A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
A president, however, must stand somewhat apart, as all great presidents have known instinctively. Then the language which has the power to survive its own utterance is the most likely to move those to whom it is immediately spoken.
All Coolidge had to do in 1924 was to keep his mean trap shut, to be elected. All Harding had to do in 1920 was repeat ''Avoid foreign entanglements.'' All Hoover had to do in 1928 was to endorse Coolidge. All Roosevelt had to do in 1932 was to point to Hoover.
All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah.
Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
As far as the job of President goes, its rewarding and I've given before this group the definition of happiness for the Greeks. I'll define it again: the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, that the Presidency provides some happiness.
Being a President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed.
But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.
But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.
Frankly, I don't mind not being president. I just mind that someone else is.
From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.
I don't have any problem with a reporter or a news person who says the President is uninformed on this issue or that issue. I don't think any of us would challenge that. I do have a problem with the singular focus on this, as if that's the only standard by which we ought to judge a president. What we learned in the last administration was how little having an encyclopedic grasp of all the facts has to do with governing.
I feel very proud, even though they didn't elect me, to be President of the Argentines.
I'd rather be right than President.
I'm the only president you've got.
If presidents don't do it to their wives, they do it to the country.
If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.
In America, the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever.
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.