Natural politicians are skilled actors, recreating reality, adjusting and ad-libbing, synthesizing the scenes, saying the same thing over and over again and making it seem that theyare saying it for the first time.

I want my books to last, to stand the test of time, and to do that I focus on the forces that shape the subject - the cultural and sociological geography - to capture them in a way that will explain them no matter what they are doing.

And then the industry itself was so cocky about what they were doing that they weren't seeing what was coming on the horizon with Japan and Germany and other places that were building smaller cars.

I said that I'm only there to write the truth, I'm not going to cover anything up, but I'll put everything in context and get as close to the truth of this person as I can.

And that John F. Kennedy uttered the first variation of "ask not what your country can do for you" in Detroit on Labor Day in 1960. So Detroit was really central to Democratic politics United States. Every Democratic candidate would start their fall campaigns in Cadillac Square.

It's hard to know exactly how people develop the characters they do. There could be people from humble beginnings that turn into jerks. Some characteristics are just part of that special soul of that human being.

Well, here you had a city that was selling more cars than ever before, that had this wondrous music being created, that was so vital to the labor and civil rights of this country, and yet it was dying and didn't see it, except for some sociologist at Wayne State University who predicted that Detroit was losing population by a half-million by the end of that '60s decade, and that that trend would continue taking away its tax base.