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"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."
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"Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are."
"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value."
"The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves."
"It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice."
"When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is."
Explore more quotes by Michael Beschloss
"Oftentimes during the period in which conventions really did business, you had situations where the delegates were divided and you would have ballot after ballot before there was a final nominee."
"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."
"The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized."
"From the beginning of the presidential nominating conventions in the 1830's really through the 1950's, you had conventions that actually did real business."
"You have had presidential candidates over the last 30 years who would have had a very hard time getting nominated under the old system. One example is John Kennedy."
"So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington."
"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."
"To people who remember JFK's assassination, JFK Jr. will probably always be that boy saluting his father's coffin."
"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."
"First of all, there's no mention of political parties in the Constitution, so you begin American history with not only no political conventions but also no parties."
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