Political Quotes

“I, too, rise in support of the nomination of Strobe Talbott to be Deputy Secretary of State. I would like to emphasize just one aspect of his work, which is a little bit apart from the comment of my distinguished friend from New Jersey about his being mainstream; and that is to just record the consistency with which he observed the weakness of the Soviet economy and the Soviet political system at a time when many saw it as an imminent threat to the whole world, not least to the United States. We, of my generation in all events, will remember him. He first came to the attention of the Nation when he appeared as the translator of that extraordinary book, 'Khrushchev Remembers,' which Time magazine was able to publish in 1970, the first insight we had into the world of the Kremlin. It was altogether unprecedented, smuggled out of the Soviet Union by various devices. I can recall Andrew Heiskell describing on an occasion the ways in which they had used voice profiles to establish, that the tapes were indeed recordings of Khrushchev. And young Talbott, with great clarity, did the translation. For the first time we got a sense of the degree to which the Soviet Union was badly governed and facing decline.”