The Presidency: A Mind with Few Limits

A Mind with Few Limits

By the reckoning of Dumas Malone, the world's preeminent Jeffersonian biographer, "No other American document has been read so often or listened to by so many weary and perspiring audiences" as the Declaration of Independence. Certainly new records were set this Fourth as the words of Thomas Jefferson about "self-evident" truths and "unalienable rights" were beamed from the base of the Statue of Liberty around the globe. "Those well-worn phrases have never lost their potency and charm," insists Malone, though at the time they were first introduced, Jefferson was still miffed that his original text had been edited by the Continental...

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