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" Political vitriol is a familiar enough characteristic of American history. "

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" During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson's group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt's sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson. "

" One doesn't simply write about Lyndon Johnson. You get the Johnson treatment from beyond the grave - arm around you, nose to nose. I should admit that he also reminds me of my father, quite an overbearing and narcissistic character. And in some ways, he reminds me of myself. Another workaholic. "

" At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It's always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office. "

" The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate. "

" American politics is theatre. There is a frightening emotionalism at national conventions. "

" During his presidency, Truman and the Republicans were locked in a series of furious assaults on each other that outraged him and made Truman an enduring foe of a party and its representatives, which he saw as on the wrong side of almost every domestic and foreign policy issue he considered important. "

" Presidents are not only the country's principal policy chief, shaping the nation's domestic and foreign agendas, but also the most visible example of our values. "

" The lifelong health problems of John F. Kennedy constitute one of the best-kept secrets of recent U.S. history - no surprise, because if the extent of those problems had been revealed while he was alive, his presidential ambitions would likely have been dashed. "

" McGeorge Bundy was a brilliant man who'd had a meteoric academic career and was the youngest man ever to be dean of the Harvard faculty. But he was also arrogant and looked upon all sorts of people and politicians as not to be taken all that seriously. "

" A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War was Johnson's vehicle for expanding the Southern economy and making it, as he hoped, one of the more prosperous regions of the country. "

" John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in the balance, and after months of exhaustive campaigning, he was too tired to stay awake any longer. "

" The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished. "

" The so-called second New Deal of 1935 - including the Works Progress Administration, Social Security and the Wagner Act legalizing union labor - represented an effort to meet the rising voices demanding a more aggressive government approach to the collapse of national prosperity. "

" Racial segregation in the South not only separated the races, but it separated the South from the rest of the country. "

" With television, you can make anyone look larger than life. "

" Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly. "

" If Roosevelt didn't have World War II, he never would have had a third term. "

" At the end of the day, Americans are not so keen on ideologues, people who have such fixed positions that they can't see any virtue in the other side's point of view. "

" Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy. "

" I think the most important thing that comes out of the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in early 1942 is a commitment on Roosevelt's part to fight Europe first. To struggle first against Germany and put Japan and the Pacific as a secondary theatre in the conflict. And this is what Churchill was after. "

" Foreign policy - dealing as it does with the most charged political subjects of all, the safety and dignity of the nation - will always be political terrain particularly vulnerable to distortion and demagoguery. "

" William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in April of 1841, after only one month in office, was the first Chief Executive to hide his physical frailties. "

" In 1800, in the first interparty contest, the Federalists warned that presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson, because of his sympathy expressed at the outset of the French Revolution, was 'the son of a half-breed Indian squaw' who would put opponents under the guillotine. "

" Public scandals are America's favorite parlor sport. Learning about the flaws and misdeeds of the rich and famous seems to satisfy our egalitarian yearnings. "

" How many State of the Union addresses do people remember? They don't resonate that way. "

" To be sure, Kennedy did not discount the importance of words in rallying the nation to meet its foreign and domestic challenges. Winston Churchill's powerful exhortations during World War II set a standard he had long admired. Kennedy was hardly unmindful of how important a great inaugural address could be. "

" Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate. "

" Governing is one thing, campaigning is another - and the latter becomes far more pronounced in an election-year State of the Union. "

" The greatest presidents have been those who demonstrated astute judgment in times of crisis - often despite the advice they were getting. "

" Nowadays, everyone seems to have a blog that finds readers. "