When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself. - Doris Kearns Goodwin

I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a leader perhaps as indispensable in his way as was Lincoln to the social and political direction of the country. After living with the subject

Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party — including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.