Sublime

Kennedy “had genuine regard for Johnson as a ‘political operator’ and even liked his ‘roguish qualities,’ ” Robert Dallek wrote in 1998. “More important, he viewed him as someone who, despite the limitations of the vice presidency, could contribute to the national well-being in foreign and domestic affairs and, by so doing, make Kennedy a more effe

With a note of sadness, Wicker wrote in 1983 that “the reverence, the childlike dependence, the willingness to follow where the President leads, the trust, are long gone—gone, surely, with Watergate, but gone before that.… After Lyndon Johnson, after the ugly war that consumed him, trust in ‘the President’ was tarnished forever.” That tarnishing re

John F. Kennedy, who showed leadership in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that kept the U.S. and the Soviet Union from a nuclear war—one that could have killed more than 100 million people (including me). My ninth-grade teacher was so convinced that a nuclear confrontation was likely that she assigned no homework for a few days. She said we would

The stationary presidency ended abruptly with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As president he left the continental United States twenty-one times, and all but one of those times he journeyed beyond the borders of the Greater United States. He visited Canada, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Haiti, Colombia, Panama, Trinidad, B

John Gunther was to write about Roosevelt’s “worst quality,” a “deviousness,” a “lack of candor” that “verged on deceit.” Men who had known Roosevelt longer—when he had been Governor of New York—used stronger words; in Albany it had been whispered that a commitment from the Governor could not be trusted; New York City’s ordinarily mild-mannered leg

There was an unspoken dignity, an impenetrable reserve that protected him against undue familiarity. Aside from relatives, old friends from college, and senior statesmen whom he had known—men like Josephus Daniels and Al Smith—Louis Howe was the only person to call him Franklin.

and of Augustus too.” Yet

The transition between the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth presidencies of the United States, the period that had begun at the moment on November 22, 1963, when Ken O’Donnell had said of the thirty-fifth President, “He’s gone,” had been brought to an end with Lyndon Johnson’s speech on January 8, 1964. It had lasted forty-seven days, just short of se

For a century—ever since Thomas Jefferson, to emphasize the separation between executive and legislative branches, had ended the practice—no President had appeared in person before Congress. But in April, 1913, Wilson did so, announcing to a joint session the first bill he wanted Congress to take up: a new tariff reduction measure. (The revenue los