David Wilbur

“But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still….And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Political life is not simply an arena in which the conflicting interests of various social groups in concrete material gains are fought out; it is also an arena into which status aspirations and frustrations are, as the psychologists would say, projected. It is at this point that the issues of politics, or the pretended issues of politics, become interwoven with and dependent upon the personal problems of individuals. We have, at all times, two kinds of processes going on in inextricable connection with each other: interest politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs; and status politics, the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“To everything, in other words, there is a season, and McCarthy’s hubris hastened the end of his hour upon the stage. “I was fully aware of McCarthy’s faults, which were neither few nor minor,” Cohn recalled. “He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had—in order to draw attention to the rock-bottom seriousness of the situation. He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements.” The urge to overstate, to overdramatize, to dominate the news, could be costly, and so it proved to be for McCarthy. The Wisconsin senator, Cohn said, was essentially a salesman. “He was selling the story of America’s peril,” Cohn recalled. “He knew that he could never hope to convince anybody by delivering a dry, general-accounting-office type of presentation. In consequence, he stepped up circumstances a notch or two”—and in so doing he opened himself to attacks that proved fatal. He oversold, and the customers—the public—tired of the pitch, and the pitchman.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels