Mcnamara Quotes

I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane.

He loses his power when we know his face.

That’s what we do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep. I’ll look out for you.

I came here because it's pine-dark and the ocean is wild. The kind of quiet-noise you need when there's too much going on in your head. Like the water and the woods are doing all the feeling, and I can hang out, quiet as a headstone, in a between place. A blank I can bear.

So this is life. Love. We spend all this time reaching for each other and mostly we end up hurting each other until it's over.

One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk. Like they did for Edward Wayne Edwards, twenty-nine years after he killed Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, in Sullivan, Wisconsin. Like they did for Kenneth Lee Hicks, thirty years after he killed Lori Billingsley, in Aloha, Oregon. The doorbell rings. No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell. This is how it ends for you. “You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark,” you threatened a victim once. Open the door. Show us your face. Walk into the light.

I love my husband. I hate men.

I wish I believed him. He's looking at me like he can see where I begin.

He's the fake shark in Jaws, barely seen so doubly feared.

I’m envious, for example, of people obsessed with the Civil War, which brims with details but is contained. In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write.

It's too much to be trusted with someone else's heart. I don't think it ever ends well.

There’s something very comforting about watching a Hugh Grant movie. You know no one’s head will be blown off in the first three minutes, no one will be tortured, and the worst thing that might happen is seeing a lanky Welshman eating mayonnaise in his underpants

My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life.

What is the lasting damage when you believe the warm spot you were just sleeping in will be your grave?

One Persons Kink is another's Dream Come True

I'm starting to feel a little like I might fly away. Like everyone else has solid lives, and I'm just a particle, passing through.

Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.

The real gift is time. Now. Each other, this night, and the wide, wide moon-silvered sea.

Why are you so interested in crime?” people ask me, and I always go back to that moment in the alley, the shards of a dead girl’s Walkman in my hands. I need to see his face. He loses his power when we know his face.

She was both proud of the fact that she had raised a strong-minded daughter and resentful of my sharp opinions.

The thing about grief is that you have to let yourself feel it. Even the worst parts. Especially the worst parts. Pass through it. Let it pass through you. It´s your strenght-your humanity-your openness to your feelings. Even when you think you might not come through.

You´re not complication. You´re the only air I can stand to breathe.

By learning to truly love someone else, you learn to love the world. And yourself, which may be even harder.

He pointed a knife at her and issued a chilling warning: “Make one move and you’ll be silent forever and I’ll be gone in the dark.

I lamented to one of them that I felt I was grasping at straws. “My advice? Grasp a straw,” he said. “Work it to dust.

Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask.

And that's just it. This is how it is. Always. To pay attention to things. People. It's too easy to fail other people. And the good-byes. You never have the time you think. It brings tears to my eyes. I blink them away.

It was a heady feeling, the idea that one could conjure a man from a stain on a calico patchwork quilt from 1978, that one could reverse the flow of power. If you commit murder and then vanish, what you leave behind isn’t just pain but absence, a supreme blankness that triumphs over everything else. The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. But his power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets. We watch as he’s led, shackled and sweaty, into a brightly lit courtroom as someone seated several feet higher peers down unsmiling, raps a gavel, and speaks, at long last, every syllable of his birth name.

Time sands the edges of the injuries, but they never lose their hold.

Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They have fists for hands and can’t plan beyond their sightlines. They’re caught easily. They talk too much. They return to the scene of the crime, as conspicuous as tin cans on a bumper. But every so often a blue moon surfaces. A snow leopard slinks by.

Wren, come back, please come back. Don't disappear again. I want you here. Stay here.

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil

I'm lost again, inside myself. Somewhere that's not nowhere. Disoriented. I've let everything go.

Oh God, my stomach must have won a medal- it's doing a lap of honour now.

I don’t care if I’m the one who captures him. I just want bracelets on his wrists and a cell door slamming behind him.

I saw now that the legends were drenched in blood, the blood of women.

Rationality will not save us.

Something falls inside me. Sinks down deep. I look at my lap. A terrible leaden loneliness. Try to breathe under the weight of it.

We were not in thrall to destiny or fate, but merely the weight of our own choices. When we turned toward each other like flowers facing the sun, we were not fulfilling some prophecy or old story. We were writing our own.

Too many people are expecting me to do things. I don't want to meet anyone's expectations. Be expected. I just want to-be. No explanations necessary. Me. Quiet. Anything more is too risky.

We see what we want to believe.

Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning

Things are changing. Life is like that.

If you slip far enough out of your life, time picks up. Passes in waves instead of notches. One month rolling by, then another.

There are points in time when you grow older than your parents. Or come up on them at least. I look at my father, who's shrinking before my eyes, and realize no one will save me. No one can save me.

You see that honky McNamara on television? He says, "Yes, we are going to draft thirty percent of the Negroes in the Army. This is where they can have equal opportunity. Yeah. Yes… it's true that they are only ten percent of the population, but this is a better chance for them." When that honky talk about drafting thirty percent black people, he's talking about black urban removal—nothing else.

