David Pietrusza

Nixon was by nature a excluder. Halderman like to exclude people. When Nixon's need met Halderman's abilities, you had the most perfect formula for disaster. _ Jim Shepley

There are really two essential things in campaigning. First, you must be in good humor. If you're going to be a raffle, you are to stay home. Second, you are to make sense in your speeches. These aren't the two things you must do. Unless you're saying, if you can be in good humor when you're exhausted. _ Henry Cabot Lodge

Eisenhower on LBJ: "He hadn't got the depth of mind nor the breath vision to carry great responsibility.

Nixon wanted view and advice brought to him through intermediaries. He wanted information filtered as it came to him _ and he wanted his filters to filter his will back to those whom he must direct.

While JFK had made the sale on a political level, he had not yet completed it on an emotional one.

For Jack Kennedy, who only made campaigning LOOK easy, it was, in fact, anything but.

TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: "It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk.

Presidential campaign observer Teddy White on the second Kennedy-Nixon debate in which the candidates spoke from separate television studios: "It was as if, separated by comments from his adversary, Richard Nixon was more at ease and could speak directly to the nation that lay between them.

JFK had a way of grabbing grandeur from mishap.

Woodrow Wilson intimate Edward House urged that his boss never first be approached by argument. Instead, the President could be made most receptive by laying a groundwork of 'common hatred".

As the pace of the campaign quickened, politics began to clash with Kennedy's innate sense of responsibility. _ Arthur Schlesinger

Author points out in Woodrow Wilson the flipside of the positive we might call big picture vision. He observes that as college president Wilson resorted to the language of a national crusade when he met resistance in a local, academic issue.

John F. Kennedy "is, in reality, a deeply serious man, reflective in his mental habits, historically minded, and given to seeing men and nations and events in the sobering context that history provides.As a human being, he is often humorous, easily bored by total routine but open to all fresh experiences, careless of the superficialities of life, warmly loyal to his friends, and oddly detached about himself. His most curious trait, in fact, is his way of discussing his most vital affairs with the dry humor and cool analytical remoteness that most people reserve for the affairs of others. _ Joseph Alsop

In front of an audience of Protestant clergy, the Catholic JFK "was drawing strength from his vulnerability.

Be civilized. Grudges are for Neanderthals. _ Hubert Humphrey

Jack and Bobby Kennedy were too young, too attached to real family to transfer affection and loyalty to those that of their blood or region or upbringing.