Yet he proved to be a bold leader who used the malleable executive system to his advantage. In this biography of the tenth President of the United States, Edward P. Crapol challenges previous depictions of Tyler as a die-hard advocate of states' rights, limited government, and a strict interpretation of the Constitution.In pursuit of his agenda, Crapol argues, Tyler exploited executive prerogatives and manipulated constitutional requirements in ways that violated his professed allegiance to a strict interpretation of the Constitution. He set precedents that his successors in the White House invoked to create an American empire and expand presidential power.Crapol also highlights Tyler's enduring faith in America's national destiny and his belief that boundless territorial expansion would preserve the Union as a slaveholding republic. When Tyler, a Virginian, opted for secession and the Confederacy in 1861, he was stigmatized as America's traitor president for having betrayed the republic he once led. As Crapol demonstrates, Tyler's story anticipates the modern imperial presidency in all its power and grandeur, as well as its darker side.

    It illuminates the presidential center of power by providing an indepth look at the day-by-day decisions and dilemmas of the thirty-fifth president as he faced everything from the threat of nuclear war abroad to racial unrest at home. "A narrative that leaves us not only with a new understanding of Kennedy as President, but also with a new understanding of what it means to be President" (The New York Times).

    This gap has now been filled with Dr. Rayback's authoritative work on Millard Fillmore. It is no eulogy, rather it is honest and unprejudiced, describing and assaying his defects of judgment such as his leadership of two abused parties at the beginning and at the end of his political career, but asserting that all this -- even his approval of the fugitive slave law -- was far outweighed by his moral convictions and concrete actions against the institution of human slavery. To Western New Yorkers this book will of course have special appeal, but it is by no means unduly concerned with local history; it is the story of a life not only of dignity and integrity but of permanent achievement on both the local and national scene. The Buffalo Historical Society takes pride in this presentation of its first president.

     Prizewinning historian Glen Jeansonne delves into the life of our most misunderstood president, offering up a surprising new portrait of Herbert Hoover—dismissing previous assumptions and revealing a political Progressive in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt, and the most resourceful American since Benjamin Franklin.   Orphaned at an early age and raised with strict Quaker values, Hoover earned his way through Stanford University. His hardworking ethic drove him to a successful career as an engineer and multinational businessman. After the Great War, he led a humanitarian effort that fed millions of Europeans left destitute, arguably saving more lives than any man in history. As commerce secretary under President Coolidge, Hoover helped modernize and galvanize American industry, and orchestrated the rehabilitation of the Mississippi Valley after the Great Flood of 1927.   As president, Herbert Hoover became the first chief executive to harness federal power to combat a crippling global recession. Though Hoover is often remembered as a “do-nothing” president, Jeansonne convincingly portrays a steadfast leader who challenged congress on an array of legislation that laid the groundwork for the New Deal. In addition, Hoover reformed America’s prisons, improved worker safety, and fought for better health and welfare for children. Unfairly attacked by Franklin D. Roosevelt and blamed for the Depression, Hoover was swept out of office in a landslide. Yet as FDR’s government grew into a bureaucratic behemoth, Hoover became the moral voice of the GOP and a champion of Republican principles—a legacy re-ignited by Ronald Reagan and which still endures today.   A compelling and rich examination of his character, accomplishments and failings, this is the magnificent biography of Herbert Hoover we have long waited for.

    Before becoming the ninth president of the United States in 1841, Harrison was instrumental in shaping the early years of westward expansion. Robert M. Owens now explores that era through the lens of Harrison’s career, providing a new synthesis of his role in the political development of Indiana Territory and in shaping Indian policy in the Old Northwest.Owens traces Harrison’s political career as secretary of the Northwest Territory, territorial delegate to Congress, and governor of Indiana Territory, as well as his military leadership and involvement with Indian relations. Thomas Jefferson, who was president during the first decade of the nineteenth century, found in Harrison the ideal agent to carry out his administration’s ruthless campaign to extinguish Indian land titles.More than a study of the man, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer is a cultural biography of his fellow settlers, telling how this first generation of post-Revolutionary Americans realized their vision of progress and expansionism. It surveys the military, political, and social world of the early Ohio Valley and shows that Harrison’s attitudes and behavior reflected his Virginia background and its eighteenth-century notions as much as his frontier milieu.To this day, we live with the echoes of Harrison’s proclamations, the boundaries set by his treaties, and the ramifications of his actions. Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer offers a much needed reappraisal of Harrison’s impact on the nation’s development and key lessons for understanding American sentiments in the early republic.

