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.

You don't say that for a senator to be a great senator he has to vote against his constituency.

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.

You have to raise $100 million, probably, to be serious.

Roosevelt understands that there are things that are worth surrendering your career for, like defending the country against [Adolf] Hitler.

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.

A lot of it was, you know, you look for moments where, for instance, we were dependent on Abraham Lincoln making sure that the slaves were freed or John Kennedy bringing civil rights, or the first one I wrote about, George Washington trying to stop the British from invading and ending this country before it even began. Those were turning points where, if you had not had a president stepping up to the plate, if there wasn't a story like that, we would not be here.