Top 22 Michael Beschloss Quotes

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.

Reagan’s defense buildup and SDI, so ridiculed at the time, pressed Gorbachev, while his economy was collapsing, to make arms deals and improve relations with the West, which contributed to the unraveling of his empire.

You really do live through someone’s life when you hear him six hours a day.

The founders were very worried that if parties developed in America, you might have something like the modern Italian system, where you have 20 different parties that divide Congress and the country and can’t govern.

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.

Too few presidents have steeped themselves not just in Lincoln’s words but his deeds, which is why Obama’s acquaintance with the great man is so compelling – especially since, like President-elect Lincoln, Obama will take office at a perilous time.

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.

To people who remember JFK’s assassination, JFK Jr. will probably always be that boy saluting his father’s coffin.

Troubled celebrities are a dime a dozen.

Presidents fall into second-term slumps for different reasons.

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.

Historians sometimes view presidents very differently from the way the public did at the time. Sometimes they don’t.

Kings and queens are expected to have offspring to carry on the name. There are no such demands on American presidents, but there is an expectation. There is a hope.

It is not always a treat to grow up as the heir to a world-famous leader.

Not to be pompous about it – my thing in life is to write history and not to chat on TV 24 hours a day.

Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.

The things we obsess about today, in 40 years seem trivial.

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.

So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960’s, part of the drama was the fact that you didn’t know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.

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.

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.

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.