From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.

New York: Random House. Affiliations
A contributing editor of The Washington Monthly Meacham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University in 2005 and holds five other honorary doctorates.

He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He is a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek a contributing editor to Time Magazine editor-at-large of WNET and a commentator on politics history and religious faith in America.