... for Davies and Service, it was the end of two brilliant careers. For the country they served, it would have even darker implications because they were the best of an era, and the Foreign Service does not produce that many men of rare excellence.

Going back to Davies, at the time after the war that Davies was a member of the policy staff of the State Department, he had advised (this was under Dulles), t…

[Davies] was one of the finest observers of oriental countries that we ever had.

The crime he did commit was that of practical, complicated, and nuanced thought. Though an ardent anti-communist, he also knew that Chiang's regime was bankrup…

Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of…

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the…

All political decisions are taken under great pressure, and if a treaty serves its turn for ten or twenty years, the wisdom of its framers is sufficiently conf…