RICHARD NORTON SMITH

The law of unintended consequences, far more than the Constitution, is what governs the modern presidency.

Creative betrayal is the essence of successful statesmanship.

Presidents in wartime, embattled presidents, unpopular presidents, they all look to Lincoln. He's their patron saint because no president was more embattled or more unpopular than Lincoln was during his presidency. We think he was born on Mount Rushmore. Not so.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

Richard Nixon as a 12-year-old was given a portrait of Lincoln that he hung over his bed. Nixon also justified what would later be seen as abuses of power by comparing America in the Vietnam era to the country during the Civil War.

Anyone who thinks that negative campaigning is a modern invention has never read the nineteenth century press

In the 1950s, men were the bread winners and women worried about the price of bread.

When we're talking about the "American response" to any disaster, it's not just a government response, an official response, it's a popular response.

One of hardest for any historian or a biographer to do is to capture convincingly on paper something as ethereal as charisma. It's a relative term, and different generations define it differently.

One of hardest for any historian or a biographer to do is to capture convincingly on paper something as ethereal as charisma. It's a relative term, and different generations define it differently.

I'm very old-fashioned - I don't operate with an agenda. If you're a biographer, you want to be passionate about what you're doing but dispassionate about how you do it.

Presidents in wartime, embattled presidents, unpopular presidents, they all look to Lincoln. He's their patron saint because no president was more embattled or more unpopular than Lincoln was during his presidency. We think he was born on Mount Rushmore. Not so.

I was 14 years old in August of 1968 and had earned the money and had managed to get tickets as a guest of the Massachusetts delegation to the Republican convention in Miami and where I was on the floor in the Rockefeller demonstrations.

Richard Nixon as a 12-year-old was given a portrait of Lincoln that he hung over his bed. Nixon also justified what would later be seen as abuses of power by comparing America in the Vietnam era to the country during the Civil War.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

Anyone who thinks that negative campaigning is a modern invention has never read the nineteenth century press

The law of unintended consequences, far more than the Constitution, is what governs the modern presidency.

Creative betrayal is the essence of successful statesmanship.

In the 1950s, men were the bread winners and women worried about the price of bread.

With the profusion of images and the Internet, you can get any truth you want.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller spent more money in New York to assure clean water than did the entire Federal Government.

Donald Rumsfeld and Nelson Rockefeller were put on this planet to piss each other off.

When we're talking about the "American response" to any disaster, it's not just a government response, an official response, it's a popular response.

The American people are not uniquely, but characteristically the most spontaneously generous in the world and you're seeing that all over this country in Web sites of charitable organizations that are crashing because of the overwhelming desire on the part of ordinary people to help out.