foreign policy, and foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.
Historians will look back and say, 'Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.' Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.
The foreign policy community in Washington has been arguing that America must put our values at the head of our foreign policy once again - and I couldn't agree more, so let's start by leading on women.
Today a Scot is leading a British army in France [Field Marshall Douglas Haig], another is commanding the British Grand Fleet at sea [Admiral David Beatty], while a third directs the Imperial General Staff at home [Sir William Roberton]. The Lord Chancellor is a Scot [Viscount Finlay]; so are the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary [Bonar Law and Arthur Balfour]. The Prime Minister is a Welshman [David Lloyd George], and the First Lord of the Admiralty is an Irishman [Lord Carson]. Yet no one has ever brought in a bill to give home rule to England!
One thing that's really interesting is not only the magnitude of the recent immigration into this country, but also its distribution and its investment in the country. About 9.3 percent of the population is now foreign-born [announced by the Census Bureau at over 10 percent a few days later]. What's really surprising is how well distributed those population groups are. Historically, we see new immigrants primarily on the coast and in a few big cities. I think the data are going to show a much wider distribution of the new population groups than we've experienced historically.
I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very sort of heroic, oversized painting of black men in a barbershop. But it was painted on the same level and with the same urgency that you would see in a grand-scale [Anthony] van Dyck or [Diego] Velazquez. The composition was classically informed; the painting technique was masterful. And it was something that really inspired me because, you know, these were images of young, black men in painting on the museum walls of one of the more sanctified and sacred institutions in Los Angeles.
Foreign policy is about the execution of ideas as much as their formulation.
Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness that in foreign policy we are all engaged in a common national endeavor.
I can't talk about foreign policy like anyone who's spent their life reading and learning foreign policy. But as a citizen in a democracy, it's very important that I participate in that.
When I started, every film got a full theatrical distribution. Today, almost no low budget films, maybe two or three a year, will get a full theatrical distribution. We've been frozen out of that, which means they must be aware that for a full theatrical distribution it either has to be something like Saw or some exploitation film of today or an extremely well made personal film.
As far as we were concerned, we were operators, we were administrators. I don't ever recall going to Dean Acheson and asking for any counsel or advice on administration, but I had the greatest respect for him, as I have today.
While I'm on foreign soil, I - I just don't feel that I should be speaking about differences with regards to myself and President Obama on foreign policy, either foreign policy of the past, or for foreign policy prescriptions.
The people see that Wall Street is running our economic policy, that big oil is running our energy policy and the military industrial complex is determining our foreign policy.
If I were Donald Trump, I would definitely not pick Mitt Romney because it's very easy for Mitt Romney to have have a separate foreign policy operatus in the State Department that would run a dissenting foreign policy from the White House foreign policy. There, I think the populist America-first foreign policy of Donald Trump does run against a potential rival.
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