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" It must have been the fall of 1952 when my father returned to London sporting a neck tie emblazoned with the words 'I Like Ike.' "
Nigel Hamilton
Words
London
Tie
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" That's the miracle of Amazon! It's like Internet dating. In the early days, you could get slimed as an author on Amazon by someone bearing a grudge, or jealous, or whatever. And because there were so few reviews posted, this stank. "
Nigel Hamilton
Internet
Early
You
" Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign. "
Nigel Hamilton
Great
Down
World
" Since his inauguration in 2009, President Obama has upheld FDR's vision of America as a nation that keeps its word - a nation still committed to uphold the 'four freedoms' that President Roosevelt set down in the great Atlantic Charter of August 1941. "
Nigel Hamilton
America
Vision
Nation
" Regularly, customers asked for a book on Greenwich, and there was none. After all, Elizabeth I was born there. The Observatory is known all over the world; the Royal Naval College is there. So I decided to do it. "
Nigel Hamilton
World
Born
Royal
" Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia. "
Nigel Hamilton
Academia
Orphan
Biography
" Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy. "
Nigel Hamilton
Determination
I Am
Time
" I'm not promising to write 'JFK 2' - but one day, I might! "
Nigel Hamilton
Promising
Day
Might
" At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right. "
Nigel Hamilton
World
American
Think
" For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction. "
Nigel Hamilton
Story
Facts
History
" For all the failures of naval, air and army defense, the men who died at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines would not die in vain. "
Nigel Hamilton
Philippines
Air
Army
" The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf. "
Nigel Hamilton
War
Story
History
" Republican isolationists had certainly tied the hands of every U.S. president, year after year - berating Franklin Roosevelt in particular and his attempts to ready the nation for inevitable attack. "
Nigel Hamilton
Year
Hands
Nation
" Both JFK and George W. Bush were the sons of wealthy U.S. ambassadors and thus privileged to meet distinguished figures, to travel, and to see the world and think about its problems if they chose. "
Nigel Hamilton
Travel
Meet
Problems
" After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London. "
Nigel Hamilton
Taught
University
London
" In my case, I belong to a group of aspiring and practicing biographers in Boston. We meet once a month for a coupla hours. It's become my lifeline - forgive the pun. "
Nigel Hamilton
Group
Boston
Forgive
" Our only president who has died as U.S. commander in chief in war is Franklin Delano Roosevelt - who died of a cerebral hemorrhage or massive stroke on April 12, 1945, only three weeks before the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces he had laid down as implacable Allied policy two years before. "
Nigel Hamilton
Two
Policy
Surrender
" I am all for charity in judging the men who have occupied the Oval Office over the past seventy years, given the huge responsibilities the president carries across the world. "
Nigel Hamilton
I Am
Charity
Judging
" In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms. "
Nigel Hamilton
Rose
Parents
Myself
" I once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful. "
Nigel Hamilton
Doctor
Daily
Famous
" We should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt today as the greatest commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in our history, bar none - including President Lincoln. "
Nigel Hamilton
History
Today
Bar
" In daring to re-tell the stories of the last twelve American presidents, both public and private, I knew I would incur some outrage with 'American Caesars.' "
Nigel Hamilton
Some
American
Daring
" President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages. "
Nigel Hamilton
Iran
He
President
" I belong to the Boston Biographers Group - and get my monthly 'fix' from them. Where else can I sit down for two hours with people who understand the challenge I face, daily, as a life-chronicler? "
Nigel Hamilton
Group
Daily
Face
" The moral was, in time of anarchy, tough leadership is the only solution - even though the collateral damage may be heartbreaking. Mrs. Thatcher's strident, take-no prisoners approach was in some ways repugnant, but it was surely necessary. "
Nigel Hamilton
Time
Moral
Solution
" To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and 'spin' news to the president's advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it. "
Nigel Hamilton
Massage
Media
News
" As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair. "
Nigel Hamilton
Great
Student
Most
" Some of the History Channel's documentaries involve docudrama segments and are highly speculative - but there seems, on the part of the producers, to be a real determination to get at the history behind our past - not the sex, which is left to drama shows and entertainment channels. "
Nigel Hamilton
Sex
Determination
History
" I was an 18-year-old kid, and I was in the heart of things in Washington. My interest in American politics and, particularly, the Kennedys, began then. "
Nigel Hamilton
Politics
American
Heart
" I'm fascinated by the concept of what I call 'clusters of creativity': the Brontes, the Waughs, families with several geniuses. I'm one of four; competition among siblings has to be a factor. "
Nigel Hamilton
Competition
Four
Creativity
" I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice. "
Nigel Hamilton
Fabric
Become
Social