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

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

My reading was always a kind of living,” he explained later, “a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.

And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.