I've just finished John F. Stacks book on James Reston Scotty  which has some notable passages. Reston is quoted as referring to an editor as "charming, but with sharp elbows" and about another "his skin was a lot thinner than his skull." At a press conference with President Dwight Eisenhower he asked Ike about starting a "preventative war" against Russia. Ike said:

"A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today..How could you have one if one of the features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities, where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled…That isn’t preventative war; that is war. I don’t believe there is such a thing and frankly I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."

That certainly made me think of Iraq and the decision of George Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney to wage a "preventive war" in that country.

The book also recounts the time yellow journalist Drew Pearson in a drunken rage punched red baiting Senator Joe McCarthy in a men’s room with Dick Nixon as a stunned witness only to have Pearson hit him again and yell out "This one’s for you Dick."