Top 66 Robert Dallek Quotes

For style and for creating a mood of optimism and hope – Kennedy on that count is as effective as any president the country has had in its history.

The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished.

Television has an awful lot to do with the Kennedy mystique and the fact that he’s frozen in people’s minds at the age of 46, and he was handsome and personable and witty and charming.

My feeling is that it’s a misreading of history to say that, as the Reagan supporters do, that Reagan won the Cold War.

Historians partial to Kennedy see matters differently from those partial to L.B.J. Vietnam has become a point of contention in defending and criticizing J.F.K.

If Roosevelt didn’t have World War II, he never would have had a third term.

As someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with most of the 20th century presidents, I have often thought that their accomplishments have little staying power in shaping popular views of their leadership.

The so-called second New Deal of 1935 – including the Works Progress Administration, Social Security and the Wagner Act legalizing union labor – represented an effort to meet the rising voices demanding a more aggressive government approach to the collapse of national prosperity.

Concealing one’s true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.

Clinton’s egregious act of self-indulgence was outdone by an impeachment based not on constitutionally required high crimes and misdemeanors but on a vindictive determination to bring down a president who had offended self-righteous moralists eager to put a different political agenda in place.

The Bay of Pigs was an operation the United States endorsed. That was a preventive operation. We were afraid that Castro was going to subvert the hemisphere.

There’s a certain clubbiness to the idea that you’re an ex-president. You’re no longer a politician. You’re a statesman.

I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.

A president cannot sit on his hands and be seen as passive in the face of ruthless action by a foreign dictator.

Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.

The greatest presidents have been those who demonstrated astute judgment in times of crisis – often despite the advice they were getting.

The 1890s was an intensely patriotic decade for Americans. It was a time of neo-imperialism, when the European powers and the United States were establishing their flags around the globe.

Foreign policy – dealing as it does with the most charged political subjects of all, the safety and dignity of the nation – will always be political terrain particularly vulnerable to distortion and demagoguery.

Eisenhower was quite supportive of Kennedy and Johnson in terms of foreign policy.

Despite an unqualified understanding that U.S. national security was inextricably bound up with Britain’s survival, F.D.R. knew that his reelection in part rested on the hope that he would keep the country out of war.

John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in the balance, and after months of exhaustive campaigning, he was too tired to stay awake any longer.

Political vitriol is a familiar enough characteristic of American history.

Presidents are not only the country’s principal policy chief, shaping the nation’s domestic and foreign agendas, but also the most visible example of our values.

Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we’d have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.

When President Obama first unveiled his gun control proposals recommending a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and better background checks, there seemed to be momentum behind the effort. But then the proposals ran into a wall.

Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage is hardly as consequential as Johnson’s legislative success on civil rights.

What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don’t fight war on our soil, we don’t have direct experience of it, so there’s an openness about the meanings we give to it.

Presidents need to be critically studied and analyzed.

It’s always valuable for someone running for president… to have as much bipartisan support as possible.

Experience helped Richard Nixon, but it didn’t save him, and it certainly wasn’t a blanket endorsement. He blundered terribly in dealing with Vietnam.

I think the public can t accept the idea that someone as inconsequential as Oswald could have killed someone as consequential as Kennedy. They don t want to believe the world is that chaotic. It is.

I think experience is a terribly overrated idea when it comes to thinking about who should become president.

Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.

Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.

By the time a second term rolls around, the illusions about a president have largely evaporated.

American politics is theatre. There is a frightening emotionalism at national conventions.

Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser in 1969, would be envious and high-strung – a maintenance project of the first order.

Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public – not while he was alive, at any rate.

Public scandals are America’s favorite parlor sport. Learning about the flaws and misdeeds of the rich and famous seems to satisfy our egalitarian yearnings.

Allegations that President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich partly in return for donations to his presidential library have raised questions about the value of such institutions and the federal appropriations that support them.

Governing is one thing, campaigning is another – and the latter becomes far more pronounced in an election-year State of the Union.

In his State of the Union speech in January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt declared America’s commitment to Four Freedoms in the struggle against Nazi totalitarianism. Among them was the freedom from fear.

The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate.

Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama’s willingness to put the matter front and center in an election year can at least make him a candidate for inclusion in Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

Racial segregation in the South not only separated the races, but it separated the South from the rest of the country.

Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society launched an anti-Communist crusade that won the support of millions of Americans in the 1950s.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

Congress becomes the public voice of opposition.

For those of us who cry out for gun control, our fears cannot be eliminated as long as the country remains an armed camp in which the most troubled among us can find ways to appropriate one of the easily available weapons in all our communities.

During Grover Cleveland’s second term, in the 1890s, the White House deceived the public by dismissing allegations that surgeons had removed a cancerous growth from the President’s mouth; a vulcanized-rubber prosthesis disguised the absence of much of Cleveland’s upper left jaw and part of his palate.

Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate.

Herbert Hoover was a man of genuine, fine character, but he lacked practical political sense. And he couldn’t bend and shift and change with the requirements of the time. And he was a ruined President, because he was such a, I think, stiff-backed ideologue. And I think that speaks volumes about his character.

Despite all the public hand-wringing about negative advertising, political veterans will tell you that it persists because, more often than not, it works. But tearing down the other guy has another attraction: It can be a substitute for building much of a case for what the mudslinger will do once in office.

Historians will look back and say, ‘Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.’ Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.

True, most Americans give lip service to the proposition that even the most exalted among us have their flaws, but we are eager to believe that presidents manage to rise above the limitations that beset the rest of us.

Unity is Obama’s theme.

William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in April of 1841, after only one month in office, was the first Chief Executive to hide his physical frailties.