Category: U.S. Presidents
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Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2002) by Robert Caro
The third volume in Robert Caro’s monumental “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” “Master of the Senate” focuses in on Johnson’s storied tenure in the Senate from 1949 to 1960. Overall, Caro is less critical of Johnson than in previous volumes. He writes in awe of Johnson’s improbably fast and remarkably high ascent within the cloistered…
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Washington: A Life (2010) by Ron Chernow
The year 2020 is a rough time to be a slaveholding Founding Father. As the mob indiscriminately tears down statues across America, I would argue there is no better time to read a book like this, an honest, richly textured Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from the celebrated Ron Chernow that brilliantly puts George Washington’s enormous contributions…
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The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012) by Robert Caro
The latest in Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, “The Passage to Power” opens with LBJ’s perplexing performance in the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. Perplexing because of Johnson’s uncharacteristic political naiveté and his complete failure to size up his competition. In short, Johnson purposively kept out of the race until just weeks before the…
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Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012) by Jon Meacham
I must confess: I’ve never been much of a Thomas Jefferson fan. Much of my understanding of our third president has come by way of his generally unfavorable presentation in popular biographies of his esteemed contemporaries, such as Washington & Hamilton (Chernow), Adams (McCullough), Franklin (Isaacson) and Marshall (Smith). From the perspective of these prominent…
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The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013) by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Teddy Roosevelt has long been a personal hero of mine. However, after reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2013 bestseller, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” I now may be an even bigger fan of the jovial but largely misunderstood and now generally forgotten William Taft. As sometimes happens,…
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