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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized.

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.

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.

To people who remember JFK's assassination, JFK Jr. will probably always be that boy saluting his father's coffin.

Even if you have presidents like FDR dealing with someone like Stalin, with whom he didn't exactly all the time disagree... He wasn't always in lockstep saying Stalin was wonderful all the time. Donald Trump never criticizes Putin.

Not to be pompous about it - my thing in life is to write history and not to chat on TV 24 hours a day.

I'm one of those people who lies awake all night and worries about all the horrible things that can go wrong, whether a comma was wrong.

Anyone who writes anything on any subject is standing on the shoulders of 900 people who've come before you.

You really do live through someone's life when you hear him six hours a day.

There is a great overlap of tragedy that played out through the generations of the Lincolns. That, coupled with the idea that many people consider Lincoln our greatest president ever and the fact that he was also a man assassinated at the age of 56 and had a widow with mental problems is what makes it all so fascinating.

Kings and queens are expected to have offspring to carry on the name. There are no such demands on American presidents, but there is an expectation. There is a hope.

The things we obsess about today, in 40 years seem trivial.

Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.

It is not always a treat to grow up as the heir to a world-famous leader.

American political scions evoke a central contradiction in our thinking. We believe - or say we do - in nurture, not nature. Yet we are comforted by the aristocratic notion that leadership might run in the bloodlines.

The more successful sons and daughters know when to lean on their parents - and when to go their own way. George W. Bush helped run his father's presidential campaigns in 1988 and 1992. But in his winning campaign for governor of Texas, he never mentioned his father's name in any of his campaign commercials.

More than Nixon or any other 20th-century president, Clinton has devoted his life to winning and keeping the presidency.

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