Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband’s passion for politics and worldly achievement surpass...
For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a...
Establish a clear purpose; challenge the team to work out details; traverse conventional departmental boundaries; set large short-term and long-term targets; create tangible success to generate accele...
Elizabeth Blair of brother Frank: he could not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of the resentment.
During the long sea voyage from Manila to San Francisco, doctors discovered that Taft’s incision was not healing properly. It was opened and drained, but months of bed rest the previous fall had weake...
Democratic periodicals in the North warned that the governor’s stance would compromise highly profitable New York trade connections with Virginia and other slave states. Seward was branded a bigoted N...
But unlike the electric excitement that had filled the room four years earlier, when Nellie had sparkled with happiness and Taft had laughed with the joy of a boy, both the president and first lady cl...
But the same personal charm that had propelled Taft to the presidency ultimately proved dangerous to him, Baker concluded. For far too long, his amiable nature had kept him from the rough-and-tumble o...
Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who were readily available on the frontier.
At the time the Constitution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity, since slav...
As a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object, [preservation of the Union] I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the firs...
American philosopher William James wrote of the mysterious formation of identity, that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, w...
After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wr...
A true leader is a man who can get people to work together on the points on which they agree and who can persuade others that when they disagree there are peaceful methods to settle their differences.
A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of...
A five minute speech, he pointed out, with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.
It was not only the executive’s right but his responsibility to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.
Wherever a tension needed the solvent of good-will, or friction the oil of benevolence; wherever suspicion needed the antidote of frankness, or wounded pride the disinfectant of a hearty laugh—there T...
There was no need to remind Roosevelt who controlled the senate. I persistently refused to lose my temper, he recalled. I merely explained good-humoredly that I had made up my mind. Though he steadfas...
The very qualities that had led to Johnson's political and legislative success were precisely those that now operated to destroy him: his inward insistence that the world adapt itself to his goals; hi...