Quotes by Rick Perlstein

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

Stories are how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on. Joan Gideon

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

Politics is motion. John Sears

What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?

Governing is not a heros profession. It is a profession of compromises.

An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment.

He talks to peoples grievances, but he doesnt seem mad. – Elizabeth Drew

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Fords clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

Now even reformers needed political machines.

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate. Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.