Quotes from Robert Dallek

Full federal funding for presidential libraries should bring with it new rules of control over papers and artifacts.

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

At the start of first terms, presidents invariably have a measure of goodwill.

Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history.

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

Every year since 1990, the Gallup poll has asked Americans to assess all the presidents since John F. Kennedy. And every year, Kennedy comes out on top.

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.

Besieged by lawsuits that threatened to engulf almost everyone at the White House, Clinton assistants shunned paper or e-mail records of their daily deliberations. One told me that he would go down the hall to confer with his division chief face to face rather than discuss an issue on the telephone.

Despite its flaws, the American electoral system has produced Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Harry Truman.

Political vitriol is a familiar enough characteristic of American history.

During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson's group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt's sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson.

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

The art of diplomacy is finding a reasonable route among imperfect alternatives.

They are pretty good at improvising, but God help us if they are given time to think. Dean Atchison

JFK to RFK: To survive in politics, you sometimes have to be willing to make fun of yourself.

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

Warum ist eigentlich das demokratische System besser?... Es ist besser, weil es die volle Entwicklung des Menschen als Individuum möglich macht. Aber... das zeigt nur, daß die Demokratie eine >angenehmere< Form der Regierung ist [...].

a gentleman of thirty-two who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.

It was a telling point: Roosevelt met with Truman only twice during the eighty-two days of his fourth term, and their discussions were brief and perfunctory. Roosevelt apparently believed that his health problems would not cut short his life, or at least would not affect him before the war ended. Moreover, he didn't seem to think that Truman needed to know about the atomic bomb or postwar plans. This may

La juventud no es una etapa de la vida, sino un estado de ánimo [...] el predominio del valor sobre la timidez, del apetito por la aventura sobre el amor a la comodidad.

The search for the sources of his megalomania and a description of his personality seem useful primarily as a warning against future infatuations with leaders promising national salvation through emotionally appealing but rationally simplistic nostrums

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.

Access to presidential materials should be as wide as possible.

McCarthy had ten years in the House of Representatives, only two terms as a senator. What did he pass? Are there any bills or any piece of legislation that he's identified with? Not at all.