Words matter. These are the best H. W. Brands Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
If the incumbent or his party has been discredited sufficiently, the challenger can run a successful, content-free campaign.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.
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.
The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun.
For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all.
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 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 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.
I’m the farthest thing from a bibliophile. I purge my collection regularly: If I haven’t read a book in a couple of years, I try to give it to someone who will.
Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for.
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.
The candidate who promises the most has the best chance of winning.
The shelf life of a seventh-year State of the Union address is about five minutes. Presidents can propose stuff. They’re probably not likely to get it done.
In modern times, the American military has become more bureaucratised.
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.
George W. Bush has shown himself to be a decent guy, not exploiting his former office to make top dollars giving speeches.
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.
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.
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.
When people think of the oil industry, they think of Rockefeller, much like when people think of the software industry, they think of Bill Gates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don’t buy studies of presidencies.
The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.
I cannot think of a president or administration that has taken seriously the 100 days.
In some ways, I would be absolutely fascinated if Trump gets elected.
The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Texas gets a lot more out of being part of the United States than the United States gets out of having Texas as one of the states.
Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.
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.
I never admit to wishing I’d written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of ‘The Guns of August,’ I wouldn’t complain.
Interest in the Founders has risen and fallen over time, as has admiration for them and their accomplishments.
If it’s a good story, it’s a good story, and it draws readers in.
When you’re actually president, the spin matters a lot less.
It wasn’t the smiling Trump that people elected. It was the frowning, glowering, angry Donald Trump that people elected.
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.
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.
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.
In the early 19th to the early 20th century, people had a lot of things wrong with them. Doctors didn’t know how to fix them, and so they lived with them.
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.
