Scott Farris > Quotes

“The great actors always play themselves.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“Stevenson told the legionnaires that patriotism “is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. . . . For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.”
― Scott Farris, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation

“Dewey could only shake his head in wonder at those who insisted on ideological purity and who wanted to purge the party of moderates and liberals. If the Republican Party were only a party of conservatives, Dewey warned, and truly became the party of reaction that yearned to return the nation to “the miscalled ‘good old days’ of the nineteenth century . . . you can bury the Republican Party as the deadest pigeon in the country.”
― Scott Farris, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation

“political environment. But there is always a thin line between a peaceful election and armed conflict. We acknowledge this close relationship in the way we use martial jargon to discuss our politics. Candidates battle for states, campaigns are run from war rooms, commercials are part of a media blitz, and campaign volunteers are foot soldiers. “Politics,” the Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz said, “is the womb in which war develops.” Violent conflict is born out in other nations where the martial language of politics is not metaphorical. In the same year that McCain and Obama”
― Scott Farris, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation

“Kennedy echoed Stanley Baldwin that a democracy is always two years behind a dictator.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“Eisenhower accepted and used the power of television. Stevenson felt obliged to critique it. In an article for Fortune magazine published shortly after the campaign, Stevenson worried that television was corrupting the ability of the body politic to think critically. “The extensions of our senses, which we find so fascinating, are not adding to the discriminations of our minds, since we need increasingly to take the reading of a needle on a dial to discover whether we think something is good or bad, right or wrong,” he wrote.”
― Scott Farris, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation

“For him (JFK) as he imagined of the British aristocracy, policies were less important than character traits such as dignity, courage, and honor. They did not pose as angry young men, but brought an almost lighthearted approach to politics. The very idea of politics invigorating society rather than dominating society very much appealed to Kennedy.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“it is not surprising that some, such as the historian John R. Vile, suggest we consider the concession as a form of military surrender or even a funeral oration. Just as after a war, the public wants peace after a presidential campaign. They hope that politicians will emulate that most”
― Scott Farris, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation

“(John F.) Kennedy was an elitist and not a populist. He was enthralled by a certain British aristocratic view of politics in which an enlightened ruling class makes reasoned, rational decisions that are in the interest of the more emotional and easily manipulated masses.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“In preaching conservative doctrine, Goldwater's jeremiads seemed to be preaching the end of the old world, while Reagan's pep talks seemed to trumpet the beginning of a new one.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“As sometimes happens with men who wish to fight but do not or cannot, Reagan developed a romantic image of the military.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“You do not know the dishonest purposes of these men as well as I do,” Douglas told Lincoln of the secessionists. “If I were president, I’d convert or hang them all within forty-eight hours.”
― Scott Farris, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation

“One biographer said Kennedy lived along the line where charm became power.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“They (Reagan and Kennedy) had some combination of cheerfulness and vulnerability that made them seem like boys on adventure who had become lost in needed a small kindness to get them back on the right path.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“Reagan's failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity.”
― Scott Farris, Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

“told his supporters that the campaign had “pushed this country in the direction of peace,” adding, “If we pushed the day of peace just one day closer, then every minute and every hour and every bone-crushing effort in this campaign was worth the entire effort.” When there is no overriding issue on which a campaign was based, the losing candidates have often offered a laundry list of causes for which they promise to keep fighting. This particular rhetorical device has been”
― Scott Farris, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation