How much he was shaped by being in the hospital so much as a kid. Because he was sick, he was a reader, and because he was a reader, Kennedy had heroes. Because he had heroes, he went into politics. [Kennedy liked Sir Walter Scott, King Arthur's knights, and biographies of political leaders.] If he hadn't been sick, he might have been like everybody else in the family, a jock.

Paying tax is not a punishment. It's a responsibility.

It's a fact of life that positive reasons don't always get people to vote. You need some negative reasons.

I am no longer going to go along with this idea that we're going to keep spending and borrowing and taking over and raising taxes, that I'm going to do everything I can to change things.

Jean [Kennedy Smith, JFK's sister] told me she thinks the whole sports angle has been overplayed, that politics was central to him. This nonsense that he only went into politics because his older brother Joe was killed is not true. He was determined he was going to be in politics, but he would have waited his turn.

I thought, giving Jeb Bush the benefit of the doubt all these years, that he was sitting, saying, what a numbnut, what an idiot. My brother's a fool. He's listening to these neocons that talked him into this war. Dad would have never done this.

In the world of late-night comics, Letterman made us feel any hometown boy from Indianapolis could poke fun at celebrities and politicians and do it right to their faces.