Political Quotes

“the Senator is correct. In World War II, with which I was going to commence my remarks in that context, I served at the very end. As a 17- or 18-year-old sailor, I was simply in a training command, but I remember that period of history very vividly. All through my early years, prior to going into the Navy, late in the fall of 1944 and starting active service in 1945, the whole of this country was consumed with that frightful conflict in which, at the hands of Nazis, some 9 million people perished, 6 million of whom were of the Jewish faith. It is just extraordinary. I was deeply disturbed by these comments to try to draw any analogy whatsoever to that period of history. Then, following the Soviet gulags, I served as Secretary of the Navy during the height of the Cold War for some 5 years in the Pentagon and actually had a great deal of work with the Soviet Union at that period of time in the context of that threatening situation of the Cold War. There is just no relationship to this. I was astonished. I did not want to let the Sun go down on this day without conveying to the Senate my own historical perspective and the danger that loose comments such as that--comparisons which have no basis in history--could do harm to the men and women serving wherever they are in the world today in this war on terrorism because this is the type of thing that is picked up and utilized by press antithetical to the interests of the United States and distorted in their own way.…”