Michael Beschloss

Too few presidents have steeped themselves not just in Lincoln's words but his deeds, which is why Obama's acquaintance with the great man is so compelling - especially since, like President-elect Lincoln, Obama will take office at a perilous time.

Mrs. Johnson was one of our most important First Ladies. Quietly but firmly, she advised LBJ on rhetoric, strategy, and personal relations and helped to dampen his volatile mood swings.

Troubled celebrities are a dime a dozen.

Historians sometimes view presidents very differently from the way the public did at the time. Sometimes they don't.

Presidents fall into second-term slumps for different reasons.

Reagan's defense buildup and SDI, so ridiculed at the time, pressed Gorbachev, while his economy was collapsing, to make arms deals and improve relations with the West, which contributed to the unraveling of his empire.

Whether history will view Ronald Reagan as a great president depends, more than anything else, on one question: how much credit does he deserve for the fact that the Cold War ended far earlier than almost anyone suspected - and on terms that Americans had fantasized about for 45 years?

Kissinger's monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger's Library of Congress cache.

More than Nixon or any other 20th-century president, Clinton has devoted his life to winning and keeping the presidency.

American political scions evoke a central contradiction in our thinking. We believe - or say we do - in nurture, not nature. Yet we are comforted by the aristocratic notion that leadership might run in the bloodlines.

Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.

There is a great overlap of tragedy that played out through the generations of the Lincolns. That, coupled with the idea that many people consider Lincoln our greatest president ever and the fact that he was also a man assassinated at the age of 56 and had a widow with mental problems is what makes it all so fascinating.

You really do live through someone's life when you hear him six hours a day.

Not to be pompous about it - my thing in life is to write history and not to chat on TV 24 hours a day.

Even if you have presidents like FDR dealing with someone like Stalin, with whom he didn't exactly all the time disagree... He wasn't always in lockstep saying Stalin was wonderful all the time. Donald Trump never criticizes Putin.

You have had presidential candidates over the last 30 years who would have had a very hard time getting nominated under the old system. One example is John Kennedy.

Then you get to the last half of the 20th century, Americans are getting very skeptical about their leaders and their institutions, and another place that is affected is parties and conventions.

The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized.

The founders were very worried that if parties developed in America, you might have something like the modern Italian system, where you have 20 different parties that divide Congress and the country and can't govern.

So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960's, part of the drama was the fact that you didn't know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.