Dead Presidents Quotes

“We may go bigger with our presidential funerals than necessary, or than the president wanted; our monuments may be large, controversial, expensive, and hard to build; we may open the presidents’ coffins (a lot); there may be thievery and bad behavior . . . but we generally get it right in the end. Even if it takes nearly a century to do it.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“You don’t have to go down that extra path to the slave quarters, or to see Alfred’s cabin behind the giant mansion. You can skip past the section about slavery on the audio player. But if you want to see the president’s tomb, you can’t overlook Alfred. You can’t pretend he’s not there. If you want to see the final resting place of Andrew Jackson, to see his house and to pay your respects to his tomb, you’ll have to see the grave of a man he enslaved, too.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“Upon hearing that Coolidge was dead, the writer Dorothy Parker cracked, “How can you tell?”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“They weren’t all Nixon supporters, either: self-described enemies were on hand, too. “Every generation needs somebody to hate, and he was ours,” said Richard Shilling, a computer programmer. “He politicized us, he incited us, he defined our cause. No one can ever take his place.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“By 1951, Herbert Hoover was the fifth-most-admired man in the country. Asked how he’d redeemed himself after being turned into a villain, Hoover gave a simple explanation: “I outlived the bastards.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“Garfield’s own system had protected him from the bullet. What the president needed was something to protect him from his doctor.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“But as those who lived through the Civil War died off, Grant’s reputation faltered. ... A generation that remembered war as mustard gas and trenches and wounds was not going to look back fondly on the high body counts Grant’s offensives racked up.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“When Madison’s niece asked what was wrong, he answered, “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear,” and slumped over, dead.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“The presidents keep on living, long after they’re gone. It’s just a little weird. These stories start where most stories about the presidents leave off. And so the chief job of a dead president is to tell us about ourselves, our history, and how we imagine our past and future.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

“But the memorials themselves are worthy of attention as well, not only for what they tell us about the presidents but because they leave a record of what we value and believe as a country. In a country founded on the principle that we’re all created equal, we’ve built Mount Rushmore, where we’ve carved only four of our equals’ heads at twelve times normal size—because the president, the one person whom we can all elect, represents and exemplifies all of us. So fairly or unfairly, we make the presidents bigger than the rest of us.”
― Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders