Michael Beschloss

“American political scions evoke a central contradiction in our thinking. We believe - or say we do - in nurture, not nature. Yet we are comforted by the aristocratic notion that leadership might run in the bloodlines.”

“Whether history will view Ronald Reagan as a great president depends, more than anything else, on one question: how much credit does he deserve for the fact that the Cold War ended far earlier than almost anyone suspected - and on terms that Americans had fantasized about for 45 years?”

“You really do live through someone's life when you hear him six hours a day.”

“Kissinger's monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger's Library of Congress cache.”

“I'm one of those people who lies awake all night and worries about all the horrible things that can go wrong, whether a comma was wrong.”

“More than Nixon or any other 20th-century president, Clinton has devoted his life to winning and keeping the presidency.”

“As parties began to develop around the turn of the 19th century, you had party nominees for President nominated in caucuses made up of party members in Congress.”

“During his last 18 months in office, Eisenhower flew to Asia, Europe, and Latin America and deployed his war hero's popularity to seek new friends for America while trying to improve relations with Moscow. By the time Ike left office, most Americans had forgotten their anger over losing the space race to the Soviets.”

“Reagan's defense buildup and SDI, so ridiculed at the time, pressed Gorbachev, while his economy was collapsing, to make arms deals and improve relations with the West, which contributed to the unraveling of his empire.”

“So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960's, part of the drama was the fact that you didn't know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.”

“First of all, there's no mention of political parties in the Constitution, so you begin American history with not only no political conventions but also no parties.”

“The more successful sons and daughters know when to lean on their parents - and when to go their own way. George W. Bush helped run his father's presidential campaigns in 1988 and 1992. But in his winning campaign for governor of Texas, he never mentioned his father's name in any of his campaign commercials.”

“From the beginning of the presidential nominating conventions in the 1830's really through the 1950's, you had conventions that actually did real business.”

“Presidents fall into second-term slumps for different reasons.”

“Oftentimes during the period in which conventions really did business, you had situations where the delegates were divided and you would have ballot after ballot before there was a final nominee.”

“Troubled celebrities are a dime a dozen.”

“Historians sometimes view presidents very differently from the way the public did at the time. Sometimes they don't.”

“Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.”

“Then you get to the last half of the 20th century, Americans are getting very skeptical about their leaders and their institutions, and another place that is affected is parties and conventions.”

“Anyone who writes anything on any subject is standing on the shoulders of 900 people who've come before you.”