Quotes from Douglas Brinkley

Stubbornness is a positive quality of presidential leadership - if you're right about what you're stubborn about.

I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.

Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.

Administration policies seem to tacitly encourage those who live below sea level in New Orleans to relocate permanently, to leave the dangerous water's edge for more prosperous inland cities such as Shreveport or Baton Rouge.

For Dylan, it seems, life is always the next gig. Changing pace and location are essential to his survival as an artist.

History chalks up Mr. McKinley's War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a 'near great' president.

Although Cronkite had once crash landed in a Dutch potato field under enemy fire, he chose instead to focus on celebrating the liberation of the Netherlands at the hands of the Free Dutch.

It is a long revisionist road up from the bottom for George W. Bush. He is ranked toward the bottom rung of presidents.

One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.

President Obama had a few historians at the White House for a couple of dinners. I was lucky enough to be one of those asked, and he was very interested in Ronald Reagan, and I came away feeling that.

In 1971, near the middle of Nixon's first term, he approved a plan to install a White House taping system as a way of preserving an accurate chronicle of important discussions and decisions. Except for Nixon, three aides, and the Secret Service, no one knew about the listening devices.

There is nobody that's ever going to fill Ted Kennedy's shoes, and that's a tall order for somebody in the family to try to live up to.

Cronkite had mastered the intentional pause, the need for frozen seconds of long silence at certain historic moments. Nobody before or after Cronkite had mastered the art of communicating news on television nightly without ever becoming an irritant.

Conservation," Pinchot famously wrote, "means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.

Eisenhower started his presidency on this same note, with a plea to avoid what he called the "burden of arms. . . . Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

By Thursday, in fact, Katrina had become one of the half-dozen moments in American television that not only revealed events but actually defined the community of millions responding to it on television. It joined the Army-McCarthy hearings (1954), the Kennedy assassination (1963), the Apollo 11 moon landing (1969), the Watergate hearings (1973–74), and the attacks on September 11, 2001.

With soldiers coming home, trained to shoot guns, there was a marked increase in hunting and fishing. Many veterans wanted to take a well-earned month or two for recreation. In 1945, eight million hunting licenses were issued, an increase of one million licenses since the start of the war.

Within two years, white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, and wood ducks all started to make startling comebacks.

The superhighway of celebrity and showmanship is filled with debris.

It's very important that we keep these special, wild places. It defines the United States. Imagine our country without our national parks and our monuments. Here in California, imagine if you didn't have in Southern Cal the Channel Islands or the great Highway 1, Big Sur up to Point Reyes up to the Redwood country.

When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn't stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit.

What I was most curious about was why Armstrong, a top U.S. Navy test pilot, flying the most advanced aircraft in the world, would want to join the astronaut corps in 1962, which included chimpanzees and monkeys.

In 2012, the city of Austin erected an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Willie Nelson in the heart of the business district. Schoolchildren, churchgoers, tourists, slackers, conventioneers, tech geeks - everybody, it seems - now congregate around this ponytailed shrine to outlaw country.

Some presidents, such as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, are political sailors - they tack with the wind, reaching difficult policy objectives through bipartisan maneuvering and pulse-taking.