(FORTUNE Magazine) – LETTERS TO FORTUNE

READ HIS LIPS

In "Stop Kidding Us!" (August 15) you suggest that whoever is elected President would raise taxes. I know that this candidate wouldn't.... This election is a referendum on whether or not we'll keep taxes down--because I will not let Congress take away our tax cuts. I'm running for President, in part, to win a mandate from the American people not to raise taxes.... I will lower the deficit by restraining spending, and I will not raise your taxes, period. In sum, the answer is clear--no tax increase, restrain spending.

George [H.W.] Bush

Washington

--October 24, 1988

On Capitol Hill, he will be a relentless lobbyist. Says longtime Clinton friend and adviser Senator David Pryor of Arkansas: "J.F.K. and L.B.J. were the all-time telephone freaks. But the country ain't seen nothing yet. Clinton will have three phones going at once. He has an adrenaline gland the size of a basketball."

-- "His First 100 Days," November 30, 1992

The Vietnam War: The Costs

There is an almost profligate disparity between the huge quantities of U.S. bullets and bombs poured from the air upon targets in Vietnam and the military and economic damage the bullets and bombs do, in the aggregate.... The thought of an A-47 [plane] firing up to 18,000 rounds per minute into treetops brings to mind the bizarre image in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, of the French warship off the African coast: "There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush ... firing into a continent."

--April 1966

Its leadership is one of the Democratic party's most perplexing aspects. Some political leaders enjoy galloping out ahead of the troops, as did Franklin Roosevelt. Some march along in their midst, as did Harry Truman. Adlai Stevenson hovers on the flanks, cogitating.

-- "The Leaderless, Lively Democrats," January 1954

Richard Nixon's Very Personal White House

The Nixon White House is like a well-managed law firm: orderly, restrained, and decorous.... The desire for privacy in chambers coincides with the President's feeling that an aura of pomp and inaccessibility about the White House is necessary to restore the prestige of the presidency, which Nixon--like many other observers--believes to have become tarnished in recent years.

--July 1970

A WHIFF OF NORMALCY

In retrospect, the Dallas tragedy does seem to have touched off a long nightmare. For years, there was a running argument about whether we had become a "sick society." ... The sheer variety of our troubles contributed to the feeling that the system was disintegrating. Assassinations, the regular burning of our cities every summer, the turmoil over Vietnam, the revolt on the campuses, the rise of the counterculture, drugs, bombings, Watergate, the collapse of the Nixon Administration, the oil embargo, the worst recession since the 1930's, double-digit inflation--the litany of disasters was mind-numbing.

-- August 1976

Research by Kate Bonamici and Chris Zappone