Quote of the Day (Bernard Baruch, on the “Cold War”)

“Let us not be deceived - we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us.”—Financier and industrial Bernard Baruch, appearing before the Senate War Investigating Committee, October 24, 1948

(Headline writers quickly latched onto Baruch’s phrase “cold war,” even more than they had two years earlier when he told the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.” Actually, both coinages were the handiwork of a talented phrasemaker in his own right: three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor Herbert Bayard Swope, a friend that Baruch turned to for ghostwriting duty. Like Winston Churchill’s observation two years before that an “Iron Curtain” had descended on Eastern Europe, this new phrase aptly summarized a frightening new state of affairs between the United States and the Soviet Union that would last for another 40 years.)