Leadership Quote by William Scranton

That little self-interruption - "I must say" - is doing heavy lifting. Scranton isn’t just reporting fear; he’s staging it as a controlled disclosure, the kind a politician offers when he wants to seem candid without seeming weak. The phrase “quite unnerved” lands like a careful compromise: emotional enough to read as honest, restrained enough to preserve authority. And the real tension is in the structure of the memory itself. “Walking in there” is plain, almost bureaucratic, but “the closer I got to it” turns the moment into a slow approach toward something ominous, unnamed, and therefore larger than whatever object or place he’s avoiding specifying.

That “it” is the quote’s most revealing choice. Politicians often invoke fear indirectly, not because they lack words, but because naming the thing can turn a dramatic moment into a debatable one. If you keep it vague, the listener supplies their own dread: a war room, a disaster site, a confrontation, a weapon, the machinery of government, the machinery of death. The syntax mirrors that psychological tightening - distance collapsing, composure thinning, the body reacting before the mind finishes its sentence.

Context matters with Scranton: a mid-century Republican known more for moderation than bombast. For that kind of figure, admitting to being “unnerved” isn’t melodrama; it’s credibility signaling. The subtext is: I was there, I felt the gravity, and I’m not one of those men who pretends history doesn’t shake you. The intent isn’t confession for its own sake; it’s to legitimize the stakes while keeping the speaker safely on the side of steadiness.