Quotes from Douglas G. Brinkley

Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.

If life were fattening, Walter Cronkite would weigh 500 pounds.

Unlike most fine writers, he wasn't in love with his own words.

It didn't seem to matter that Reagan made his heartfelt endorsements of traditional family values despite being divorced and so alienated from his own children that one of them would write a book about what a rotten father he had been; by the same token, the president's failure to have made regular or even occasional visits to church hardly dimmed his appeal for the resurgent religious right

He followed an ironclad rule. He NEVER WATCHED HIMSELF.

When he (Walter Cronkite) drank, he had an appetite for both history and political bullshit.

Unlike the Marines, who are given macho monikers like "jarheads," the Coast Guard had long been denigrated in military circles as fey "puddle jumpers." But just as 9/11 brought a newfound respect to firemen, Katrina did the same for the reputation of the Coast Guard. At the peak of rescue operations they had 62 aircraft, 30 cutters, and 111 small boats stepping up in rescue and recovery operations. They did it all one person at a time.

from Booker T. Washington himself: "You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

survival of the fittest"—which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer

And when we allow freedom to ring . . . we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

Cronkite is not a genius at anything except being straight, honest, and normal.

A crooked peace officer is just a damned abomination," McCarthy wrote. "That's all you can say about it. He's ten times worse than the criminal."48

Although federal revenues nearly doubled during the Reagan years, federal spending far exceeded that pace and drove the national debt from $909 billion to $2.6 trillion between 1980 and 1988, by far the highest it had ever been.

September 15, 1950, MacArthur launched a brilliantly conceived and executed amphibious landing at Inchon, trapping a large North Korean force after walking ashore several times to ensure a good take for the cameras, his ever-present corncob pipe jutting from his jaw.

History will remember the Superdome debacle—caused by the dearth of evacuation buses—as "Nagin's Folly," mayoral incompetence of the first order.

John McPhee's 1989 book The Control of Nature, for

the president began dictating what became his famous declaration of hope for "a world founded upon four essential human freedoms" - freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion; freedom from want; and freedom from fear. These were, he said, not a vision for "a distant millennium" but "a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

Most Americans didn't distinguish fame from accomplishment.

Years later, the plain-speaking Truman would explain: "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president . . . . I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.