Quote: "There are only 90,000 people out there...."

[Jonathan Lighter]

Among the Henry Kissinger quotes in YBQ, one does *not* find the following,
which is, as they say, "all over the Internet."

As best I can tell, it appeared for the first time in former Interior
Secretary Wally Hickel's "Who Owns America?" (Prentice-Hall, 1971), but GB
won't cough up the page.

Kissinger seems to have been discussing, in 1969, Marshall Islanders who
had been exposed to radiation from U.S. nuclear tests in the 1950s, but not
having seen the context I can't swear to it.

"There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?"

According to Jack Anderson's column of Oct. 22, 1971, "Kissinger tells us
he can't remember making the statement that Hickel attributes to him. It is
contrary, he says, to his actual views."

Anderson that the statement was nonetheless typical of both Democratic and
Republican attitudes toward Micronesia.

JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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