A true leader is a man who can get people to work together on the points on which they agree and who can persuade others that when they disagree there are peaceful methods to settle their differences.
Everything was of interest to him,” marveled the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, “people of today, people of yesterday, animals, minerals, stones, stars, the past, the future.
Still, Roosevelt noted, it was “not always easy to strike the just middle,” and he inevitably made mistakes.
FDR, even weakened and near the end of his life, opted to allow disabled veterans to see his true condition. This allowed them to understand the life which could still be before them.
If I am ever to be remembered,” Johnson wistfully told me, “it will be for civil rights.
The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.
His one passion was for the game of golf, which Roosevelt found excruciatingly dull and slow.
The habit of mobility had become ingrained.
They would carry their books to the woods and read aloud to one another. At picnic lunches near Cooper’s Bluff, they recited their favorite poems. “In the early days,” Fanny recalled, “we all delighted in Longfellow and Mrs. Browning and Owen Meredith.” Later, they turned to Swinburne, Kipling, Shelley, and Shakespeare. The Roosevelts.
The bullet that rests in Roosevelt’s chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency,” one Democratic speaker suspected.
Roosevelt repeatedly “brought his clenched fist down on the palm of his other hand.
But unlike the “electric” excitement that had filled the room four years earlier, when Nellie had sparkled with happiness and Taft had “laughed with the joy of a boy,” both the president and first lady clearly understood that the divisive convention had rendered Republican chances for election in November almost impossible.
As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.
His experience taught him what every party boss has understood through the ages: the practical machinery of the party organization – the distribution of ballots, the checklists, the rounding up of voters – was as crucial as the broad ideology laid out in the platform. The same intimate involvement in campaign organization that he displayed in these early years would characterize all of Lincoln’s future campaigns.
It was a grim and evil fate, but I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow, nor does it lighten the blow to cease from working.
On July 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln convened a special session of his cabinet to reveal – not to debate – his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
His fierce determination to escape an invalid’s fate led him to transform his body and timid demeanor through strenuous work; Taft, on the other hand, blessed from birth with robust health, would allow his physical strength and energy to gradually dissipate over the years into a state of obesity.
Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.
Gather firsthand information, ask questions.
Spring had come to Washington. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. Yet the glacial mood of the capital refused to melt. Accusations.