The greatest presidents have been those who demonstrated astute judgment in times of crisis - often despite the advice they were getting.
Obama is cutting back on the idea that we're going to have Jeffersonian democracy in Pakistan or anywhere else.
George Washington sets the nation on its democratic path. Abraham Lincoln preserves it. Franklin Roosevelt sees the nation through depression and war.
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 streets.
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.
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.
Racial segregation in the South not only separated the races, but it separated the South from the rest of the country.
It's always valuable for someone running for president... to have as much bipartisan support as possible.
John Kennedy had so many different medical problems that began when he was a boy. He started out with intestinal problems... spastic colitis.
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 saw as on the wrong side of almost every domestic and foreign policy issue he considered important.
There's a certain clubbiness to the idea that you're an ex-president. You're no longer a politician. You're a statesman.
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.
President Obama can talk about having no grand schemes and making no big gains, but the reality is he can't get anything of significance through Congress.
My feeling is that it's a misreading of history to say that, as the Reagan supporters do, that Reagan won the Cold War.