Leadership meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.

Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.

House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

I can tell you if we don't see more than rhetoric, this leadership team is not secure.

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

The author's alliterative description of politics since the 1960 presidential debates: "Government by Gotcha".