Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.
The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized.
Whether history will view Ronald Reagan as a great president depends, more than anything else, on one question: how much credit does he deserve for the fact that the Cold War ended far earlier than almost anyone suspected - and on terms that Americans had fantasized about for 45 years?
Mrs. Johnson was one of our most important First Ladies. Quietly but firmly, she advised LBJ on rhetoric, strategy, and personal relations and helped to dampen his volatile mood swings.
During his last 18 months in office, Eisenhower flew to Asia, Europe, and Latin America and deployed his war hero's popularity to seek new friends for America while trying to improve relations with Moscow. By the time Ike left office, most Americans had forgotten their anger over losing the space race to the Soviets.
Even if you have presidents like FDR dealing with someone like Stalin, with whom he didn't exactly all the time disagree... He wasn't always in lockstep saying Stalin was wonderful all the time. Donald Trump never criticizes Putin.
Troubled celebrities are a dime a dozen.
The more successful sons and daughters know when to lean on their parents - and when to go their own way. George W. Bush helped run his father's presidential campaigns in 1988 and 1992. But in his winning campaign for governor of Texas, he never mentioned his father's name in any of his campaign commercials.
The Founders deliberately limited presidential authority.
Anyone who writes anything on any subject is standing on the shoulders of 900 people who've come before you.
American political scions evoke a central contradiction in our thinking. We believe - or say we do - in nurture, not nature. Yet we are comforted by the aristocratic notion that leadership might run in the bloodlines.
As parties began to develop around the turn of the 19th century, you had party nominees for President nominated in caucuses made up of party members in Congress.
More than Nixon or any other 20th-century president, Clinton has devoted his life to winning and keeping the presidency.
From the beginning of the presidential nominating conventions in the 1830's really through the 1950's, you had conventions that actually did real business.
There is a great overlap of tragedy that played out through the generations of the Lincolns. That, coupled with the idea that many people consider Lincoln our greatest president ever and the fact that he was also a man assassinated at the age of 56 and had a widow with mental problems is what makes it all so fascinating.
Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan each suffered through his second four years. FDR was checkmated by Congress and the Supreme Court. Ike was dogged by Sputnik and reckless charges that the United States suffered from a Missile Gap. Reagan had to wend his way through Iran-Contra.
So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington.
You have had presidential candidates over the last 30 years who would have had a very hard time getting nominated under the old system. One example is John Kennedy.
Kissinger's monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger's Library of Congress cache.
We insist that ours is a government of laws, not men, but it is striking how often large historical forces pivot on something so unpredictable as the continued good health of a politician.
