Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society launched an anti-Communist crusade that won the support of millions of Americans in the 1950s.

Governing is one thing, campaigning is another – and the latter becomes far more pronounced in an election-year State of the Union.

Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president – pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome...

When Gingrich attacked CNN’s John King for bringing up his alleged proposal of an open marriage to his second wife, Gingrich accused him of lowering the level of discourse in a presidential debate, suggesting that...

One doesn’t simply write about Lyndon Johnson. You get the Johnson treatment from beyond the grave – arm around you, nose to nose. I should admit that he also reminds me of my father, quite...

Full federal funding for presidential libraries should bring with it new rules of control over papers and artifacts.

F.D.R. had an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1933 when he drove 15 major bills through the Congress, and super majorities in the House and the Senate in 1935 when he won passage of...

McGeorge Bundy was a brilliant man who’d had a meteoric academic career and was the youngest man ever to be dean of the Harvard faculty. But he was also arrogant and looked upon all sorts...

Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at...

William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in April of 1841, after only one month in office, was the first Chief Executive to hide his physical frailties.

Nowadays, everyone seems to have a blog that finds readers.

Presidents are not only the country’s principal policy chief, shaping the nation’s domestic and foreign agendas, but also the most visible example of our values.

Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage is hardly as consequential as Johnson’s legislative success on civil rights.

I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.

The Bay of Pigs was an operation the United States endorsed. That was a preventive operation. We were afraid that Castro was going to subvert the hemisphere.

A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War was Johnson’s vehicle for expanding the Southern economy and making it, as...

Ronald Reagan in foreign affairs, I think, was someone who had certain, very general ideas, general propositions by which he lives: To combat communism, to build up the American military power to assure our national...

Harry Truman wrote scathing letters, but he almost never sent them.

From the moment he took office in January of 1961, Kennedy had been eager to settle the Cuban problem without overt military action by the United States.

Once the public loses confidence in a president’s leadership at a time of war, once they don’t trust him anymore, once his credibility is sharply diminished, how does he get it back?

Clinton’s egregious act of self-indulgence was outdone by an impeachment based not on constitutionally required high crimes and misdemeanors but on a vindictive determination to bring down a president who had offended self-righteous moralists eager...

There is a line between scurrilous nonsense and serious discussion that laps over, especially in this day and age when you’ve got all this electronic media and these blogs and this kind of fanatical impulse...

Political vitriol is a familiar enough characteristic of American history.

Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it’s the heartland of America. It’s a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it’s beginning to pass.

There are examples of ex-presidents speaking out. Jimmy Carter has not held back on a variety of issues. Harry Truman didn’t.

If nobody trusts you as president, then you can’t get anything done.

Allegations that President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich partly in return for donations to his presidential library have raised questions about the value of such institutions and the federal appropriations that support them.

A presidential candidate’s great desire is to be seen as pragmatic, and they hope their maneuvering and shifting will be seen in pursuit of some higher purpose. It doesn’t mean they are utterly insincere.

Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy.

Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public – not while he was alive, at any rate.

Historians partial to Kennedy see matters differently from those partial to L.B.J. Vietnam has become a point of contention in defending and criticizing J.F.K.

Television has an awful lot to do with the Kennedy mystique and the fact that he’s frozen in people’s minds at the age of 46, and he was handsome and personable and witty and charming.

Racial segregation in the South not only separated the races, but it separated the South from the rest of the country.

Access to presidential materials should be as wide as possible.

Presidential aspirants reach for the highest office to satisfy some yearning for greatness or even immortality.

Some Kennedy aides have always insisted that Johnson misread J.F.K.’s plans for Vietnam. They say that Kennedy had begun to rethink the U.S. presence in Indochina and was reluctant to increase it.

For those of us who cry out for gun control, our fears cannot be eliminated as long as the country remains an armed camp in which the most troubled among us can find ways to...

Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate.

Nixon’s deep antipathy toward Jews is well known, and he took a strange satisfaction in having Kissinger in his inner circle, where he could periodically taunt him.

At the end of the day, Americans are not so keen on ideologues, people who have such fixed positions that they can’t see any virtue in the other side’s point of view.

The 1890s was an intensely patriotic decade for Americans. It was a time of neo-imperialism, when the European powers and the United States were establishing their flags around the globe.

How many State of the Union addresses do people remember? They don’t resonate that way.

Historians will look back and say, ‘Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.’ Ford is not going to be remembered as...

The rise of the Tea Party, along with the emergence of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Carl Paladino in New York and Ron Paul in Kentucky, is not the first time in...

There’s a certain clubbiness to the idea that you’re an ex-president. You’re no longer a politician. You’re a statesman.

A president cannot sit on his hands and be seen as passive in the face of ruthless action by a foreign dictator.

Presidents need to be critically studied and analyzed.

The Atlantic conference in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland is a dramatic moment in World War II history because for the first time, Roosevelt and Churchill are meeting face to face in this war.

During Grover Cleveland’s second term, in the 1890s, the White House deceived the public by dismissing allegations that surgeons had removed a cancerous growth from the President’s mouth; a vulcanized-rubber prosthesis disguised the absence of...

Obama is cutting back on the idea that we’re going to have Jeffersonian democracy in Pakistan or anywhere else.