Public scandals are America’s favorite parlor sport. Learning about the flaws and misdeeds of the rich and famous seems to satisfy our egalitarian yearnings.

The Bay of Pigs is one of America’s most infamous Cold War blunders, and it has been studied, debated, and dramatized endlessly ever since.

When President Obama first unveiled his gun control proposals recommending a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and better background checks, there seemed to be momentum behind the effort. But then the proposals ran...

Besieged by lawsuits that threatened to engulf almost everyone at the White House, Clinton assistants shunned paper or e-mail records of their daily deliberations. One told me that he would go down the hall to...

Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we’d have a kind...

If Roosevelt didn’t have World War II, he never would have had a third term.

In seeking an empire of liberty, Jefferson wished not only to expand the country’s territorial holdings, but also to extend American institutions around the globe.

To be sure, Kennedy did not discount the importance of words in rallying the nation to meet its foreign and domestic challenges. Winston Churchill’s powerful exhortations during World War II set a standard he had...

In his State of the Union speech in January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt declared America’s commitment to Four Freedoms in the struggle against Nazi totalitarianism. Among them was the freedom from fear.

At the start of first terms, presidents invariably have a measure of goodwill.

The greatest presidents have been those who demonstrated astute judgment in times of crisis – often despite the advice they were getting.

The lifelong health problems of John F. Kennedy constitute one of the best-kept secrets of recent U.S. history – no surprise, because if the extent of those problems had been revealed while he was alive,...

The CIA’s official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how...

The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate.

As for Vietnam, what matters is that Kennedy successfully resisted pressure to send anything more than military advisers, a stance that was a likely prelude to complete withdrawal from the conflict. There is solid evidence...

Compared with other recent presidents whose stumbles and failures have assaulted the national self-esteem, memories of Kennedy continue to give the country faith that its better days are ahead. That’s been reason enough to discount...

Despite all the public hand-wringing about negative advertising, political veterans will tell you that it persists because, more often than not, it works. But tearing down the other guy has another attraction: It can be...

In counterfactual history, nothing is certain.

In the late 19th century, the Populists – a protest movement of mainly disaffected farmers and workers – threatened to overturn established authority.

Late 19th-century populists saw bankers and industrialists manipulating markets to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers and labourers and favoured political candidates promising economic relief through free and unlimited coinage of silver.

Concealing one’s true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.

There are limits on what a president can achieve or do, but the expectations are so great.

The nation should be able to remove by an orderly constitutional process any president with an unyielding commitment to failed policies and an inability to renew the country’s hope.

The so-called second New Deal of 1935 – including the Works Progress Administration, Social Security and the Wagner Act legalizing union labor – represented an effort to meet the rising voices demanding a more aggressive...

Unity is Obama’s theme.

As someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with most of the 20th century presidents, I have often thought that their accomplishments have little staying power in shaping popular views of their leadership.

During his presidency, Truman and the Republicans were locked in a series of furious assaults on each other that outraged him and made Truman an enduring foe of a party and its representatives, which he...

George Washington sets the nation on its democratic path. Abraham Lincoln preserves it. Franklin Roosevelt sees the nation through depression and war.

It’s always valuable for someone running for president… to have as much bipartisan support as possible.

Kennedy saw the presidency as the vital center of government, and a president’s primary goal as galvanizing commitments to constructive change. He aimed to move the country and the world toward a more peaceful future,...

The consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn’t an acceptance of Castro and his control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by stealth.

Despite its flaws, the American electoral system has produced Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Harry Truman.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

True, most Americans give lip service to the proposition that even the most exalted among us have their flaws, but we are eager to believe that presidents manage to rise above the limitations that beset...

Few American presidents are held in higher esteem than Thomas Jefferson. Though historians have scrutinized every phase of his long public career and found him wanting in a number of respects, he holds an unshakable...

By the time a second term rolls around, the illusions about a president have largely evaporated.

Despite an unqualified understanding that U.S. national security was inextricably bound up with Britain’s survival, F.D.R. knew that his reelection in part rested on the hope that he would keep the country out of war.

During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson’s group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson.

Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama’s willingness to put the matter front and center in an election year can at least make him a candidate for inclusion in Kennedy’s Profiles in...

Historians evaluating George W. Bush’s first term will focus on foreign policy and, most of all, 9/11. I think they will criticize him for his early reaction, for not returning at once to Washington, D.C.

John Kennedy had so many different medical problems that began when he was a boy. He started out with intestinal problems… spastic colitis.

McCarthy had ten years in the House of Representatives, only two terms as a senator. What did he pass? Are there any bills or any piece of legislation that he’s identified with? Not at all.

American politics is theatre. There is a frightening emotionalism at national conventions.

Flattery was one of Kissinger’s principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly.

With television, you can make anyone look larger than life.

Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.

Foreign policy – dealing as it does with the most charged political subjects of all, the safety and dignity of the nation – will always be political terrain particularly vulnerable to distortion and demagoguery.

Congress becomes the public voice of opposition.

Every year since 1990, the Gallup poll has asked Americans to assess all the presidents since John F. Kennedy. And every year, Kennedy comes out on top.

Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.