Historian

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

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 into a wall.

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

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.

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 his limitations and remain enamored of his presidential performance.

Presidents need to be critically studied and analyzed.

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.

How different our national perspective would be had Johnson, rather than Nixon, served from 1969 to 1973.

Experience helped Richard Nixon, but it didn't save him, and it certainly wasn't a blanket endorsement. He blundered terribly in dealing with Vietnam.

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

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 place in the pantheon of American heroes.

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

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

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 he hoped, one of the more prosperous regions of the country.

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 a substitute for building much of a case for what the mudslinger will do once in office.

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 appropriate one of the easily available weapons in all our communities.

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

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.

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

Don't be intimidated by people who seem to be experts. Hear their points of view and get their judgements. But at the end of day, you've got to make a judgement because it's not their life that's going to be affected so much as your future.