Michael Beschloss Quotations

As you look back in history, we [the United States] have done wonderful things, the Marshal Plan is the most obvious. After World War II, we spent billions of dollars to rebuild Europe or at least part of Europe after the devastation of World War II. We did it out of charity, but we also did it to keep the Russians from getting deeply into Europe.

Then you get to the last half of the 20th century, Americans are getting very skeptical about their leaders and their institutions, and another place that is affected is parties and conventions.

The founders were very worried that if parties developed in America, you might have something like the modern Italian system, where you have 20 different parties that divide Congress and the country and can't govern.

The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized.

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.

So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960's, part of the drama was the fact that you didn't know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.

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.

He's at the center of two big historical events.

So the result was that in many cases the conventions really did represent the underlying electoral topography of the United States.

He felt that if he was able to build enormous support for fighting poverty, then that wouldn't seem something that was liberal and off on the left.