Mark K. Updegrove > Quotes

“It was the year of Birmingham, when the civil rights issue was impressed on the nation in a way that nothing else before had been able to do. It was the most decisive year in the Negro’s fight for equality. Never before had there been such a coalition of conscience on this issue.
(Page 213) quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.”
― Mark K. Updegrove, Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency

“Most important, he didn’t lust for power. Imagine Lenin, Mao, or Castro—revolutionaries all—willingly ceding power and giving it back to the masses (or at least to a voting constituency of white male property owners) to decide who would succeed him. Washington was the one man in American history who was bigger than the government itself; the hero of the revolution could have been the emperor of the state he, more than any other, helped found. Instead, he ensured that government would remain in the hands of the people. In doing so, he set his most important precedent, leaving office after two terms in office and exemplifying a fundamental Democratic ideal.”
― Mark K. Updegrove, Baptism by Fire: Eight Presidents Who Took Office in Times of Crisis

“Baseball held particular significance for father and son. Though football dominated West Texas sports culture, it was baseball that captured young George’s imagination.”
― Mark K. Updegrove, The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush

“Cool and detached, he was pragmatic about fate’s mercurial whims; his attitude spoke to the restless, manic pace in which he would go through life—the vitality he exuded, his insatiable intellectual curiosity and quest for adventure and all things new, his sometimes-touching compassion for others and often inexplicable recklessness. It could all go at any time, his life’s experience whispered in his ear. Get the most out of it. Don’t waste a moment. “The point is,” he once told his friend George Smathers, “you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth. That’s what I’m doing.”
― Mark K. Updegrove, Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency

“Image was Kennedy’s currency, and he radiated it in spades.”(Page 60)”
― Mark K. Updegrove, Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency