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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870–1965)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 233
AUTHOR: Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870–1965)
QUOTATION: Let us not be deceived—we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us.
ATTRIBUTION: BERNARD M. BARUCH, address at the unveiling of his portrait in the South Carolina legislature, Columbia, South Carolina, April 16, 1947.—Journal of the House of Representatives of the First Session of the 87th General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, p. 1085.

The phrase “cold war” was coined by Herbert Bayard Swope, who occasionally wrote speeches for Baruch, and was first used in this speech. It was popularized by, and sometimes mistakenly attributed to, columnist Walter Lippmann, whose 1947 book was titled The Cold War.

Baruch used the phrase again on October 24, 1947—“Although the shooting war is over, we are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer”—in testimony before the Senate’s Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, part 42, p. 25740 (1948). William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary, pp. 127–29 (1978), gives an extensive account of the coinage and use of this term, though the date for Baruch’s testimony is given there as 1948.
SUBJECTS: Cold war