Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In revering the Founders, we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make improvements - necessary improvements - in the republican experiment they began.
I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about.
President Obama ran a campaign in 2008 that was entirely expected from a non-incumbent. You promise, and you imply that if you elect me, everything good is going to happen.
When you look at the development of the American presidency, you see that the presidents who have had the greatest impact are the ones who fit their times most successfully.
It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.
A president can start a war under relatively specious circumstances, and once American soldiers are under fire, Americans will support the soldiers and support the president.
I was raised in, and presumably to, the cutlery business. I really didn't think that that's what I wanted to do for a career. But I felt a certain obligation to give it a try.
The Catalonian movement is quite serious; I don't think it's simply symbolic. I think that they believe that Catalonia can be more successful on its own than as part of Spain.
Presidents have to decide what their popularity is for. Lyndon Johnson probably understood best that political popularity is a wasting asset. You had to use it when you had it.
Theodore Roosevelt, when he was out of office, he would do things to draw attention. But when you are president, you don't need to shout. When you are in office, you are the story.
The president was not the most important political player in the 19th century. Besides Jefferson at the beginning, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the center of politics was Congress.
With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.
Everything that happens today is like something in the past, but it's also unlike things in the past. We never know until an event happens if it's the similarities or differences that matter more.
Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don't want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don't, but they should.
I had this grand plan for writing the history of the United States in six volumes. This was in the mid-1990s; I was fairly young and very ambitious. I pitched it to a publisher, who just laughed at me.
Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.
He used humor more effectively than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Reagan was not an especially warm person, but he appeared to be. Many people disliked his policies, but almost no one disliked him.
Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O'Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse.
A lot of people were ambivalent about Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 positioned himself as the peace candidate. Once Johnson sent large amounts of troops into battle in 1965, most Americans were behind the war.
I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.
In the business arena, the standard rules of morality don't apply. What we're really looking for is efficiency. It doesn't do anyone any good to be nice to the weak. In a certain sense, competition is inefficient.
With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible.
President Trump is doing what he can to act decisively. And if there's one thing most people have in mind in distinguishing the business world from the political world is that the CEO of a business can act decisively.
I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.
I'm more inclined to say the presidency has changed Trump rather than Trump changed the presidency. He has moderated or reversed himself on most of the positions he took as a candidate. Reality has set in, as it does with every new president.
You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with.
In the early days of the republic, the secretary of state was the heir apparent to the president. Presidents could easily hand-pick their party's next candidate. The party caucuses formally selected the candidates, but presidents guided the process.
There is a certain kind of sobering, civilizing effect that being president imposes on people. There is a certain kind of dignity with which you comport yourself. As an observer of the presidency, I have to wonder if Trump would follow that pattern.
The more of my readers I encounter who say, often apologetically, that they are actually listeners, the more I write for the ear rather than the eye. Small things like identifying speakers in dialogue rather than relying on paragraphing to mark the shifts.
You might say presidents are drafting the first chapter of their memoirs in these seventh-year State of the Union addresses. They're trying to get the public and the media to think about their presidencies in the way that they would like to have them thought of.
Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.
People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age.
Politics is not something most people have to do every day. Their daily lives are much more influenced by job opportunities, whether the country is in a recession or a boom period. If you really want to understand what drives American history, look at the economic... side.
Previous candidates who get elected are almost always sobered by the office and the responsibility they take on. Donald Trump shows no evidence of that. He's the same Trump that he was when he was host of his reality TV show. He's the same Trump that he was when he was a candidate.
The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country. And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election?
There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.
In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.
The president of the United States from the 1940s until 2017 was considered the leader of the free world - probably the most powerful person in the world - not simply in terms of America's military might but in terms of the moral authority of the president. Donald Trump has largely abdicated that.
Harry Truman's decision to fire Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War in April 1951 shocked the American political system and astonished the world. Much of the world didn't realize the president had the power to fire a five-star general; much of America didn't realize Truman had the nerve.
Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.
Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'
Reagan's enduring value as a conservative icon stems from his resolute preaching of the conservative gospel, in words that still warm the hearts of the most zealous conservatives. Yet Reagan's value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals.
I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.
When the Constitution was written in 1787, there was this supposition that American politics would be above party. The people who would staff the positions in government would have the interests of the country, or at least their states and congressional districts, at heart, and so they wouldn't form permanent political parties.
To me, the puzzle of Ronald Reagan is how a comparatively ordinary man, someone with not extraordinary talent, accomplished such extraordinary results. At the age of 50, no one expected that this was going to be the guy who would become, at least in my interpretation, one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century.
When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?