Political Quotes

“Mr. President, when I came out of graduate school, I was hired by Secretary Weinberger as a Presidential Management Intern--now called PMF, or Presidential Management Fellows--five of us who were brought in to do a series of rotations to bring, well, an injection of policy determination to the conversation in Secretary of Defense's Office. And it was really quite an enlightening experience. My first assignment involved being desk officer for Jordan at the Defense Security Systems Agency, because the desk officer who worked for both Jordan and Lebanon had to pay a lot more attention to Lebanon because we had the horrific bombing of the Marines in the tower. And then there was an argument inside the defense establishment about how to keep Russia from going forward at a faster pace technologically. And the research and development side said: If you classify everything, you will slow us down and Russia will catch up. And the policy said: Unless we classify everything, the Russians will steal so much, they will speed up and catch up. And there was this fundamental difference of opinion about how to control technology in order to maintain our technological lead over Russia. And I was asked to set up a steering committee and bring both parties to the table to try to work out where they could work together and try to resolve their differences.…”