Fonzie Quotes

You kidding? So many preservatives in these things, I'll live forever.

Right now I am thinking of writing another cookbook. All cookbooks have a gimmick, and mine will be that it contains recipes that I have invented and named after famous people. Some of them are: Brisket of Brynner (very lean meat) Carson Casserole (it's got everything on it) Barbecued Walters Marinated Maude Roasted Rhoda King King Curry (it will feed about eight thousand people) Fricassee of Fonzi Pickled Rickles Raquel Relish Leftovers à la Gabors

How do we defeat victory?" Piper wondered. "Sounds like one of those impossible riddles." "Like making stones fly," Leo said, "or eating only one Fonzie." He popped a handful into his mouth. Hazel wrinkled her nose. "That stuff is going to kill you." "You kidding? So many preservatives in these things, I’ll live forever.

My heart beat faster because I didn’t know what I would see or read, and I knew Luke might be in there, and I didn’t want to imagine or to confirm anything bad about him. I scanned the right margin, where all the names or aliases of the room’s members were listed. Weird-looking names, most of which made no sense to me. And then I spotted Fonzie at the bottom.

Moby Dick was a helluva lot more than just a fish in the ocean.”)

Aren’t you proud that you know how to use a dial phone? That you lived a whole, full life without a digital device in your pocket? You remember who Gilligan is! You watched Fonzie jump the shark! You remember when coming in second place was still awesome. You know how to use a phone book and roll down a window manually. You probably drove a stick shift. As a kid, you played outside all day until dinner. You lived in a time when you could walk your loved ones all the way to the gate in an airport. The guy who sang your favorite song on the radio wasn’t also a model. You know what “Where’s the beef?” means and remember when everyone ate Hamburger Helper. You watched Jaws at the drive-in. We have seen a lot. We survived Aqua Net. We were the last generation of children to ride in a car without seat belts! And there’s nothing shameful in saying that.

The low point occurred in July, during Romney’s junior week abroad, in which the press became increasingly frustrated over Romney’s refusal to talk to them. It came to a head in Warsaw during a visit by Romney to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there. As the former governor walked to his car, reporters shouted questions at him about his earlier mishaps. “Kiss my ass,” admonished Romney’s traveling press aide, Rick Gorka. “Show some respect. This is a holy site for the Polish people.” Channeling Fonzie, Gorka also instructed Jonathan Martin of Politico to “shove it.” Some in the political echo-system treated this as a major international incident, a skirmish between weary but still potent superpowers—the press, the Romney campaign—that conjured Cold War–like tensions. After Gorka’s unsacred words raced around the world, the jackals rechristened the Polish holy site “Gorka Park.” Ryan, on the other

Eleanor didn't know the first thing about kissing. Of course, she'd watched a million kisses on TV (thank you, Fonzie), but TV never showed you the mechanics of it. If Eleanor tired to kiss Park it would be like a realise version of some little girl making her Barbie kiss Ken. Just smashing their faces together.

I’m mildly lactose intolerant, so a milkshake isn’t a great idea. Although I did once have a really intense sex dream about sharing a milkshake with Chachi after my mom made me binge watch Happy Days with her. So consequently, milkshakes have the potential to give me both diarrhea and orgasms. Which is the worst combination imaginable.” Shit. Maybe he didn’t hear anything I said just now. After staring at me for about infinity seconds, he finally deadpans, “Well, I’m more of a Fonzie, so it doesn’t sound like you could handle it.

Under such a propaganda barrage, the Arbenz government fled the country before many real bullets could fly. Phillips later termed the technique, which he would use again, “the big lie.

Congressional public hearings are not for the public but for Congress. They are designed to provide the Committee members with as much exposure as possible, and give the public the impression that its Congressmen are serious about what they’re doing and that they have not been squandering the taxpayer’s money. Hearings are primarily designed, in other words, to be politically rewarding.

It has been suggested that Nixon’s antidrug campaign was, in actuality, a bid to establish his own intelligence network. It has also been suggested that it was exactly that bid which brought the sucker setup that was Watergate and Nixon’s political assassination.

The notion that somehow people outside of Washington can come into Washington and do great and noble things in Washington without understanding the place, is just nonsense.

