"Our staff not only received the reports from these agencies, they examined them. They questioned them"
About this Quote
That clipped insistence on process is doing political combat work. John Sherman Cooper isn’t merely asserting that information existed; he’s drawing a bright line between passive governance and accountable oversight. “Not only received” establishes the low bar he’s accusing others of settling for: agencies send paper, officials file it, everyone claims plausible deniability later. Cooper’s corrective is in the verbs. “Examined” signals competence, the unglamorous labor of reading and weighing evidence. “Questioned” escalates to skepticism, implying an adversarial posture toward the national-security apparatus rather than reflexive deference to it.
The repetition also matters. Two short sentences, each ending with “them,” creates a drumbeat of responsibility aimed at an audience that has learned to distrust closed-door assurances. Cooper, a Senate institutionalist in the mid-century mold, is speaking from a moment when “the agencies” had become both indispensable and politically radioactive: the Cold War state was expanding, secrecy was normalizing, and Congress’s role as a check could look ceremonial. His phrasing pushes back against that drift by framing scrutiny as patriotism, not obstruction.
Subtext: if a disaster, misjudgment, or deception is on the table, blame cannot be outsourced to bureaucracy. Cooper is preempting the familiar Washington alibi - we were briefed, we didn’t know - and replacing it with a standard that implicitly indicts colleagues who confuse being informed with being in control. In eight words of action, he turns oversight from a procedural nicety into a moral posture.
The repetition also matters. Two short sentences, each ending with “them,” creates a drumbeat of responsibility aimed at an audience that has learned to distrust closed-door assurances. Cooper, a Senate institutionalist in the mid-century mold, is speaking from a moment when “the agencies” had become both indispensable and politically radioactive: the Cold War state was expanding, secrecy was normalizing, and Congress’s role as a check could look ceremonial. His phrasing pushes back against that drift by framing scrutiny as patriotism, not obstruction.
Subtext: if a disaster, misjudgment, or deception is on the table, blame cannot be outsourced to bureaucracy. Cooper is preempting the familiar Washington alibi - we were briefed, we didn’t know - and replacing it with a standard that implicitly indicts colleagues who confuse being informed with being in control. In eight words of action, he turns oversight from a procedural nicety into a moral posture.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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