Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

I was only 8 years old on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, 38-year-old commander of 'Apollo 11,' descended the cramped lunar module Eagle's ladder with hefty backpack and bulky spacesuit to become the first human on the moon.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

History chalks up Mr. McKinley's War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a 'near great' president.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

It's very important that we keep these special, wild places. It defines the United States. Imagine our country without our national parks and our monuments. Here in California, imagine if you didn't have in Southern Cal the Channel Islands or the great Highway 1, Big Sur up to Point Reyes up to the Redwood country.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

Truman has become the patron saint of failed presidents because he left office with a 27 percent approval rating, and people were saying, 'To err is Truman,' yet look at what he did: the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

It's Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean Air and Water Acts. Endangered Species Act. Promoted affirmative action. One could go on and on with Nixon as a New Deal liberal on domestic policy and a hawk, but one with great geo-political skills.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

Nobody has trusted the Iranian government from day one, but the idea of just refusing to have any kind of talks is dangerous in the extreme. Every administration says at least that we're trying to have talks between Israel and Palestine and solve the Middle East peace problem.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

One of the things I learned in editing 'The Reagan Diaries' is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

Reagan was a pure liberation, free-and-fair election American.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

There is nobody that's ever going to fill Ted Kennedy's shoes, and that's a tall order for somebody in the family to try to live up to.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

In 1971, near the middle of Nixon's first term, he approved a plan to install a White House taping system as a way of preserving an accurate chronicle of important discussions and decisions. Except for Nixon, three aides, and the Secret Service, no one knew about the listening devices.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

I'm not a partisan.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

For years, I longed to hear Armstrong describe what it was like to contemplate Earth from 238,900 miles away. Former Space Center director George Abbey once told me that many NASA astronauts felt that looking at Earth was akin to a religious experience.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

If you're a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you're treated as royalty. And in the United States, we're endlessly fascinated by the family.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

I feel like I'm always learning from people.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

If Reagan had intelligence information that showed that the upheaval in Egypt is actually Democratic in spirit, then he would have, I believe, turned his back on Mubarak, even though there's a long friendship between the United States and Egypt.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when 'American Pie' topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

In 2012, the city of Austin erected an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Willie Nelson in the heart of the business district. Schoolchildren, churchgoers, tourists, slackers, conventioneers, tech geeks - everybody, it seems - now congregate around this ponytailed shrine to outlaw country.

Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley

John Kerry wants to be the hero in his own drama. He likes King Arthur and the Round Table. He likes the young swashbuckling Churchill, and he loved the early antics of Theodore Roosevelt.