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Presidents and the dissolution of the union
The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. In his other acclaimed books about the American presidency, Fred Greenstein assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. Here, he evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents.
Using his trademark no-nonsense approach, Greenstein looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, he provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Greenstein sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day.
Presidents and the Dissolution of the Unionreveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times--and what caused others to fail.
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Master of deceit : J. Edgar Hoover and America in the age of lies
This book examines the story of America during J. Edgar Hoover's reign as head of the FBI.
BOOK
The American President
The American President is an enthralling account of American presidential actions from the assassination of William McKinley in 1901 to Bill Clinton's last night in office in January 2001. William Leuchtenburg, a prize-winning historian, portrays each of the presidents in a chronicle sparkling with anecdote and wit.
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The astronaut maker : how one mysterious engineer ran human spaceflight for a generation
\"One of the most elusive and controversial figures in NASA's history, George W. S. Abbey was called \"the Dark Lord,\" \"the Godfather,\" and \"UNO\" (unidentified NASA official) by those within NASA. From young pilot and wannabe astronaut to engineer, bureaucrat, and finally director of the Johnson Space Center (\"mission control\"), Abbey's story has never been fully told--until now. This fascinating account takes readers inside NASA to learn the real story of how Abbey rose to power and wielded it out of the spotlight. Informed by countless hours of interviews with Abbey and his family, friends, adversaries, and former colleagues, The Astronaut Maker is the ultimate insider's account of ambition and power politics at NASA\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The White House Vice Presidency
\"I am nothing, but I may be everything,\" John Adams, the first vice president, wrote of his office. And for most of American history, the \"nothing\" part of Adams's formulation accurately captured the importance of the vice presidency, at least as long as the president had a heartbeat. But a job that once was \"not worth a bucket of warm spit,\" according to John Nance Garner, became, in the hands of the most recent vice presidents, critical to the governing of the country on an ongoing basis. It is this dramatic development of the nation's second office that Joel K. Goldstein traces and explains inThe White House Vice Presidency.The rise of the vice presidency took a sharp upward trajectory with the vice presidency of Walter Mondale. In Goldstein's work we see how Mondale and Jimmy Carter designed and implemented a new model of the office that allowed the vice president to become a close presidential adviser and representative on missions that mattered. Goldstein takes us through the vice presidents from Mondale to Joe Biden, presenting the arrangements each had with his respective president, showing elements of continuity but also variations in the office, and describing the challenges each faced and the work each did. The book also examines the vice-presidential selection process and campaigns since 1976, and shows how those activities affect and/or are affected by the newly developed White House vice presidency.The book presents a comprehensive account of the vice presidency as the office has developed from Mondale to Biden. ButThe White House Vice Presidencyis more than that; it also shows how a constitutional office can evolve through the repetition of accumulated precedents and demonstrates the critical role of political leadership in institutional development. In doing so, the book offers lessons that go far beyond the nation's second office, important as it now has become.
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The new imperial presidency
In The New Imperial Presidency, Andrew Rudalevige suggests that the congressional framework meant to advise and constrain presidential conduct since Watergate has slowly eroded. Rudalevige describes the evolution of executive power in our separated system of governance. He discusses the abuse of power that prompted what he calls the \"resurgence regime\" against the imperial presidency and inquires as to how and why—over the three decades that followed Watergate—presidents have regained their standing. Chief executives have always sought to interpret constitutional powers broadly. The ambitious president can choose from an array of strategies for pushing against congressional authority; finding scant resistance, he will attempt to expand executive control. Rudalevige's important and timely work reminds us that the freedoms secured by our system of checks and balances do not proceed automatically but depend on the exertions of public servants and the citizens they serve. His story confirms the importance of the \"living Constitution,\" a tradition of historical experiences overlaying the text of the Constitution itself.
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Mexican messiah : Andrés Manuel López Obrador
The emergence of Latin American firebrands who champion the cause of the impoverished and rail against the evils of neoliberalism and Yankee imperialism—Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico—has changed the landscape of the Americas in dramatic ways. This is the first biography to appear in English about one of these charismatic figures, who is known in his country by his adopted nickname of \"Little Ray of Hope.\"
The book follows López Obrador's life from his early years in the flyspecked state of Tabasco, his university studies, and the years that he lived among the impoverished Chontal Indians. Even as he showed an increasingly messianic élan to uplift the downtrodden, he confronted the muscular Institutional Revolutionary Party in running twice for governor of his home state and helping found the leftist-nationalist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). As the PRD's national president, he escalated his political and ideological warfare against his former president, Carlos Salinas, and other \"conspirators\" determined to link Mexico to the global economy at the expense of the poor. His strident advocacy of the \"have-nots\" lifted López Obrador to the mayorship of Mexico City, which he rechristened the \"City of Hope.\" Its ubiquitous crime, traffic, pollution, and housing problems have made the capital a tomb for most politicians. Not for López Obrador. Through splashy public works, monthly stipends to senior citizens, huge marches, and a dawn-to-dusk work schedule, he converted the position into a trampoline to the presidency. Although he lost the official count by an eyelash, the hard-charging Tabascan cried fraud, took the oath as the nation's \"legitimate president,\" and barnstormed the country, excoriating the \"fascist\" policies of President Felipe Calderón and preparing to redeem the destitute in the 2012 presidential contest.
Grayson views López Obrador as quite different from populists like Chávez, Morales, and Kirchner and argues that he is a \"secular messiah, who lives humbly, honors prophets, gathers apostles, declares himself indestructible, relishes playing the role of victim, and preaches a doctrine of salvation by returning to the values of the 1917 Constitution— fairness for workers, Indians' rights, fervent nationalism, and anti-imperialism.\"
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Lincoln, the law, and presidential leadership
From his early years as a small-town lawyer through his rise to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln respected the rule of law.Secession and the Civil War, however, led him to expand presidential power in ways that, over time, transformed American society.
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A feminist in the White House : Midge Costanza, the Carter years, and America's culture wars
Midge Costanza was one of the unlikeliest of White House insiders. But for a time during the seventies, this \"loud-mouthed, pushy little broad\" with no college education was a prominent focal point of the American culture wars. In this book, Doreen J. Mattingly draws on Costanza's life to tell a wider, but heretofore neglected, story of the hopeful yet fraught era of gender politics in late 70s Washington - a history that is not just important to US women's and presidential history but which continues to resonate in politics today.
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