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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy throughout his presidency—from the long and grueling campaign to Kennedy's tragic and unexpected assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. In A Thousand Days, Schlesinger combines intimate knowledge as one of President Kennedy's inner circle with sweeping research and historic context to provide a look at one of the most legendary presidential administrations in American history.

William Howard Taft never wanted to be president and yearned to serve as chief justice of the United States. In this assessment, author Jeffrey Rosen reveals Taft's crucial role in shaping how America balances populism against the rule of law. Taft approached each decision as president by asking whether it comported with the Constitution, seeking to put Roosevelt's activist executive orders on firm legal grounds. But unlike Roosevelt, who thought the president could do anything the Constitution didn't forbid, Taft insisted he could do only what the Constitution explicitly allowed.

Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office. Johnson faced a nearly impossible task—to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. Annette Gordon-Reed, one of America's leading historians of slavery, shows how ill-suited Johnson was for this daunting task.

An intimate portrait of the first president of the 20th century The warm and knowing biography traces Roosevelt's involvement in the politics of New York City and New York State, his celebrated, military career, and his ascent to the national political stage. Caricatured through history as the...

The plainspoken man from Missouri who never expected to be president yet rose to become one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century In April 1945, after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the presidency fell to a former haberdasher and clubhouse politician from Independence...

A masterly, posthumous work by the New York Times bestselling author of Churchill and Gladstone A protean figure and a man of massive achievement, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only man to be elected to the presidency more than twice. In a ranking of chief executives, no more than three of...

In this powerfully argued essay, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. examines the the lessons of one polyglot country after another tearing itself apart or on the brink of doing so, and points out troubling new evidence that multiculturalism gone awry here in the United States threatens to do the same.

A fresh look at the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms. Though often overlooked, Grover Cleveland was a significant figure in American presidential history. Having run for President three times and gaining the popular vote majority each time -- despite losing the electoral college in...

Bill Clinton: a president of contradictions. He was a Rhodes Scholar and a Yale Law School graduate, but he was also a fatherless child from rural Arkansas. He was one of the most talented politicians of his age, but he inspired enmity of such intensity that his opponents would stop at nothing to destroy him. He was the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win two successive presidential elections, but he was also the first president since Andrew Johnson to be impeached.

The underappreciated presidency of the military man who won the Civil War and then had to win the peace as well As a general, Ulysses S. Grant is routinely described in glowing terms—the man who turned the tide of the Civil War, who accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox, the man who had the...

Leading scholars define the special contributions and qualifications of our first president Washington's legacy is a successful experiment in collective leadership, great initiatives in establishing a strong executive branch and the formulation of innovative and lasting economic and foreign...

Elected alongside James A. Garfield, Arthur found his life transformed just four months into his term, when an assassin shot and killed Garfield, catapulting Arthur into the presidency. The assassin was a deranged man who thought he deserved a federal job through the increasingly corrupt "spoils system." To the surprise of many, Arthur, a longtime beneficiary of that system, saw that the time had come for reform. His opportunity came in the winter of 1882-83, when he pushed through the Pendleton Act, which created a professional civil service and set America on a course toward greater reforms.