I will always remember what she said to me when I told her the Committee had changed its mind about permitting her to tell her story publicly, to the American people. Her words echo in my mind, a soft shroud covering the years of my investigative sojourn through the labyrinth of the Kennedy assassination: “We lost,” she said. “We all lost.

So, again, our Government slapped the American people in the face. We have been slapped in the face over and over again and we still deny it is happening to us. Why?

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to KNOW the truth—as opposed to only BELIEVE the truth—is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade

Today most Americans BELIEVE there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but they don’t KNOW it. They don’t want to KNOW it—and our Government doesn’t want to KNOW it and our elected representatives don’t want to KNOW it because KNOWING it would mean having to do something about it. That’s an awesome thought.

But perhaps we all might find it easier to come to KNOW it, and to face that awesome thought, if we constantly reminded ourselves that on November 22nd, 1963, a man’s life ended in Dallas. A man’s life ended.

It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.

As the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Cennedy descends on us,” she said, “I am much concerned that we are on the threshold of a failure from which there will be no forgiveness. “We must win this struggle for truth . . . and do so quickly, lest the assas—ination of President Kennedy flounder on some remote shoulder of highway, in a century whose history is on the way to the printer.

Edward Korry reveals to the Church Senate Intelligence Committee his opposition to the CIA’s role in overthrowing Allende: “The CIA is amoral. . . . It could operate behind my back, not merely with the president of the United States, but with Chileans. . . . In that sense, the CIA could be an ‘invisible’ government.

Antonio Veciana reveals to Schweiker Subcommittee investigator Fonzi that a CIA masterspy named Maurice Bishop was his secret control officer, initiated the founding of Alpha 66, instigated two Castro assassination plots, and planned anti-Castro raids during the Cuban missile crisis in an attempt to embarrass President Kennedy and provoke Cuban or Russian retaliation that would spark a major U.S. reaction. Veciana also reveals he saw Bishop with Lee Harvey Oswald. After years of sworn denials by the Agency, it is the first evidence that the CIA was directly involved with Oswald.

The security team there was unprepared and Henry and Donny were trapped at one point, separated from their limousine by an unregulated mass of humanity. Crisis was averted only when Henry put on his Fonzie voice to address the crowd, "I want to tell you something now." He said, "You're going to part like the red sea." He snapped his fingers, the same way he did on the show to summon chicks. The crowd obediently opened up a pathway to the car. When all four of us met up in Philadelphia, Hansen and I got a sense of how intense Fonzie-mania had already become.

The fact is, we know an effective democracy demands a populace ready, willing and able to get riled enough to pressure its elected officials into doing their duty in spite of themselves.

Sylvia Meagher, writing in a small magazine called Minority of One, had this to say about the Warren Commission: “There are no heroes in this piece, only men who collaborated actively or passively—willfully or self-deludedly—in dirty work that does violence to the elementary concept of justice and affronts normal intelligence

Our choice was denied.

So, especially in the beginning, he had the rough job of keeping his men busy in Washington. Accustomed to being on the street, they got itchy inside. But since only one or two had any background familiarity with the Kennedy case, Fenton suggested they spend their time reading the shelves of books that had been written on the subject, mostly by Warren Commission critics. It was, however, a case of the blind leading the blind. One of the more popular books circulating around the office was a large, softcover volume by Texans Gary Shaw and Larry Harris called Cover-Up. It had a lot of pictures in it.

Thus, before an objective evaluation of the facts concerning the assassination of President Kennedy ever got under way, it was decided that four of the six areas of investigation should concern themselves with Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Commission decided that the order of the hits and the miss was irrelevant and made no determination of the sequence.

how the FBI abused its power by harassing dissident political groups and conducting illegal investigations; how the CIA, Army Intelligence and the National Security Agency were involved in domestic snooping; and how the intelligence agencies had planned assassination attempts on foreign leaders.

You want to hear something ironic?” he said. “My last meeting with Bobby Kennedy was on November 22nd, 1963. He was running late for a luncheon appointment and had to hurry off. He said we’d finish up when he returned. He never returned. At lunch he got word of his brother’s death in Dallas.

It was obvious that he knew how to take over an operation because the first thing he did when he arrived was nothing. That, as they tell you in the military, is exactly what a new commander should do when he is assigned a unit: Do nothing but walk around, look around, listen carefully and ask questions.