How did I not see it? Pain is everywhere. I'm just another sorry story. All these people wearing smiles, dragging themselves around--do they all know already? Do they realize how fast the world can change?

We swim or sink against our deficits in life,

There's a scream permanently lodged in my throat now.

You're the only air I can stand to breathe.

Larkin gets it, got it, the lies we live just to tread through time.

It was like comparing the cold unyielding beauty of the stars to the bloom of a flower, something impermanent and imperfect but all the more lovely for it.

I always find it something of a relief to be in the presence of someone who knows the shorthand

I want him captured; I don’t care who he is. Looking at such a man’s face is anticlimactic; attaching a name, even more so. We know what he did; any information beyond that will inevitably feel pedestrian, pale, somehow cliché: “My mother was cruel. I hate women. I never had a family. . . .” And so on. I want to know more about true, complete people, not dirty scraps of humans.

It really confirmed for me that inside everyone lurks a Sherlock Holmes that believes that given the right amount of clues they could solve a mystery. If the challenge here, or perceived weakness, is that the unsolved aspect will leave readers unfulfilled, why not turn that on its head and use it as a strength?

The victims recede from view. Their rhythm is off, their confidence drained. They’re laden with phobias and made tentative by memory. Divorce and drugs beset them. Statutes of limitations expire. Evidence kits are tossed for lack of room. What happened to them is buried, bright and unmoving, a coin at the bottom of a pool. They do their best to carry on.

I’ve now come to realize that getting excited about a suspect is a lot like that first surge of stupid love in a relationship, in which, despite vague alarm bells, you plow forward convinced that he is the One.

In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write.

You can't make anything if you're lost to yourself. You'll want to again, it's who you are. Wren, grieving is hard. Complex. Takes its own time.

Sometimes we think we know what we want, but we don't actually know what we need until we find it.

Every obsession needs a room of its own.

If Psyche dies, I will never be finished mourning her. I may not deserve her, but this world does.

He later underscored how tricky suspect assessment is by pointing out that just based on geographic history and physical description a good EAR-ONS suspect would be Tom Hanks. (Who, it should be emphasized, can be eliminated by the shooting schedule of Bosom Buddies alone).

All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.

Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.

But then you hear a scream and you decide it’s some teenagers playing around. A young man jumping a fence is taking a shortcut. The gunshot at three a.m. is a firecracker or a car backfiring. You sit up in bed for a startled moment. Awaiting you is the cold, hard floor and a conversation that may lead nowhere; you collapse onto your warm pillow, and turn back to sleep. Sirens wake you later.

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. “Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.

Inside everyone lurks a Sherlock Holmes that believes given the right amount of clues they could solve a mystery.

Irvine’s motto, goes the joke, is “sixteen zip codes, six floor plans.” Or “Irvine: we have sixty-two words for beige.

A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing ability without a pencil is no particular advantage.

Looking back now, it feels like I was born into a party that had started to wind down.

We are responsible for what we create.

It shouldn't be so hard to live without messing up other people.

I stake the future on the few humble and hearty lovers who seek God passionately in the marvelous, messy world of redeemed and related realities that lie in front of our noses.

There's something beyond one's self

It's dark out. The sky is crazy, more stars than dark. So many more than I can ever remember seeing.

I'm not fit to be in public.

I hate the world. All the fragile people in it. Every one of us.

I don't trust anything I think I know now. I guess that's the price of sailing so far away.

Up near the top, the view pierces me so totally I have one of those flash thoughts about tossing myself into the ocean. Surrender to the enormous wildness, the water's churning gray force, the solid rocks. It doesn't seem so scary. The idea. It seems like it could bring a lot of quiet. Endless quiet.

remember talking with my sister Maureen once about the severe short haircuts we all had as children. “Doesn’t it seem like Mom was trying to desexualize us?” I asked. Maureen, the mother of three, suppressed a laugh mixed with irritation. “Wait until you have kids, Michelle,” she said. “Short haircuts aren’t desexualizing. They’re easy.

What I wanted wasn't hidden, it was just messy. Uncertain. In my heart it could have been anything less prescribed, something open, different. Something that got me out into the larger world, watching people, the secrets playing on their faces. Something true. I wanted to see something true. Collect as many stories as my heart could hold. My stupid heart.

All three are hip-deep in midlife, when the eyes go and the waistline spreads and the city on the hill that shone so brightly in youth turns out to be more like a semi-incorporated town in the middle of a garbage strike. An age when a person can feel not so much himself as an inexplicably inferior version of himself.

