Political Quotes

“there is another guy who preceded all these people that we have talked about. He is a guy who, in this city, was actually taken to court-martial at one point because he told the United States, when he was a U.S. officer, a General officer, he announced to the world and to the United States that we were not ready for war and that we needed to be doing more. And, of course, sometimes when you tell the truth, that gets you in trouble. But in the 1930s, we were not ready for war. This guy's name was Billy Mitchell. In fact, one time I was carrying on about Billy Mitchell and how great he was at warning us to get ready for this new age of air power, and the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bass), one of our great colleagues, asked me to quit lecturing him on Billy Mitchell because, he said, Billy Mitchell was my uncle. And he knew a lot more about Billy Mitchell than I did. But Billy Mitchell took a tour of the world in the 1920s and came back reported to the Coolidge administration about where he thought our vulnerabilities lay. He would go out and analyze scenarios in which he thought we might be attacked. More than a decade before Pearl Harbor, he predicted at some point we would be attacked by a low-level, early-dawn attack by aircraft from Japan at Pearl Harbor.”