“In the half-decade following the end of World War II, both McCarthy and Cohn had taken advantage of growing anxieties over social transformations and an uncertain global political situation to secure positions of influence in the emergent national security state. They had portrayed themselves as founts of masculinity, able to undertake the urgent task of defending the United States from enemies foreign and domestic.”

its guaranteed to end in tears. Nuclear tears.

“There’s a reason why monocultures do not exist in nature.”

“How did we go from ‘grab ‘em by the’ – I don’t know if I can even say that word, but you know what I mean – to images of him being [almost another] Jesus. I don’t understand it.

“ – how could a cultured nation which had produced Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, Schiller, Einstein, Kant, Hegel and so many of the world’s greatest thinkers and artists allow itself to be led lemming-like to the precipice of self-destruction by a ragged collective of criminals, misfits, sadists and petty bureaucrats – the very dregs of society?”