Quotes from Jon Meacham

to succeed Ronald Reagan, there were rising federal deficits, historic Cold War breakthroughs with Moscow, and, in the waning weeks of 1986, a scandal involving hostages in the Middle East, arms sales to Iran through Israel, and secret funding for the anti-Communist Nicaraguan contras.

Diplomacy, grace, and mercy had their place. So did steel, vengeance, and strength.

We were then, and are now, what Jackson called "one great family.

The GOP, Truman said, was more interested in partisan advantage than in national security.

Finally, at one p.m. on Tuesday, February 17, 180161, on the thirty-sixth ballot, Jefferson prevailed. R

knows how this will end: but assuredly in one extreme or the other. There can be no medium between those who have loved so much.

The opposition continued to fear Jackson's mysterious power over so many people. "His administration is absolutely odious, and yet there is an adherence to the man," John Sergeant, a former congressman from Pennsylvania, wrote to Clay. "It remains to be seen whether this will not yield to the conviction that his continuance must be destructive of everything that is worthy to be cherished.

No arguments you may use, no facts you may present, no logic you may array will in the slightest affect these people," the Kansas editor William Allen White, who opposed the Klan in an unsuccessful race for governor, wrote. "They have no capacity for receiving arguments, no minds for retaining or sifting facts and no mental processes that will hold logic. If they had any of these they would not be Kluxers.

Texas did not long mourn John Kennedy. In a piece in The Nation magazine, an influential South Texan was reported to have remarked, "I don't hold with murder. But I can't say I'm not glad to see us rid of that bushy-haired bastard from Boston.

Good humor, Jefferson added, "is the practice of sacrificing to those whom we meet in society all the little conveniences and preferences which will gratify them, and deprive us of nothing worth a moment's consideration;

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism:

The Ku Klux Klan," the Reverend Charles Jefferson, the pro-Klan author of Roman Catholicism and the Ku Klux Klan, said, "is the Mussolini of America.

And, critically, Jackson had spoken in the vernacular of hope and of unity to combat fear and disunion. To him it was a father's role—and a president's.

Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic.

The courts, the press, and two presidents (Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge) took stands, however limited, against the politics of fear.

In 1928, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a New York law requiring the Klan to file membership lists with state authorities on the grounds that, as the appellate court in the case wrote, "It is a matter of common knowledge that the association or organization"—the Klan—"exercises activities tending to the prejudice and intimidation of sundry classes of our citizens.

A man liberated from monarchical or hereditary limitations stood a greater chance of possessing a mind free to roam and to grow and to create and to innovate in a climate in which citizens lived together in essential harmony and affection.87 This was Jefferson's ideal republic—and he was

This book is a portrait of hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent—a reminder that periods of public dispiritedness are not new and a reassurance that they are survivable.

If the President's theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion," Senator Pat Harrison, Democrat of Mississippi, remarked, "then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States.

Watergate is a shabby, tawdry business that demeans the Presidency. Am I failing to lead by not stating that?

And you know, my friends," King said, "there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July, and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November.

A high-flying politician," Hopkinson wrote, "is I think not unlike a balloon—he is full of inflammability, he is driven along by every current of wind, and those who will suffer themselves to be carried up by them run a great risk that the bubble may burst and let them fall from the height to which a principle of levity had raised them."6

But when we reflect how difficult it is to move or inflect the great machine of society, how impossible to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right, we see the wisdom of Solon's remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear, and that will be chiefly to reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it, and improve some little on old routines." Even

the enslaved "would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.