It was obvious that he knew how to take over an operation because the first thing he did when he arrived was nothing. That, as they tell you in the military, is exactly what a new commander should do when he is assigned a unit: Do nothing but walk around, look around, listen carefully and ask questions. Then you’ll know how to move for control quickly and firmly.

Questioned by investigator Fonzi, he admitted there was conflicting evidence that “gave us a lot of concern.” Specter’s inability to resolve the contradictions led Fonzi to his initial surmise of a conspiracy.

he called for an unrestricted investigation and refused to play the Washington political game. Within six months, he was forced to resign. “But when I looked back at what happened,” he later said, “it suddenly became very clear that the problems began only after I ran up against the CIA.

And if the reasons for the collapse at the Bay of Pigs had not been covered up . . . the CIA might perhaps have been curbed, and the country could have been spared the intelligence scandals of the 1970s, the revelations of a government agency routinely, daily, committing unconstitutional acts against its own citizens in its own country.

What the Bay of Pigs plan provided was the historic opportunity for the CIA to begin domestic field operations on an unprecedented scale. For instance, the CIA’s presence in Miami grew to overwhelming dimensions. The Agency’s officers, contract agents, informants and contacts reached into almost every area of the community.

One factor that led the Central Intelligence Agency to believe it could topple Castro was its success in Guatemala in 1954. Using a force of only 150 exiles and a handful of World War II P-47 fighters flown by American contract pilots, the CIA brought down the legally elected government of Socialist President Jacobo Arbenz in less than a week, firing hardly a shot, and installed the Agency’s handpicked leader, Carlos Castillo Armas.

Citizens Committee to F Cuba,

Attached hereto is copy of House Resolution 222. Please familiarize yourself with this document.

Although I recognized that there was a point to this and, in fact, felt the staff was in dire need of organizational control, it bothered me.

President Kennedy set up, under the guidance of his brother Robert, a multiagency coordinating panel called Special Group Augmented (SGA) to supervise a massive covert program to overthrow Castro’s government.

With the CIA providing financing and lessons in sabotage, explosives, weapons, survival, ambushes, communications and logistics, the missions to Cuba began escalating in both frequency and scale.

It needed the Agency to make special arrangements with U.S. Customs, Immigration and the Coast Guard because the missions were technically illegal under the Neutrality Act.

Whether the exile leaders acknowledged it or not, the Agency was pulling all the strings.

In giving the CIA new life, immense funding, and incredible power and influence to conduct effective large-scale secret operations, Kennedy had created a force over which he could not maintain control.

clandestine radio station in Mexico—the Voice of Liberation—and, while pretending to be broadcasting from within Guatemala, orchestrate a crescendo of false reports about legions of rebels which didn’t exist and major battles which never took place.

It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of Mexico City in the “Spy versus Spy” games going on at that time. It was the only place in the Western Hemisphere where every Communist country and every democratic country had an embassy, and it was a hotbed of intrigue. The Americans alone had fully staffed stations for the FBI, Army Intelligence and the CIA. To be the Chief of Covert Action in Mexico City was a prestigious job indeed.

If Oswald was observed going into the Cuban and Soviet embassies, as the CIA said he was, where were the Agency’s surveillance photos?

If Oswald was heard talking with a Soviet intelligence officer, as the CIA said he was, where were the Agency’s tape recordings of the conversation? Why did the CIA send a photograph to the Warren Commission of a man it said was Oswald when it was obviously not Oswald? Those were just some of the questions that fell directly into David Phillips’s area of responsibility. He had to know the answers. And if he didn’t, why didn’t he?

(I came to suspect that Phillips may, indeed, have been one of the very best covert agents the CIA ever had. His former wife once told a friend, “He lies in his sleep.”)

the real David Phillips was closely associated with top figures in the military-industrial complex, as well as with the most hawkish of the nation’s right-wing power brokers.

Luisa Calderon Carralero, a Cuban employee of the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, and believed to be a member of the Cuban Directorate General of Intelligence (DGI), discussed news of the assassination with an acquaintance. Initially, when asked if she had heard the latest news, Calderon replied, in what appeared to be a joking manner, “Yes, of course, I knew almost before Kennedy.