    The chiefs of staff, often referred to as "the gatekeepers," wield tremendous power in Washington and beyond; they decide who is allowed to see the president, negotiate with Congress to push POTUS's agenda, and--most crucially--enjoy unparalleled access to the leader of the free world. Each chief can make or break an administration, and each president reveals himself by the chief he picks.Through extensive, intimate interviews with all seventeen living chiefs and two former presidents, award-winning journalist and producer Chris Whipple pulls back the curtain on this unique fraternity. In doing so, he revises our understanding of presidential history, showing us how James Baker's expert managing of the White House, the press, and Capitol Hill paved the way for the Reagan Revolution--and, conversely, how Watergate, the Iraq War, and even the bungled Obamacare rollout might have been prevented by a more effective chief.Filled with shrewd analysis and never-before-reported details, The Gatekeepers offers an essential portrait of the toughest job in Washington.

    In President without a Party―the first full-scale biography in more than fifty years and the first new academic study of him in eight decades―Christopher J. Leahy explores the life of the tenth chief executive of the United States.Born in the Virginia Tidewater into an elite family sympathetic to the ideals of the American Revolution, Tyler, like his father, worked as an attorney before entering politics. Leahy uses a wealth of primary source materials to chart Tyler’s early political path, from his entry into the Virginia legislature in 1811, through his stints as a congressman and senator, to his vice-presidential nomination on the Whig ticket for the campaign of 1840. When newly elected William Henry Harrison died unexpectedly a mere month after assuming the presidency, Tyler became the first vice president to become president because of the death of the incumbent. Leahy traces Tyler’s ascendance to the highest office in the land and unpacks the fraught dynamics between Tyler and his fellow Whigs, who ultimately banished the beleaguered president from their ranks and stymied his election bid three years later.Leahy also examines the president’s personal life, especially the relationships he shared with his two wives and fifteen children. In the end, Leahy suggests, politics fulfilled Tyler the most, often to the detriment of his family relationships. Such was true even after his presidency, when Virginians elected him to the Confederate Congress in 1861, and northerners and Unionists branded him a “traitor president.”The most complete accounting of Tyler’s life and career, Leahy’s biography makes an original contribution to the fields of politics, family life, and slavery in the antebellum South. Moving beyond the standard, often shortsighted studies that describe Tyler as simply a defender of the Old South’s dominant ideology of states’ rights and strict construction of the Constitution, Leahy offers a nuanced portrayal of a president who favored a middle-of-the-road, bipartisan approach to the nation’s problems. This strategy did not make Tyler popular with either the Whigs or the opposition Democrats while in office―or with historians and biographers ever since. Moreover, his most significant achievement as president―the annexation of Texas―exacerbated sectional tensions and put the United States on the road to civil war.

    presidents have captured the imagination of the American people as has Harry S. Truman, “the man from Missouri.”In this major new biography, Robert H. Ferrell, widely regarded as an authority on the thirty-third president, challenges the popular characterization of Truman as a man who rarely sought the offices he received, revealing instead a man who—with modesty, commitment to service, and basic honesty—moved with method and system toward the presidency.Truman was ambitious in the best sense of the word. His powerful commitment to service was accompanied by a remarkable shrewdness and an exceptional ability to judge people. He regarded himself as a consummate politician, a designation of which he was proud. While in Washington, he never succumbed to the “Potomac fever” that swelled the heads of so many officials in that city. A scrupulously honest man, Truman exhibited only one lapse when, at the beginning of 1941, he padded his Senate payroll by adding his wife and later his sister.From his early years on the family farm through his pivotal decision to use the atomic bomb in World War II, Truman’s life was filled with fascinating events. Ferrell’s exhaustive research offers new perspectives on many key episodes in Truman’s career, including his first Senate term and the circumstances surrounding the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In addition, Ferrell taps many little-known sources to relate the intriguing story of the machinations by which Truman gained the vice presidential nomination in 1944, a position which put him a heartbeat away from the presidency.No other historian has ever demonstrated such command over the vast amounts of material that Robert Ferrell brings to bear on the unforgettable story of Truman’s life. Based upon years of research in the Truman Library and the study of many never-before-used primary sources, Harry S. Truman is destined to become the authoritative account of the nation’s favorite president.

    A biography of the only president to be elected to non-consecutive terms reveals a tough, honest, courageous leader who took responsibility for his actions and wasn't afraid to take on corruption where he saw it.

