Leadership Quote by John Sherman Cooper

Cooper is doing something politicians rarely do in public: admitting that the machinery of official truth is built to be ignored. The line lands because it pretends to be casual - a shrug about page counts - while quietly indicting the entire ritual of commissions, reports, and “the record.” When he asks, “Who has read 26 volumes,” it’s not really a question. It’s a permission slip for the public (and his colleagues) to disengage, and a warning about what that disengagement enables.

The subtext is institutional self-protection. A multi-volume report doesn’t just collect facts; it creates distance. Complexity becomes a kind of armor: the more exhaustive the documentation, the easier it is for power to say, “It’s all there,” while knowing almost no one will verify what “there” contains. Cooper’s pivot to the “summary” is the sharpest move. Even the supposedly digestible version “takes a long time,” meaning the public is effectively funneled into secondhand interpretations - headlines, talking points, partisan retellings.

As a politician, Cooper is also signaling a reality about democratic accountability: the bottleneck isn’t access, it’s attention. In an era of high-profile investigations and national security secrecy, his remark reads like an early diagnosis of the modern information problem - not censorship, but saturation. The result is a politics where legitimacy is manufactured through volume, and trust is asked for not because people are persuaded, but because they’re tired.