AArdvark wrote: Sat Sep 24, 2022 5:26 pm
Er, you didn't read the book, did you
You're right; it was my memory. Looking it up, while my quote was not exact, I did get the essence of the quote. I found the exact quote at the world's largest library of facts and information, stored in hundreds of millions of places:
QUOTATION: When contemplating General Eisenhower winning the Presidential election, Truman said, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”
ATTRIBUTION: HARRY S. TRUMAN.—Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power, the Politics of Leadership, p. 9 (1960).
SUBJECTS: Presidency
The original place where I read it noted that Truman was wrong; Rosenmhpwer did understand and knew something about how, after four years of grueling war (1941-1945) the country needed time to recover, and heal. Yes, and again it's not exact and at 3 in the morning I'm too tired & lazy to look it up.
Oh hell, if I don't check it, someone\a gonna ding me for it anyway. You guys are probably more pedantic than I am.
So, on second thought, it probably took as long or longer to say I was too tired to look it up than to just look it up in the first place. Here it is, with attribution:
Harry Truman didn't think his successor had the right training to be president. "Poor Ike -- it won't be a bit like the Army," he said. "He'll sit there all day saying, 'Do this, do that,' and nothing will happen." Truman was wrong about Ike. Dwight Eisenhower had led a fractious alliance -- you didn't tell Winston Churchill what to do -- in a massive, chaotic war. He was used to politics.
- Fareed Zakaria, "Sun King Syndrome",
Washington Post, Washingtonpost.com, August 21, 2001 at
this location.
