"I didn't realize it at the time, but it became apparent to me later, that I had just experienced the most incredible lesson in leadership that I would ever experience: a Navy captain, who was in charge of the entire day-to-day operations of the Naval Academy, took the time to reach down deep into that organization and drag an individual up who was having trouble and try to instill in that individual a little bit of self-discipline and self-confidence. He knew my uncle, obviously, but I felt he would have done this for anyone in my predicament regardless of who his relatives were."

“I had a role in developing the doctrine From the Sea, which was later modified to Forward From the Sea. But the way we looked at the situation was that the world we live in is a dangerous place. There's a violent peace out there, there are going to be problems over the horizon, and certainly that proved to be true.”

“There were a lot of people who were willing to write a letter for me. Not because I was academically inclined, but because I worked hard.”

“The Naval Academy is a very prestigious place, and I choose to try it. I got there and darn near didn't pass, just about flunked out the first year, but a commandant by the name of Bush Bringle managed to call me in one day and taught me more about leadership in about 15 minutes than I have learned in the rest of my life. And because of Bush Bringle I regained some faith and confidence in myself, learning I had a little bit more in me than I thought, and I went back to work and finished.”

“I remember a picture I saw in a paper not long before the wall came down. There was a man standing holding a very young daughter, my guess was that she was only about one or two years old. She had on a rather plain dress, he had on a coat and a tie and he was carrying probably a cardboard suitcase. And my guess is that everything he owned in the world was in that suitcase. And he was weeping. He wasn't weeping because he left his car and the rest of his family back on the other side of that Iron Curtain; he was weeping because he was free. He was weeping because now he had opportunity, he had the chance to choose for the first time in his life, and his daughter whom he was holding in his hands had a future, whereas before she would not have had one. That struck me as a very, very vivid picture of what this all meant.”

“We went out on a very cloudy day, in an area we probably should not have been operating in, and the two of us did a maneuver that was not authorized, and I made it and he didn't. … We pulled up over some overcast to dive bomb the target. I had practice with this maneuver in the Med, but Bill was less familiar with it. I made it, but Bill just disappeared. I went back and looked for hims. I saw no race of any wreckage. I tried to tank and go back but was ordered to return to the ship.”