Presidential Biography Quotes

Presidents need to be critically studied and analyzed.

If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you're offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.

Lincoln, the Man of the People

As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.

Even though Lyndon Johnson's presidency was in many ways scarred forever by the war in Vietnam, and destroyed in a lot of ways, he - as a character - was even larger than his presidency. Being able to get to know him well, that firsthand relationship with this large character, I think is what drew me to writing books about presidents.

Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.

Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography, 'Why Not the Best?,' published in 1975.

Pres. Lyndon Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth-as on the question of civil rights-he functioned like most men, as a product of his background.

Donald Trump, perhaps the least historically minded man ever to reach the pinnacle of power, has fallen under the spell of what (and who) has come before. What's revealing about a President's sense of history is less about the history itself than about what that President's perspective on the history tells us about him.

Once you choose to run for president of the United States and succeed, your earlier life, your biography, is a major part of American history.

In daring to re-tell the stories of the last twelve American presidents, both public and private, I knew I would incur some outrage with 'American Caesars.'

One I'm deeply into is Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals." I was the only person in the US who hadn't read it.

I've done 44 portraits of Obama because he's the 44th president.

I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: 'It Wasn't My Fault' and 'It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn't Been There.'

It has been a habit of presidents to try to write their own history, to establish themselves as a legitimate embodiment of America's past and shaper of America's future.

Every presidential library is a reflection of the society at the time in terms of the media in it.

Gerald Ford is one of the relatively few living Americans who not only admires Richard Nixon, but actually likes him.