The Remaking Of A President

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama himself told veteran political reporter Richard Wolffe, 'You'll get more access than anyone else', and Renegade is his unique story of how a political newcomer with no money and an outsider's name grew into the world's most powerful leader. But it is also a uniquely intimate portrait of the person behind the iconic posters and the man codenamed 'Renegade' by his Secret Service protectors. Wolffe portrays an historic candidate and his - until now - inscrutable character and campaign in untold, stunning detail, from his university lecturer's office in Iowa to the Oval Office in Washington. With unprecedented access, gained over a dozen exclusive interviews with Obama, Wolffe shares with us his front row seat. We fly on the candidate's plane and ride in his bus on an odyssey across a country in crisis; we stand next to him at a bar on the night he secures the nomination; and feel the tension backstage as he delivers his convention speech to a stadium crowd and a transfixed TV audience. Renegade is not just an election epic but is also an insightful biography of the new President of the United States.

Based on groundbreaking original reporting, an extensive new look at Donald Trump's relationships with women, revealing new accusations of sexual misconduct, exploring the roots of his alleged predatory behavior, and illustrating how Trump's presidency has helped catalyze the #MeToo movement and revitalize women's activism.

“[White] revolutionized the art of political reporting.” —William F. Buckley The Making of the President 1972 is the fourth book in Theodore H. White’s landmark series, a riveting account of the 1972 presidential campaign and Richard M. Nixon’s precedent-shattering landslide victory. White had made history with his groundbreaking narrative The Making of the President 1960, winning the Pulitzer Prize for revolutionizing the way that presidential campaigns were reported. Now, The Making of the President 1972—back in print, freshly repackaged, and with a new foreword by Cokie Roberts—joins Theodore Sorensen’s Kennedy, White’s The Making of the President 1960, 1964, and 1968, and other classics in the burgeoning Harper Perennial Political Classics series.

The 1960 presidential election, won ultimately by John F. Kennedy, was one of the closest and most contentious in American history. The country had never elected a Roman Catholic president, and the last time a Catholic had been nominated--New York Governor Al Smith in 1928--he was routed in the general election. From the outset, Kennedy saw the religion issue as the single most important obstacle on his road to the White House. He was acutely aware of, and deeply frustrated by, the possibility that his personal religious beliefs could keep him out of the White House. In The Making of a Catholic President, Shaun Casey tells the fascinating story of how the Kennedy campaign transformed the "religion question" from a liability into an asset, making him the first (and still only) Catholic president. Drawing on extensive archival research, including many never-before-seen documents, Casey takes us inside the campaign to show Kennedy's chief advisors--Ted Sorensen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Archibald Cox--grappling with the staunch opposition to the candidate's Catholicism. Casey also reveals, for the first time, many of the Nixon campaign's efforts to tap in to anti-Catholic sentiment, with the aid of Billy Graham and the National Association of Evangelicals, among others. The alliance between conservative Protestants and the Nixon campaign, he shows, laid the groundwork for the rise of the Religious Right. This book will shed light on one of the most talked-about elections in American history, as well as on the vexed relationship between religion and politics more generally. With clear relevance to our own political situation--where politicians' religious beliefs seem more important and more volatile than ever--The Making of a Catholic President offers rare insights into one of the most extraordinary presidential campaigns in American history.

When John Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he also won the right to put his own spin on the victory. Rorabaugh cuts through the mythology of this election to explain the operations of the campaign and offer a corrective to Theodore White's flawed classic, 'The Making of the President'.

The Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates of 1858 marked a significant crossroads in the political career of Abraham Lincoln. Though he lost the Unites States senate seat for Illinois to Stephen A. Douglas, the debates launched Lincoln into political prominence and eventually contributed to his successful run for the presidency. This work reveals Lincoln's political evolution during the debates through a narrative approach, evaluating his debate strategy and seemingly inconsistent views on slavery and racial inequality. Organized chronologically, the book examines each of the seven debates individually, acknowledging Lincoln's disappointing turns at Jonesboro and Charleston but celebrating his powerful comeback at Alton in the final senatorial debate.

The presidential election of 1884, in which Grover Cleveland ended the Democrats' twenty-four-year presidential drought by defeating Republican challenger James G. Blaine, was one of the gaudiest in American history, remembered today less for its political significance than for the mudslinging and slander that characterized the campaign. But a closer look at the infamous election reveals far more complexity than previous stereotypes allowed, argues Mark Summers. Behind all the mud and malarkey, he says, lay a world of issues and consequences. Summers suggests that both Democrats and Republicans sensed a political system breaking apart, or perhaps a new political order forming, as voters began to drift away from voting by party affiliation toward voting according to a candidate's stand on specific issues. Mudslinging, then, was done not for public entertainment but to tear away or confirm votes that seemed in doubt. Uncovering the issues that really powered the election and stripping away the myths that still surround it, Summers uses the election of 1884 to challenge many of our preconceptions about Gilded Age politics.