Robert Dallek Quotes

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Robert Dallek

Profession : Historian

Birth : May 16, 1934

Nowadays, everyone seems to have a blog that finds readers.

Robert Dallek

John Kennedy had so many different medical problems that began when he was a boy. He started out with intestinal problems... spastic colitis.

Robert Dallek

The Atlantic conference in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland is a dramatic moment in World War II history because for the first time, Roosevelt and Churchill are meeting face to face in this war.

Robert Dallek

I think the most important thing that comes out of the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in early 1942 is a commitment on Roosevelt's part to fight Europe first. To struggle first against Germany and put Japan and the Pacific as a secondary theatre in the conflict. And this is what Churchill was after.

Robert Dallek

Historians will look back and say, 'Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.' Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.

Robert Dallek

Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.

Robert Dallek

My feeling is that it's a misreading of history to say that, as the Reagan supporters do, that Reagan won the Cold War.

Robert Dallek

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

Robert Dallek

What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression.

Robert Dallek

During his presidency, Truman and the Republicans were locked in a series of furious assaults on each other that outraged him and made Truman an enduring foe of a party and its representatives, which he saw as on the wrong side of almost every domestic and foreign policy issue he considered important.

Robert Dallek

How different our national perspective would be had Johnson, rather than Nixon, served from 1969 to 1973.

Robert Dallek

If Roosevelt didn't have World War II, he never would have had a third term.

Robert Dallek

I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.

Robert Dallek

F.D.R. had an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1933 when he drove 15 major bills through the Congress, and super majorities in the House and the Senate in 1935 when he won passage of Social Security.

Robert Dallek

The nation should be able to remove by an orderly constitutional process any president with an unyielding commitment to failed policies and an inability to renew the country's hope.

Robert Dallek

Foreign policy - dealing as it does with the most charged political subjects of all, the safety and dignity of the nation - will always be political terrain particularly vulnerable to distortion and demagoguery.

Robert Dallek

Despite an unqualified understanding that U.S. national security was inextricably bound up with Britain's survival, F.D.R. knew that his reelection in part rested on the hope that he would keep the country out of war.

Robert Dallek

Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.

Robert Dallek

Some Kennedy aides have always insisted that Johnson misread J.F.K.'s plans for Vietnam. They say that Kennedy had begun to rethink the U.S. presence in Indochina and was reluctant to increase it.

Robert Dallek

From the moment he took office in January of 1961, Kennedy had been eager to settle the Cuban problem without overt military action by the United States.

Robert Dallek