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

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

The HathiTrust search engine says there is a match on page 208 for the
following "There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn"
within his edition:

Year: 1971
Title: Who owns America?
Author: Walter J. Hickel.
Publisher: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall
Physical Description: xii, 328 p. 22 cm.
Original Classification Number: E855 .H63

I have not seen the above book. A book reviewer in the Los Angeles
Times gave the following context for the quotation attributed to
Kissinger.

Newspaper: Los Angeles Times
Article date: September 16, 1971
Article title: Book by Hickel Explains How Nixon Fired Him: Tells
Differences Over SST and Rebuffs When He Criticized Invasion of
Cambodia
Article page: A4
Article author: Don Oberdorfer
Newspaper location: Los Angeles, California

[Begin excerpt ; check for OCR errors]
Presidential Asst. Henry A. Kissinger objected to Hickel's demand for
"full compensation" with "full consultation" for any land taken by the
government from the Pacific islands people of Micronesia, where the
United States is in charge under a United Nations trusteeship. Hickel
quotes Kissinger as saying at a State Department meeting, "There are
only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?"
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Quote: "There are only 90,000 people out there...."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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