Michael Barone has a great look back at when national political conventions actually meant something.

“The national conventions are diminishing in importance, but I would be sorry to see them go extinct. I always feel a twinge of sadness when they adjourn and the maintenance people start popping the balloons and folding up the chairs. There’s something awesome about being part of an American political tradition that goes back to the 19th century.”

Ancestry.com has discovered that John Punch, the first African enslaved for life in America, was the 11th great-grandfather of President Obama.

CNN notes researchers “found the new connection to the president’s African roots through an unlikely link, that of Obama’s Caucasian mother. President Obama’s African American roots had previously been tied to his father’s Kenyan birth. But as genealogists were pouring through documents tracing Stanley Ann Dunham’s ancestors, they found a connection to the Bunch family which had recently published DNA evidence that they had roots in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Maggie Haberman finds an interesting anecdote from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s book, Memo to the President Elect, about the 2002 Olympics uniforms:

“This episode is worth recounting because every prospective torch carrier was given, courtesy of the U.S. Olympic Committee, a special uniform consisting of a nylon sports jacket and matching pants. When my uniform arrived, I glanced at the label, which read ‘Made in Myanmar,’ that is, Burma, a country that suffers under one of the most repressive governments on Earth. It was not yet illegal to import clothing from Burma, but public pressure had induced most U.S. retailers to stop doing business there. I had my own grounds for revulsion, having visited the country to pledge support for its courageous democratic leader, the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. I was furious about the uniform but knew it was too late to reorder all the clothing, though I did go out and buy my own shirt and pants (Made in America). When I arrived in Salt Lake City, I informed Mitt Romney, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, about the gaffe; he thanked me kindly for keeping my mouth shut. The following year, Congress approved a ban on all imports from Burma.”

New book: The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade against Smut by Douglas M. Charles.

A fascinating look at the FBI’s crusade against pornography.

An excerpt of Where They Stand:The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians by Robert W. Merry in Salon suggests George W. Bush will be ranked near the bottom of all presidents.

“Based on the contemporaneous voter assessments, the objective record, and what we know of history, it’s difficult to see him even in middle-ground territory. History likely will view Bush largely as the voters did after eight years of his stewardship. And so it’s probably just as well that he doesn’t care much about the verdict of history.”

NPR talks to three political scientists and gets three different answers.

1936 — “The Republicans tried to attack FDR for his New Deal programs, saying they were too expensive and moved the country toward socialism — sound familiar?”

1980 — “Young, unknown president is elected after an unpopular administration… economy in the doldrums, problems with Iran, sense of malaise. Republicans nominate the person who finished second place in the previous nomination… after a divisive nomination struggle.”

2004 — “You have an incumbent president running for re-election in a polarized and closely divided electorate… And the result is again likely to be a close election in which the outcome will come down to a few swing states.”

A British company plans to auction of what it says is a vial of Ronald Reagan’s blood taken at the hospital where he was treated after a 1981 assassination attempt, Reuters reports.

David Grann has a must-read piece on William Alexander Morgan, a Midwesterner who helped Fidel Castro rise to power in Cuba.

“In 1957, when Castro was still widely seen as fighting for democracy, Morgan had traveled from Florida to Cuba and headed into the jungle, joining a guerrilla force. In the words of one observer, Morgan was ‘like Holden Caulfield with a machine gun.’ He was the only American in the rebel army and the sole foreigner, other than Guevara, an Argentine, to rise to the army’s highest rank, comandante.”

“After the revolution, Morgan’s role in Cuba aroused even greater fascination, as the island became enmeshed in the larger battle of the Cold War. An American who knew Morgan said that he had served as Castro’s ‘chief cloak-and-dagger man,’ and Time called him Castro’s ‘crafty, U.S.-born double agent.'”

Later, Morgan “was charged with conspiring to overthrow Castro. The Cuban government claimed that Morgan had actually been working for U.S. intelligence — that he was, in effect, a triple agent. Morgan denied the allegations, but even some of his friends wondered who he really was, and why he had come to Cuba.”

The New York Times reviews Passage to Power and notes it showcases Robert Caro’s “masterly gifts as a writer: his propulsive sense of narrative, his talent for enabling readers to see and feel history in the making and his ability to situate his subjects’ actions within the context of their times.”

