Zitat des Tages von Doris Kearns Goodwin:
Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling.
That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.
Obama does seem to have what both FDR and Lincoln had, which is the recognition that you have to hold back at times and then wait to come forward.
I write about presidents. That means I write about guys - so far. I'm interested in the people closest to them, the people they love and the people they've lost... I don't want to limit it to what they did in the office, but what happens at home and in their interactions with other people.
FDR once said he was like a cat, that he would pounce and then relax. That's much harder to do in the 24-hour cable world, because it's almost like the press demands of you to be saying something or doing something every day.
Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
My recurring nightmare is that someday I will be faced with a panel: Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all of whom will be telling me everything I got wrong about them. I know that Johnson's out there saying, 'Why is it that what you wrote about the Kennedys is twice as long as the book you wrote about me?'
Roosevelt's strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
My books are written with a strong chronological spine.
I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life.
People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.
Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.
I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
I wish we could go back to the time when the private lives of our public figures were relevant only if they directly affected their public responsibilities.