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Could the impact of Hanson have been less if I had attacked her more strongly and openly immediately after her maiden speech? I think not. Pauline Hanson was an accident, but accidents constantly happen in politics. A more vigorous response from me would have intensified the frustrations felt by those Australians to whom she gave a voice, and gratuitously alienated them from me — and for what purpose, other than the political benefit of the ALP? Those frustrations were bound to surface at some point and, coming as they did from many citizens whose natural political bent was Coalition rather than Labor, it would have been foolish in the extreme for me to have treated them with the contempt urged upon me by my many critics.
Lazarus Rising
John Howard
These were the months in which Senator Arthur Vandenberg was brooding in his Wardman Park1 apartment, making his historic pivot toward faith in the viability of international interdependence. Crouched in a London air raid shelter as German robot bombs rocked the ground overhead, he had asked his escort, “How can there be immunity or isolation when man can devise weapons like that?” Vandenberg broke the power of his party’s go-it-alone faction when he told a hushed Senate, “I have always been frankly one of those who believed in our own self-reliance. I still believe that we can never again—regardless of collaborations—allow our national defense to deteriorate to anything like a point of impotence. But I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by its own exclusive action…. I want maximum American cooperation…. I want a new dignity and a new authority for international law. I think self-interest requires it.”
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
There is a kind of Don Juan—like quality to reading manuscripts–the next one, or the one after, might be the love of one’s life—but editing them is a slow, painstaking effort to patch up and make presentable what has already been botched and fudged. It is possible to spend hours unraveling someone else’s prose or trying to decide what he or she was trying to say and finding some way to make the words express it without starting from scratch in one’s own words. In editing, time becomes meaningless. A single page can sometimes absorb hours, like the most infuriating kind of puzzle. For most editors, there is no time to edit in the office, where they are caught up dealing with the problems of real live authors, talking to agents, being called to meetings, or trying to explain to the marketing people or the business people or the publicity people just what this or that book is about and why it’s important to buy it or print fifty thousand copies of it or reject it. This in turn means that editors do most of their serious work at night and over the weekends and explains why so many of the better ones eventually become publishers,
Another Life
Michael Korda
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