John Dickerson

My piece in The Atlantic about George.  

From Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island.

As we prepare to move apartments– just a few blocks away– we’ve been packing up the books with all of their underlined passages. Some of those passages are being posted here.     A post shared by John Dickerson Library (@jfdlibrary) As we prepare to move apartments– just a few blocks away– we’ve been packing […]

I started writing a note to myself to help me understand what this year 2020 meant. I am posting it here in this low-key way for those I’ve come to know over the years. Please click “Read the full post.” Then click the link to End of Year Thoughts 2020. Thank you for your support […]

     I was recently in a discussion about presidential standards. Someone made the same case Senator John Cornyn does in this Tweet, that we should evaluate presidents by what we can see them do. I argued, as I do in my book, that this is not just wrong, but a big problem. The job […]

In 1976 government officials thought there was going to be an outbreak of swine flu that would kill as many or more than the 1918 flu. (Some good background). They developed a vaccine and these PSA’s were created to convince people to take it. Whoa…Wait ’till you hear about Dotty!

“Members joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes. Some embraced one another, others wept like Children. I have felt ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country.” — Congressman George W. Julian on passage of 13th Amendment.    

John Lithgow on his new play, “Stories by Heart,” and playing Churchill   This interview for the CBS This Morning podcast is from 2018 and it is still one of my favorites. “My favorite podcast this year was talking to John Lithgow. We were in his green room right before his amazing one man show. […]

I am continuing to go through old notes and papers. I found a series of sentences I’d written down from Charles Dickens’ Selected Journalism. This one amused me: “What I particularly want to impress upon you is, that it is not enough to see a thing and go home and describe it, but that the […]

I like this metaphor: This is from Harry Emerson Fosdick’s book The Meaning of Prayer.  

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Reading President Obama’s book A Promised Land, I keep coming across passages that I wish I could drop into The Hardest Job in the World. Here is Obama’s passage on the mystery of his own schedule: Here is what I wrote about the presidential schedule when I was trying to help readers understand the job […]