    An American Iliad in the guise of contemporary political reportage, What It Takes penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that makes a true candidate? As he recounts the frenzied course of the 1988 presidential race -- and scours the psyches of contenders from George Bush and Robert Dole to Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer comes up with the answers, in a book that is vast, exhaustively researched, exhilarating, and sometimes appalling in its revelations.

    Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slaveowner, while Adams, the overachiever from New England's rising middling classes, painfully aware he was no aristocrat, was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist view of government. They worked closely in the crucible of revolution, crafting the Declaration of Independence and leading, with Franklin, the diplomatic effort that brought France into the fight. But ultimately, their profound differences would lead to a fundamental crisis, in their friendship and in the nation writ large, as they became the figureheads of two entirely new forces, the first American political parties. It was a bitter breach, lasting through the presidential administrations of both men, and beyond. But late in life, something remarkable happened: these two men were nudged into reconciliation. What started as a grudging trickle of correspondence became a great flood, and a friendship was rekindled, over the course of hundreds of letters. In their final years they were the last surviving founding fathers and cherished their role in this mighty young republic as it approached the half century mark in 1826. At last, on the afternoon of July 4th, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration, Adams let out a sigh and said, "At least Jefferson still lives." He died soon thereafter. In fact, a few hours earlier on that same day, far to the south in his home in Monticello, Jefferson died as well. Arguably no relationship in this country's history carries as much freight as that of John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Gordon Wood has more than done justice to these entwined lives and their meaning; he has written a magnificent new addition to America's collective story.

    Drawing on extensive research, Ferling depicts a reluctant revolutionary, a leader who was deeply troubled by the warfare that he helped to make, and a fiercely independent statesman.

    The shocking murder of President William McKinley threw into stark relief the emerging new world order of what would come to be known as the American Century. The President and the Assassin is the story of the momentous years leading up to that event, and of the very different paths that brought together two of the most compelling figures of the era: President William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who murdered him.The two men seemed to live in eerily parallel Americas. McKinley was to his contemporaries an enigma, a president whose conflicted feelings about imperialism reflected the country’s own. Under its popular Republican commander-in-chief, the United States was undergoing an uneasy transition from a simple agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse spreading its influence overseas by force of arms. Czolgosz was on the losing end of the economic changes taking place—a first-generation Polish immigrant and factory worker sickened by a government that seemed focused solely on making the rich richer. With a deft narrative hand, journalist Scott Miller chronicles how these two men, each pursuing what he considered the right and honorable path, collided in violence at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.Along the way, readers meet a veritable who’s who of turn-of-the-century America: John Hay, McKinley’s visionary secretary of state, whose diplomatic efforts paved the way for a half century of Western exploitation of China; Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist whose incendiary rhetoric inspired Czolgosz to dare the unthinkable; and Theodore Roosevelt, the vainglorious vice president whose 1898 charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba is but one of many thrilling military adventures recounted here. Rich with relevance to our own era, The President and the Assassin holds a mirror up to a fascinating period of upheaval when the titans of industry grew fat, speculators sought fortune abroad, and desperate souls turned to terrorism in a vain attempt to thwart the juggernaut of change.

    senator, secretary of state, president of the United States (1825-1829), and, finally, U.S. representative (the only ex-president to serve in the House). On the basis of a thorough study of Adams' seventy-year diary among a host of other documents, the author gives us a richer account than we have yet had of JQAs life - his passionate marriage to Louisa Johnson, his personal tragedies (two sons lost to alcoholism), his brilliant diplomacy, his recurring depression, his exasperating behavior - and shows us why in the end, only Abraham Lincoln's death evoked a greater outpouring of national sorrow in nineteenth-century America. We come to see how much Adams disliked politics and hoped for more from life than high office; how he sought distinction in literary and scientific endeavors, and drew his greatest pleasure from being a poet, critic, translator, essayist, botanist, and professor of oratory at Harvard; how tension between the public and private Adams vexed his life; and how his frustrations kept him masked and aloof (and unpopular).

    Representing a lifetime of study by the great American poet, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years distills Sandburg's monumental six volume set into a single one-book edition. By gleaning every possible reference from history, literature, and popular lore, Sandburg successfully captures not only the legendary president, but also Lincoln the man. He reveals exactly who Lincoln was, and what forces in his life shaped his personality. More than 100 black-and-white historical photographs and linecuts show Lincoln himself, the places he went, and the people who knew him.