Senator Kenneth Wherry:
> "With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it > is just like Kansas City."
Cited in John Franklin Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 178.
Wherry was U.S. Senator (R) from Nebraska from 1943 to 1951. He made this remark while Mayor of Pawnee City and Chairman of the Republican Party of Nebraska.
Wherry's senatorial papers are archived at the Nebraska State Historical Society (http://www.nebraskahistory.org/lib-arch/research/manuscripts/politics/wherry.htm, accessed 20120102), where the collection description includes this comment: "Little of the correspondence reflects Wherry's political philosophy or his relations with other members of the Congress or of the government. Senator Wherry conducted much of his personal political business via the telephone and no record survives."
I suspect it's hard for people raised on the Internet to envision how much of what was said and done in the past is not recorded.