It would later become one of the first pieces of “evidence” to plant the seed of suspicion of a foreign conspiracy in President Johnson’s mind,

You represent the United States Congress,” he said. “But what the hell is that to the CIA?” “But what the hell is that to the CIA?

You represent the United States Congress,” he said. “But what the hell is that to the CIA?” “But what the hell is that to the CIA?” It was hard to believe that someone from the inside was being so brutally candid. What the hell are the lawfully elected representatives of the people in a democracy?

CIA personnel testified to the Committee that a review of Agency files would not always indicate whether an individual was affiliated with the Agency in any capacity. Nor was there always an independent means of verifying that all materials requested from the Agency had, in fact, been provided.

Asked whether the CIA knew of any ties Oswald had with either the KGB or the CIA, Helms paused and with a laugh said, ‘I don’t remember.’ Pressed on the point, he told a reporter, ‘Your questions are almost as dumb as the Committee’s.

it crossed my mind that, sitting in that office what we were doing was planning to deceive them. Those people out there thought we were investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. We were planning to get out a report.

Blakey spoke up. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve laid this all out to you from the beginning. I said we would spend the first months looking at the entire spectrum of the case and defining our goals. Well, we reached the point where we must start moving on the report. Our main priority is the report.

you don’t have to worry about me covering my ass because I know how a report should be written. I know how to make a report look good. But I want more than that. I also want the report to be good. I just don’t see a conflict in getting the investigation now boiled down to certain basic issues in attempting to solve the case.

What are you doing to me?” he demanded. “Those are professional people out there! This is damn embarrassing to me.

while everyone else is busy with the public hearings and getting the report written, we’ll be able to continue the investigation and cover it in any way we want. We got a promise on that.

the meeting did end with an extemporaneous chorus of a country song popular at the time: “Take This Job and Shove It.

our “full and complete” investigation would now have to be done in five months.

we fell into a trap that Blakey had set. Other teams also wound up in the same trap. It sprung from our attempt to structure a question that would be vital, answerable within the time and resources allowed and, at the same time, broad enough to permit the widest scope of investigation. We didn’t realize that those prerequisites combined to produce results that might look good but were actually superficial.

at the time, most of us basically felt he was doing the job as he legitimately thought it should be done. Certainly we had no reason to suspect otherwise.

cozy with the CIA, making agreements with the Agency severely restricting the staff’s use of intelligence information. And they were accusing him of Machiavellian scheming in inviting key critics in as consultants and then forcing them to sign nondisclosure agreements in an attempt, they said, to preempt future criticism.

Blakey had once filed an affidavit in support of a libel suit brought against Penthouse magazine by an alleged racket-connected Nevada resort owner named Moe Dalitz.

from Bob Blakey. There was a very nervous edge to his voice. “Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me everything you know about how we came in contact with the Ortiz manuscript.

as he had been and, strategically, the U.S. had to keep a handle on the situation to prevent other foreign interests from exploring the vast offshore oil potential of the island.

I also didn’t tell him that, just for the hell of it, Al and I had checked the telephone calls the witness had made immediately after he received the subpoena to testify before the Committee. He had made a lot of calls but the one that stuck out was the one to McLean, Virginia.

The investigative plan itself only called for touching all the bases—the Committee version of covering its ass—so the report could be written simply on the basis of the effort made. It generated an underlying philosophy: Why take the time to go all the way down the road when you already know what it looks like from here? Or can guess what it looks like and maybe come pretty close. Whatever, this isn’t the real world, reality is irrelevant.

Cliff said that Blakey just discovered that there was some kind of miscalculation in the way they were keeping the financial records and that the Committee is running way the hell over budget.

The general attitude is, why should I do anything if I’m going to be fired? Everybody is feeling just terrific.

individuals would be let go in consultation with a panel of experts who had established the proper scientific postulations for the decision: “All Leos, Cancers, Pisces and Tau—ruses are hereby dismissed.

Of the 25 staffers given their walking papers, the majority were investigators. In June, just before the cut, the Committee employed 118 persons; in the end, only 83 staffers remained. Of those, only four were Kennedy assassination investigators.

They kept promising me that we would be able to swing the way we wanted after we finished the work plan at the end of June. That’s why I kept telling everybody

he was not invited to join Blakey, a select few staffers and a couple of the Committee members on a trip to Cuba to interview Castro. When Al was hired by the Committee, he was told by then-Deputy Counsel Bob Tanenbaum that his early acquaintance with Castro as his New York bodyguard would be utilized by the Committee to establish a rapport. And if Castro cooperated, he could be a valuable new source of information.

