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Kennedy was a lot of fun, always. He had something going on. But not Nixon.

Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate.

When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.

Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

I remember the day Richard Nixon won in 1968. That was a time that seemed certain to bring about long awaited seismic change in America. But events of tragic proportion took us on a turn. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were suddenly dead.

That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man.

By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.