“Yet Barkley drew back. Perhaps he, like Harry Truman, knew that the quiet power of incumbency easily overcomes the noise of crowds and bands.”

“Truman makes friends without influencing people,' noted Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 'Dewey influences people without making friends.”

“It involves no disrespect for Mrs. Truman to say that her daughter gets a bigger hand than she does,' observed Richard Rovere. 'This country may be run by and for mothers, but its goddesses are daughters. Margaret's entrance comes closer than anything else to bringing down the house.”

“Never far removed from the progressive consciousness was a question that was never easily answered: of what value was it to punish offending Democrats, if one merely replaced them with infinitely more retrograde Republicans?”

“Every presidential nominee says his vice president will be given a serious, important role in his new administration. But it almost never materializes. A strong, totally self-centered politician like Tom Dewey sharing his hard-won power with a vice president? Don''t count on it.' - David Brinkley”

“Author points out in Woodrow Wilson the flipside of the positive we might call big picture vision. He observes that as college president Wilson resorted to the language of a national crusade when he met resistance in a local, academic issue.”

“TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: "It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk.”