“Caro’s descriptions of Johnson — and those of John and Robert Kennedy — have a novelistic depth and amplitude. He gives us a rich sense here of how past experiences shaped their interactions, how one encounter or misunderstanding often snowballed into another, and how Johnson and Robert Kennedy evinced a capacity to grow and change. Even more impressive in these pages is Mr. Caro’s ability to convey, on a visceral level, how daunting the challenges were facing Johnson upon his assumption of the presidency and the magnitude of his accomplishments in the months after Kennedy’s assassination.”

New York magazine excerpts a forthcoming biography of Ben Bradlee, Yours in Truth by Jeff Himmelman, which suggests the legendary Washington Post editor was skeptical about certain aspects of Bob Woodward’s claims about Watergate informant “Deep Throat.”

According to material from Bradlee’s own archive, he expressed “fear in my soul” that Woodward had embellished key details of his reporting.

However, Woodward tells Politico that Himmelman “failed to include” a much more recent interview he did with Bradlee that was more supportive of Woodward.”

George Will raves about Robert Caro’s Passage to Power, the fourth book in his epic series on Lyndon Johnson, which is finally out this week.

“Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s Paradise Lost that no one ever wished it longer. Not so Caro’s great work, which already fills 3,388 pages. When his fifth volume, treating the Great Society and Vietnam, arrives, readers’ gratitude will be exceeded only by their regret that there will not be a sixth.”

The New York Times reviews Eisenhower in War and Peace noting author Jean Edward Smith makes the “startling claim” that apart from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower was “the most successful president of the 20th century.”

Smith carefully traces Eisenhower’s “preparation for the presidency, and that’s what this biography is really about. (Only a quarter of the book is devoted to the White House years and beyond.) From it, Eisenhower’s own views on success in leadership emerge reasonably clearly. To reduce them to the length of a tweet — an exercise my students recommend, and which Ike might well have approved — they amount to achieving one’s ends without corrupting them.”

“Ends, Eisenhower knew, are potentially infinite. Means can never be. Therefore the task of leaders — whether in the presidency or anywhere else — is to reconcile that contradiction: to deploy means in such a way as to avoid doing too little, which risks defeat, but also too much, which risks exhaustion. Failure can come either way.”

Charles Colson, “who served time in prison for his role in the
Watergate scandal and later became an influential evangelical Christian,”
has died at age 80, NPR reports.

“Colson went from being one of the
nation’s most despised men to a hero of conservative Christians.”

Just published: Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship by Richard Aldous.

New York Times: “Together they dominated the 1980s. It is a remarkable story, which deserves the fresh account that Richard Aldous, a professor of history at Bard College, gives it in Reagan and Thatcher. His book casts new light on the heroic version in which two great leaders continued the struggle for freedom waged for generations past by ‘the English-speaking peoples.'”

In anticipation of Robert Caro’s Passage to Power — which is out in just five weeks! — the New Yorker makes available seven of Caro’s previous pieces for the magazine.

The Washington Post runs a must-read piece from David Maraniss, author of First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton and the forthcoming Barack Obama: The Story, on the similarities between the two presidents.

“They were born on August days 15 years apart, at opposite ends of the baby-boom generation, Bill Clinton in 1946 and Barack Obama in 1961. Both came into the world under circumstances that made it surpassingly unlikely either boy would grow up to be president of the United States. It is hard to imagine two places further from the centers of power than southwestern Arkansas or Hawaii. Neither state had produced a president before. But there was so much more working against them than geography.”

“William Jefferson Blythe III and Barack Hussein Obama II were the namesakes of fathers they did not know. Billy’s dad, a traveling salesman from Texas, was killed in a car crash before his son was born. Barry’s old man, a traveling student from western Kenya, also died in a car crash. His son was 21 then but had never lived with his father. Both boys’ mothers created myths about their fathers to ease the pain; in truth, the sons were almost certainly better off without them.”

A new release of The War Room, the 1993 classic documentary on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, is out today with added bonus features.

Dave Weigel: “We get a new, full movie, Return to the War Room, which re-interviews the first movie’s subjects (not Bill Clinton). It’s interesting to see the spoils of victory — these people have put together comfortable Washington/New York axis-of-power lives — but apart from some good new anecdotes, it’s not overly involving. The better stuff comes when Hegedus and Pennebaker talk at length about the film and reveal how they made it. The two big takeaways: They got lucky, and probably no one will ever get this lucky again.”

The New York Times notes Newt Gingrich is quoting from Ballots and Bandwagons by Ralph Martin, a 1964 book that focuses on five historic brokered conventions.