If the Chiefs had successfully pressed with the president their position that the United States needed to act forcefully to defeat the North, they might have forced a difficult choice between war and withdrawal from South Vietnam. Through their own actions as well as through the manipulation of Taylor and McNamara, the Chiefs missed their opportunity to influence the formulation of a strategic concept for Vietnam, and thereafter always found themselves in the difficult position of questioning a policy that the president had already approved. The intellectual foundation for deepening American involvement in Vietnam had been laid without the participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 5

It's like last May I stepped on the wrong stone and slipped into this rotten otherworld. A place where the stakes are higher than you ever knew they could be and people deal with these kinds of things. Accidents. Illness. Death. Loss. Weights I can scarcely carry.

US crime rates show a steady rise in violent crime throughout the 1960s and ’70s, peaking in 1980. Taxi Driver came out in February 1976; the bleak and violent film was hailed as an encapsulation of its time, to no one’s surprise. Many retired cops I talk to, from Sacramento but other places too, uniformly recall 1968 to 1980 as a particularly grim period.

According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted. Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians.

You excelled at the stealth sidle. But your heydey prowess has no value anymore. Your skill set has been phased out. The tables have been turned. Virtual windows are opening all around you. You, the master watcher, are an aging, lumbering target in their crosshairs. A ski mask won't help you now.

Most violent criminals are impulsive, disorganized, and easily caught. The vast majority of homicides are committed by people known to the victim and, despite game attempts to throw off the police, these offenders are usually identified and arrested. It’s a tiny minority of criminals, maybe 5 percent, who present the biggest challenge—the ones whose crimes reveal preplanning and unremorseful rage.

The Greeks have three words for love. The first is philia, the kind of love that involves liking and grows up between two people who enjoy each other’s company very much. The second is agape, the selfless love of parents for children or between those who are like family to one another. The third is eros, which explains itself—connection, spark, the desire of the body to seek fulfillment in another.

There's no air in here. There is something seriously wrong with me. I can't figure anything out. I'm too out of control. My heart does something when I'm near him. And it's messing everything up. He's too close. Familiar or something. I'm not getting tangled up in anything again. With anyone. Not like this.

The fundamental problem here is the continued over-identification with doing. By attempting to “do” The Leap, the practitioner is attempting the impossible (as doing and being point to two different realms). Thus far your training has been largely if not entirely immersed in the relative domain. With Being, your training is stepping beyond this domain into the transcendent. Fundamentally, there is nothing you can “do” to “be.

Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They have fists for hands and can't plan beyond their sightlines. They're caught easily. They talk too much. They return to the scene of the crime, as conspicuous as tin cans on a bumper. But every so often a blue moon surfaces. A snow leopard slinks by.

Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.

I hope that's a good thing,' I said, thinking he might say I reminded him of a film star- then we'd actually have something in common. I was hoping for Anne Hathaway or Julia Roberts, and not the obvious Vivien Leigh. Even Angelina Jolie would have done, though I'd never quite forgiven her for stealing Brad's heart. Talking of Brad, was Sean starting to resemble him too? No, he could never be a Brad, a Matthew McConaughey maybe at a push, but never a Brad Pitt.

There's always the question of what to call an unknown perpetrator in police reports. The choice is often "the suspect," occasionally "the offender," or sometimes simply "the man." Whoever wrote the Danville reports elected to use a term that was stark and unambiguous in its charge, its tone of reproach as if a finger were pointing from the very page. The term affected me the moment I read it. It became my private shorthand for the EAR, the simple term I returned to when I lay awake at three a.m. cycling through a hoarder's collection of murky half clues and indistinct facial features. I admired the plainness of its unblinking claim. The responsible.

The wisdom of the time traveler, I realized, can be deceiving. We return to the past armed with more information and cutting-edge innovations. But there are hazards in having so much wizardry at hand. The feast of data means there are more circumstances to bend and connect. You're tempted to build your villain with the abundance of pieces. It's understandable. We're pattern-seekers, all of us. We glimpse the rough outline of what we seek and we get snagged on it, sometimes remaining stuck when we could get free and move on.

The male victims were born in the forties and fifties, a generation for whom therapy was mostly an alien concept. In the police files, gender roles are rigid and unambiguous. Detectives ask the women where they shop and the men about the locking mechanisms on the doors and windows. They drape blankets over the women's shoulders and ferry them to the hospital. The men are asked what they saw, not what they felt. Many of the male victims had military experience. They had toolsheds. They were doers and protectors who'd been robbed of their ability to do and protect. Their rage is in the details: one husband chewed the bindings off his wife's feet.

The last time the "best and brightest" got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country has still not fully recovered. Yet Reich seems to believe that a new generation of Whiz Kids can do for the faltering American economy what Robert McNamara's generation failed to do for American diplomacy: to restore, through sheer brainpower, the world leadership briefly enjoyed by the United States after World War II and subsequently lost not, of course, through stupidity so much as through the very arrogance the "arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright used to call it to which the "best and brightest" are congenitally addicted. This arrogance should not be confused with the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are closely associated, has any place in the world view of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts. Even the concept of a republic of letters, which might be expected to appeal to elites with such a large stake in higher education, is almost entirely absent from their frame of reference.