10 Quotes by Jack El-Hai

Unlike animals, who react to stimuli but cannot think of rational explanations for them, humans have the ability to change their behavior by understanding causes, circumstances, and solutions.

Psychiatry is the management of despair.

Far greater numbers of Americans experienced psychological trauma than in the previous war, and anyone who could relieve the troops’ tortures and, better still, send them back to duty, would be a hero to the military. Between Pearl Harbor and the end of the war, the US military was overwhelmed by 1.1 million disabling, psychiatric traumas. Fear and stress were most often responsible. Kelley, serving as an army psychiatrist, called the problem “combat neurosis” and “combat exhaustion.

The psychiatrist marveled at Rosenberg’s one-track mind, which could turn a conversation on any topic into a discourse on racial purity. “I was more than casually interested as a psychiatrist to find in Rosenberg an individual who had developed a system of thought differing greatly from known fact, who absolutely refused to amend his theories, and who, moreover, firmly believed in the magic of the words in which he had expressed them.

If some fanatical gang had taken it into their heads to lead a truck with high explosives and send it speeding through the wall to the jail itself, we should have all been blown skywards.” The facility was dangerously understaffed by Americans, and Andrus considered his security contingent unwilling castoffs and poor performers. He fumed over the security mess he and the top Nazis were entering, and he thought they had arrived at Nuremberg too early.

Naturally, I am the leader, so it is my problem to see that each of us contributes his share’.

The horrors of this decision are well known,” Kelley wrote, “and it is appalling to realize that an entire war was precipitated because of the severe hysterical stomach cramps and obsessive-compulsive fears of a psychoneurotic who happened to be in a position of command.

He pegged criminals as impulsive, immature, deprived of affection, and lacking in restraint, all qualities that later studies bore out.

In some ways he was a pioneer... but in others he did a disservice and slowed the pace of development by being too much of a cowboy and acting too exuberantly without scientific foundation.