Quotes from Douglas Brinkley

The Rough Riders brought honor to San Antonio by winning battles in Cuba throughout the summer of 1898, and Roosevelt became a Texas folk hero overnight.

The answer to New Orleans's levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower.

Theodore Roosevelt had been enthralled with the idea of Texas since 1883, when he arrived in the Dakota Territory to ranch cattle.

John Kerry wants to be the hero in his own drama. He likes King Arthur and the Round Table. He likes the young swashbuckling Churchill, and he loved the early antics of Theodore Roosevelt.

Politicians wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc and copper, and Theodore Roosevelt said, 'No.'

Truman has become the patron saint of failed presidents because he left office with a 27 percent approval rating, and people were saying, 'To err is Truman,' yet look at what he did: the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine.

Reagan was a pure liberation, free-and-fair election American.

How one deals with the death of a loved one is a highly personalized affair. Some people weep for days; others take a hike in the woods or count rosary beads.

The Middle East is the tinder box of the world, and to be able to remove a nuclear threat of any kind out of Iran, that would have been a big deal, very positive step forward.

As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man's collar.

The D-Day moniker wasn't invented for the Allied invasion. The same name had been attached to the date of every planned offensive of World War II. It was first coined during World War I, at the U.S. attack at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, in France in 1918.

Richard Kerry not only was a pilot in World War II, but was a civil servant. He did not come from money.

Ever since Willie Nelson brought rednecks into an alliance with hippies back in the psychedelic '70s, Austin has milked its quirky libertarian spirit for a worldwide bonanza of free publicity.

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

While the scars of the monstrous Civil War still remain, the wounds have closed since 1865, in large part, because of the civility of Grant and Lee.

John Kerry doesn't think in terms of black-and-white. He's all gray, and he looks at all sides of the issues. That makes people think he likes to be devil's advocate. Whatever you say, he'll challenge you on.

Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn't like to have enemies around him.

I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.

Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'

If you're a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you're treated as royalty. And in the United States, we're endlessly fascinated by the family.

John Kerry had a very vivid imagination as a young person. I mean, he actually did go and take his bicycle from Norway to go camp in Sherwood Forest to be around the ghost of Robin Hood.

Nobody has trusted the Iranian government from day one, but the idea of just refusing to have any kind of talks is dangerous in the extreme. Every administration says at least that we're trying to have talks between Israel and Palestine and solve the Middle East peace problem.

John Kerry can be absolutely ruthless. I would not want to be on his enemies list when he's ready to go after you.

I'm not a historian who thinks Confederate memorials should be boarded up.