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.

Theodore Roosevelt had drawn public attention to his attractive family in order to create a bond with ordinary Americans. Eleanor Roosevelt had successfully broached the idea that a First Lady could be nearly as much...

At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It’s always premature to make...

Vice President Biden’s surprising declaration of unqualified support for gay marriage seems to have forced President Obama into a public endorsement of a controversial social issue. It is difficult not to suspect that Biden’s pronouncement...

I think experience is a terribly overrated idea when it comes to thinking about who should become president.

I think the most important thing that comes out of the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in early 1942 is a commitment on Roosevelt’s part to fight Europe first. To struggle first against Germany and...

To be sure, hunters and sportsmen back gun rights. Beyond that, there are millions who see guns as a defense against fear – fear of criminals breaking into their homes or assaulting them on city...

John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in...

After one party loses two elections in a row, there’s sort of blood in the water.

The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished.

The disaster at the Bay of Pigs intensified Kennedy’s doubts about listening to advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, or the State Department who had misled him or allowed him to accept lousy advice.

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,...