War & Peace Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

There is a peculiar chill in how Kellogg concedes the point and then steps right past it. “To be sure” is doing the dirtiest kind of work in political English: it grants the critique - yes, unconstitutional - and immediately reframes it as unremarkable, almost routine. The pivot is the real message. Legality becomes a technicality; history becomes an alibi.

Kellogg’s intent reads as containment. He isn’t trying to defend every action on the merits so much as to lower the temperature around them, to suggest that extraordinary measures after a war belong to the normal weather of politics. That move matters because it shifts the argument from “Is this lawful?” to “Is this unusual?” and once “unusual” is the standard, power can justify itself simply by pointing to precedent. The phrase “by such methods” is another tell: vague enough to cover coups, emergency decrees, coerced transfers of power - without naming any of them, and therefore without having to morally own them.

The subtext is a warning dressed up as reassurance: expect instability; don’t be shocked when constitutional boundaries blur. Coming from a U.S. politician of Kellogg’s era - steeped in post-World War I realignment, revolutions in Europe, and the shaky legitimacy of new states - it reflects a diplomatic sensibility that often prized “order” over process. It’s the language of the international realist before realism had a brand: rules are nice, but history is rough, and states survive by adapting to roughness.

What makes the line effective is its modesty. It doesn’t sound like a justification. It sounds like grown-up perspective. That’s precisely how it sneaks normalization into the room.