Lord Acton
"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."[7]
Corruption guaranteed incompetence in office, high or low. Professional performance had no bearing on whether men like Chinh held division commands. They kept their positions by their facility at forming corruption alliances with those above them and at creating other corruption alliances with those below in order to channel money upward... Lines of authority that needed to function if the country was to be governed rationally and that were already weakened by the influence of family ties and religious and factional connections were undermined entirely by those networks within networks of graft.
Neil Sheehan
A Bright Shining Lie
John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
page 515
