QUOTES by H. W. Brands
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To me, the puzzle of Ronald Reagan is how a comparatively ordinary man, someone with not extraordinary talent, accomplished such extraordinary results. At the age of 50, no one expected that this was going to be the guy who would become, at least in my interpretation, one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When the Constitution was written in 1787, there was this supposition that American politics would be above party. The people who would staff the positions in government would have the interests of the country, or at least their states and congressional districts, at heart, and so they wouldn't form permanent political parties.
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I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
President Trump is doing what he can to act decisively. And if there's one thing most people have in mind in distinguishing the business world from the political world is that the CEO of a business can act decisively.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
If - heaven forbid - a shooter did come into my class, I wouldn't want to have to worry about getting caught in a crossfire.
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Americans knock themselves out, especially since 9/11, praising the military.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
In the early days of the republic, the secretary of state was the heir apparent to the president. Presidents could easily hand-pick their party's next candidate. The party caucuses formally selected the candidates, but presidents guided the process.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The president of the United States from the 1940s until 2017 was considered the leader of the free world - probably the most powerful person in the world - not simply in terms of America's military might but in terms of the moral authority of the president. Donald Trump has largely abdicated that.
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Everything that happens today is like something in the past, but it's also unlike things in the past. We never know until an event happens if it's the similarities or differences that matter more.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I'm the farthest thing from a bibliophile. I purge my collection regularly: If I haven't read a book in a couple of years, I try to give it to someone who will.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The American political system is based on the president taking the initiative and Congress responding. With President Trump, it's been the opposite.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
You might say presidents are drafting the first chapter of their memoirs in these seventh-year State of the Union addresses. They're trying to get the public and the media to think about their presidencies in the way that they would like to have them thought of.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Previous candidates who get elected are almost always sobered by the office and the responsibility they take on. Donald Trump shows no evidence of that. He's the same Trump that he was when he was host of his reality TV show. He's the same Trump that he was when he was a candidate.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.
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Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don't want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don't, but they should.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
It wasn't the smiling Trump that people elected. It was the frowning, glowering, angry Donald Trump that people elected.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O'Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse.
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Although this should not be so, historians reconsider presidencies based on how the presidents conduct themselves after leaving office.
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I certainly don't think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class.
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Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The more of my readers I encounter who say, often apologetically, that they are actually listeners, the more I write for the ear rather than the eye. Small things like identifying speakers in dialogue rather than relying on paragraphing to mark the shifts.
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Presidents are evaluated not by what they did by the stroke of their own pen; it's what they persuade Congress to do.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
There is a certain kind of sobering, civilizing effect that being president imposes on people. There is a certain kind of dignity with which you comport yourself. As an observer of the presidency, I have to wonder if Trump would follow that pattern.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.
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He used humor more effectively than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Reagan was not an especially warm person, but he appeared to be. Many people disliked his policies, but almost no one disliked him.
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I'm often asked, 'Why didn't Benjamin Franklin ever become president?' My short, easy answer is: He died.
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Reagan's enduring value as a conservative icon stems from his resolute preaching of the conservative gospel, in words that still warm the hearts of the most zealous conservatives. Yet Reagan's value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals.
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I had this grand plan for writing the history of the United States in six volumes. This was in the mid-1990s; I was fairly young and very ambitious. I pitched it to a publisher, who just laughed at me.
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Presidents have to decide what their popularity is for. Lyndon Johnson probably understood best that political popularity is a wasting asset. You had to use it when you had it.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.
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Booker Washington was branded an accommodationist by many of the people who criticized him.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country. And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election?
Quote by -H. W. Brands