Blakey deliberately kept Al Gonzales off the Cuba trip, saying he specifically didn’t want to bring anyone who knew Castro; he wanted the Committee’s record to reflect that it was totally objective in its approach to the Cuban leader. Al thought that was asinine. He was convinced that the brief friendship he had developed with Castro in New York might open doors of trust that would be valuable. As it turned out, Castro was cooperative with the Committee, but Eddie Lopez, who did go on the trip, believes that Castro might have been more forthcoming, especially in providing access to Cuban intelligence documents.

Cornwell claimed he then reviewed the books himself and found that Blakey was right, something had just gone wrong in keeping track of the budget.

Bob Blakey agreed to the idea of giving each of the investigators being fired a special award for meritorious service.

the Chairman of the Committee would present to each investigator a large, very lovely wooden plaque with a beautifully engraved brass plate. The investigator’s name was elegantly etched in and, below it, was the notation that he had provided “outstanding service” in the investigation.

an early indication of how very astute he was about the ways of Washington. Naively, I had always assumed that Congressional public hearings were for the public. So I had thought that the Assassinations Committee’s public hearings would be our opportunity to present to the American people the first objective overview of the Kennedy assassination.

if the hearings had a political purpose, it would be to educate and rouse the public to demand that its government produce a firm and final conclusion

But Washington teaches its own civics lessons and I learned that Congressional public hearings are not for the public but for Congress. They are designed to provide the Committee members with as much exposure as possible, and give the public the impression that its Congressmen are serious about what they’re doing and that they have not been squandering the taxpayer’s money. Hearings are primarily designed, in other words, to be politically rewarding.

My God, this is incredible,” she said, “after all the hell I’ve been putting myself through.” She paused, unable to express the depth of her reaction. “I feel a tremendous anger,” she finally said softly. “Well, this is the end for me. I don’t want to have anything more to do with any more investigations or anything that has to do with the Government at all.

a deliberate attempt to set up the American public for what was coming in the final report. The results of the acoustic tests—which found that more than three shots were fired, thus dictating the conclusion that there was a conspiracy

Blakey seems to have made the link well before the acoustic results dictated the need for a conspiracy theory.

interesting that Blakey was assuming that the CIA would be sensitive to evidence indicating it had been involved in pulling strings for Veciana.

Blakey’s administrative flunky, Charlie Mathews, threw his arms in the air and shouted, “He didn’t testify to what we paid him to testify to!

his quote of Trafficante—“he is going to be hit”—has since worked its way into every Kennedy assassination book with a “Mob-did-it” theme, including Blakey’s.

The operative word was “definite.” There was a huge amount of circumstantial evidence which I felt proved beyond a reasonable doubt that David Atlee Phillips was Maurice Bishop.

How could the Committee reach such a conclusion without calling for a deeper and more forceful investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency?

Second, Veciana would not supply proof of the $253,000 payment from Bishop, claiming fear of the Internal Revenue Service.

The Committee had to conclude that both Veciana and Phillips were liars. Any other conclusion would have opened doors that the Committee did not want to open; would have questioned the validity of the Committee’s entire relationship with the CIA; would have raised ominous doubts about the worth of the Agency’s promise to cooperate with the Committee; would have made suspect the Agency’s veracity in responding to questions, in making documents available and in providing access to all its files; and would have challenged the Agency’s claim of having had no association with Lee Harvey Oswald and no knowledge of the circumstances of Kennedy’s assassination.

Yet the Committee’s decision to impeach both Veciana’s and Phillips’s testimony also impeaches its own conclusions in a key area of evidence. And that, concurrently, undermines its entire final report. And the last investigation.

To sum up. This report has serious shortcomings. It pulls its punches. It insinuates much about the Mob and JFK’s death which it then says it doesn’t really mean. It is alternately confused and dogmatic on the subject of Oswald’s motive. It tells us it could not see all the way into the heart of CIA or FBI darkness, yet assures us that we are secure.

I kept thinking of what Vincent Salandria had told me more than three years before: “They’ll keep you very, very busy and eventually they’ll wear you down.