So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington.

As parties began to develop around the turn of the 19th century, you had party nominees for President nominated in caucuses made up of party members in Congress.

The point is that you see candidates running in these different kinds of contests. A primary shows you something that's different from a state party convention, which shows you something that is different than what a caucus shows you.

Under the system that we now have to nominate presidential candidates, for instance, I would prefer that we have a system that is closer to, say, the one we had in the 1960s.

To people who remember JFK's assassination, JFK Jr. will probably always be that boy saluting his father's coffin.

What if we had a culture that prevented these presidents from being courageous? And I worry now that we have a system that makes it very hard to choose people who would make the same courage choice as our great presidents. And I guess what I would say is, in this next campaign, take a look at the people who are running. If they don't remind you of the great presidents, do not vote for them.

We [the United States] are the world's only superpower right now, so everyone notices every bit of what we do or don't do.