Quotes from David Pietrusza

Though there is no evil in righteousness, there is in self-righteousness

Truman makes friends without influencing people,' noted Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 'Dewey influences people without making friends.

But even a wonderful soloist needs a song. Even a pitch-perfect voice needs a message.

Losers break the rules. There's no point in obeying them because if you obey the unwritten rules of civility, you're going to lose anyway. So why not just do what you can?' - Zachary Karabell

Every presidential nominee says his vice president will be given a serious, important role in his new administration. But it almost never materializes. A strong, totally self-centered politician like Tom Dewey sharing his hard-won power with a vice president? Don''t count on it.' - David Brinkley

It came down to so many factors: an underdog who refused to surrender, a presumed victor who refused to fight, disgruntled Democrats - on the left and right - who, by deserting their party, merely strengthened it, and fearful Republican farmers, who in the end, proved more farmer than Republican.

Author points out in Woodrow Wilson the flipside of the positive we might call big picture vision. He observes that as college president Wilson resorted to the language of a national crusade when he met resistance in a local, academic issue.

TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: "It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk.

John F. Kennedy responded, as he often did when at his best, skillfully mixing dollops of wit with, self-deprecation, and the principle of not-really-going-near-the-question.

The right to resign is one of the cherished privileges of a free man; the willingness to resign, when principle and the public interest are served, is always present in the public-spirited and the self-respecting. They look upon resigning, not as a cowardice and quitting and a personal disaster, but as the ultimate guarantee of their useful influence and of their personal dignity. - Walter Lippmann

Yet Barkley drew back. Perhaps he, like Harry Truman, knew that the quiet power of incumbency easily overcomes the noise of crowds and bands.

Never far removed from the progressive consciousness was a question that was never easily answered: of what value was it to punish offending Democrats, if one merely replaced them with infinitely more retrograde Republicans?

To Dewey, if brevity was the soul of wit, stagecraft was the very center of politics.

Be civilized. Grudges are for Neanderthals. – Hubert Humphrey

Woodrow Wilson intimate Edward House urged that his boss never first be approached by argument. Instead, the President could be made most receptive by laying a groundwork of 'common hatred".

JFK had to act before his fragile body betrayed him.

Jack had an actor's control." Chuck Spalding

For Jack Kennedy, who only made campaigning LOOK easy, it was, in fact, anything but.

It involves no disrespect for Mrs. Truman to say that her daughter gets a bigger hand than she does,' observed Richard Rovere. 'This country may be run by and for mothers, but its goddesses are daughters. Margaret's entrance comes closer than anything else to bringing down the house.

Richard Nixon coveted, to the point of obsession, a controversy-free, stage-managed coronation.

A lot of people here some South in your mouth, and they automatically think you're dumb. They think if you talk funny, you are funny. – Lloyd Hand

The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse. – Calvin Coolidge

As the pace of the campaign quickened, politics began to clash with Kennedy's innate sense of responsibility. – Arthur Schlesinger

JFK apparently felt genuine sympathy for his 1960 presidential opponent Richard Nixon. He felt that, with Nixon's frequent shifts in political philosophy and reinventions, he must have to decide which Nixon he will be at each stop. This, Kennedy reasoned, must be exhausting.