Robert Dallek

My feeling is that it's a misreading of history to say that, as the Reagan supporters do, that Reagan won the Cold War.

What did in the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union.

What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression.

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.

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

I see a direct line between Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the opening to China and the detente with the Soviet Union.

F.D.R. had an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1933 when he drove 15 major bills through the Congress, and super majorities in the House and the Senate in 1935 when he won passage of Social Security.

The nation should be able to remove by an orderly constitutional process any president with an unyielding commitment to failed policies and an inability to renew the country's hope.

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.

Despite an unqualified understanding that U.S. national security was inextricably bound up with Britain's survival, F.D.R. knew that his reelection in part rested on the hope that he would keep the country out of war.

Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.

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.

From the moment he took office in January of 1961, Kennedy had been eager to settle the Cuban problem without overt military action by the United States.

In counterfactual history, nothing is certain.

The consequence of the Bay of Pigs failure wasn't an acceptance of Castro and his control of Cuba but, rather, a renewed determination to bring him down by stealth.

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.

William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in April of 1841, after only one month in office, was the first Chief Executive to hide his physical frailties.

During Grover Cleveland's second term, in the 1890s, the White House deceived the public by dismissing allegations that surgeons had removed a cancerous growth from the President's mouth; a vulcanized-rubber prosthesis disguised the absence of much of Cleveland's upper left jaw and part of his palate.

The lifelong health problems of John F. Kennedy constitute one of the best-kept secrets of recent U.S. history - no surprise, because if the extent of those problems had been revealed while he was alive, his presidential ambitions would likely have been dashed.

American politics is theatre. There is a frightening emotionalism at national conventions.

Once the public loses confidence in a president's leadership at a time of war, once they don't trust him anymore, once his credibility is sharply diminished, how does he get it back?

Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy.

As someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with most of the 20th century presidents, I have often thought that their accomplishments have little staying power in shaping popular views of their leadership.

Whatever the long-term legal prospects for same-sex marriage, President Obama's willingness to put the matter front and center in an election year can at least make him a candidate for inclusion in Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

John Kennedy had so many different medical problems that began when he was a boy. He started out with intestinal problems... spastic colitis.

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