Sometimes People Will Find Things That Are

When You Are An Historian, There's Probably Nothing That Matters More Than To Be Recognized By Your Colleagues In Your Own Profession. I Was Lucky Enough To Win The Pulitzer Prize For History. I Had To Give A Talk Right After That To Some Young People. The Most Important Thing To Tell Them, I Think, Is That You Can't Ever Know That It's Going To Turn Out That Way.

While Its [harvard's] Undergraduate Life Was Still Controlled [in 1908-1912] By A Select Group Of Rich And Fashionable Families Whose Sons Merely Arrived When They Were Due To Fill The Places That Had Been Waiting For Them From The Day They Were Born, It Was, At The Same Time, Opening Its Doors To A More Cosmopolitan Student Population And Beginning To Take The First Tentative Steps Toward Mitigating The Evils Of A Pyramidal Social System That Concentrated All Its Social Honors Upon The Rich And The Wellborn.

What Interested Me Most About The Kennedys Was The Family Situation. Somehow, They Had Created This Family That Lasted Over Time, They Had A Sense Of Connection To One Another. Especially Now, When People Are Spread All Over The Country And They Don't See Grandparents And Parents, This Family Bonded Together.

The Only Protection As A Historian Is To Institute A Process Of Research And Writing That Minimizes The Possibility Of Error. And That I Have Tried To Do, Aided By Modern Technology, Which Enables Me, Having Long Since Moved Beyond Longhand, To Use A Computer For Both Organizing And Taking Notes.

All Through My Childhood, My Father Kept From Me The Knowledge That The Daily Papers Printed Daily Box Scores, Allowing Me To Believe That Without My Personal Renderings Of All Those Games He Missed While He Was At Work, He Would Be Unable To Follow Our Team In The Only Proper Way A Team Should Be Followed, Day By Day, Inning By Inning. In Other Words, Without Me, His Love For Baseball Would Be Forever Incomplete.