On the court, Jason Collins is not a huge basketball star, but he has already claimed his place in civil rights history as the first openly gay athlete to play in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there’s no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
As a candidate, Obama disdained the game of politics, a self-conscious contrast to all the tireless political athletes named Clinton. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
Obama was elected on a slogan of hope and change because both were in short supply: the military exhausted by two wars, the banks failing their public trust, the U.S. Congress a comedy of dysfunction, and a federal government that seemed designed to idle on the sidelines. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
After 9/11, whatever the evidence of intelligence failures, many people still saw that attack as almost unimaginable, so brutal and brazen an assault. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
America’s presidents tend to die young. Maybe it is in the nature of the men who reach such heights, or of the job once they attain it. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
Even if it wasn’t always morning in America during the years of his presidency, Reagan’s eagerness to insist that it was tapped into a longing among voters. They didn’t want to picture themselves turning down their thermostats and buttoning up their cardigans. They wanted to strut again. Reagan opened his arms and said, ‘Walk this way.’ Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
George W. Bush, though a president’s son, is cast as Reagan’s heir even more than his father’s. Nancy Gibbs Read Quote
