My recurring nightmare is that someday I will be faced with a panel: Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all of whom will be telling me everything I got wrong about them. I know that Johnson's out there saying, 'Why is it that what you wrote about the Kennedys is twice as long as the book you wrote about me?'

A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.

Still, slander against the president and first lady continued to fill the columns of opposition papers.

Simon Cameron: “I loved my brother, as only the poor and lonely can love those with whom they have toiled and struggled up the rugged hill of life’s success – but he died bravely in the discharge of his duty.

The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn’t change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it. She could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair.

Theodore Roosevelt’s father wrote him, “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

If Roosevelt were given another chance to lead the country, he intended to make the Republican Party once more the progressive party of Abraham Lincoln, to restore “the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.

Shortly before she left for New York, she received an unwelcome present from South Carolina – a painting depicting Lincoln “with a rope around his neck, his feet chained and his body adorned with tar and feathers.

Before any outcome was made public, the radicals had worked themselves into “a fury of rage,” certain that the president “was about to give up the political fruits which had been already gathered.

Lincoln was “the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.