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" The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London. "

" What George W. Bush learned in his pre-presidential years - and what he omits in his new memoirs - was not how to lead a nation, but how, with sufficient toughness, to cheat the democratic system to get elected. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" Selective memory is surely one of nature's most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species. "

" 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. "

" Traditionally Presidents Day was Washington's birthday. It was celebrated as a public holiday on February 22 each year, in peace or in war. "

" 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. "

" President Gerald Ford was no intellectual, but he had served with distinction in combat as a naval gunnery officer and then as Congressman for a quarter century. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness and gratitude. "

" 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

President

" My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so. "

" My father had risen in the British Army under the revolutionary aegis of General Montgomery, who was mad about training for battle, not muddling into disaster. "

" I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia. "

" 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. "