Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party

Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party PDF Author: Scott Kaufman
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700625003
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Within eight turbulent months in 1974 Gerald Ford went from the United States House of Representatives, where he was the minority leader, to the White House as the country's first and only unelected president. His unprecedented rise to power, after Richard Nixon's equally unprecedented fall, has garnered the lion's share of scholarly attention devoted to America's thirty-eighth president. But Gerald Ford's (1913–2006) life and career in and out of Washington spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party captures for the first time the full scope of Ford's long and remarkable political life. The man who emerges from these pages is keenly ambitious, determined to climb the political ladder in Washington, and loyal to his party but not a political ideologue. Drawing on interviews with family and congressional and administrative officials, presidential historian Scott Kaufman traces Ford's path from a Depression-era childhood through service in World War II to entry into Congress shortly after the Cold War began. He delves deeply into the workings of Congress and legislative–executive relations, offering insight into Ford's role as the House minority leader in a time of conservative insurgency in the Republican Party. Kaufman's account of the Ford presidency provides a new perspective on how human rights figured in the making of U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era, and how environmental issues figured in the making of domestic policy. It also presents a close look at the 1976 presidential election—emphasizing the significance of image in that contest—and extensive coverage of Ford's post-presidency. In sum, Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party is the most comprehensive political biography of Gerald Ford and will become the definitive resource on the thirty-eighth president of the United States.

Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party

Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party PDF Author: Scott Kaufman
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700625003
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book Here

Book Description
Within eight turbulent months in 1974 Gerald Ford went from the United States House of Representatives, where he was the minority leader, to the White House as the country's first and only unelected president. His unprecedented rise to power, after Richard Nixon's equally unprecedented fall, has garnered the lion's share of scholarly attention devoted to America's thirty-eighth president. But Gerald Ford's (1913–2006) life and career in and out of Washington spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party captures for the first time the full scope of Ford's long and remarkable political life. The man who emerges from these pages is keenly ambitious, determined to climb the political ladder in Washington, and loyal to his party but not a political ideologue. Drawing on interviews with family and congressional and administrative officials, presidential historian Scott Kaufman traces Ford's path from a Depression-era childhood through service in World War II to entry into Congress shortly after the Cold War began. He delves deeply into the workings of Congress and legislative–executive relations, offering insight into Ford's role as the House minority leader in a time of conservative insurgency in the Republican Party. Kaufman's account of the Ford presidency provides a new perspective on how human rights figured in the making of U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era, and how environmental issues figured in the making of domestic policy. It also presents a close look at the 1976 presidential election—emphasizing the significance of image in that contest—and extensive coverage of Ford's post-presidency. In sum, Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party is the most comprehensive political biography of Gerald Ford and will become the definitive resource on the thirty-eighth president of the United States.

The Isolated Presidency

The Isolated Presidency PDF Author: Jordan T. Cash
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197669778
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
"Beginning with a discussion of how the regime created by the Constitution requires a strong executive, it then moves to note the different attributes that emerge from the presidency's structure. Specifically, energy, secrecy, continuity, a national perspective, and a longer temporal horizon. The rest of the chapter describes how these attributes fit in with the presidency's constitutional duties and powers, providing the means to achieve the functional ends set by the Constitution. The framework for analyzing the relationship between the office's structure, duties, and powers are five presidential roles: chief executive, chief legislator, chief diplomat, commander-in-chief, and chief constitutionalist. Throughout the chapter it is also noted how this logic interacts with the other branches and points out those areas where the logic may have tensions or be ambiguous, to be resolved by political contestation"--

Lying in State

Lying in State PDF Author: Eric Alterman
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541616812
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This definitive history of presidential lying reveals how our standards for truthfulness have eroded -- and why Trump's lies are especially dangerous. If there's one thing we know about Donald Trump, it's that he lies. But he's by no means the first president to do so. In Lying in State, Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief, showing that, from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. He also reveals the cumulative effect of this deception-each lie a president tells makes it more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie-and the media's complicity in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend. Full of vivid historical examples and trenchant analysis, Lying in State is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived in this age of alternative facts.

Diplomacy Shot Down

Diplomacy Shot Down PDF Author: E. Bruce Geelhoed
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806166711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The history of the Cold War is littered with what-ifs, and in Diplomacy Shot Down, E. Bruce Geelhoed explores one of the most intriguing: What if the Soviets had not shot down the American U-2 spy plane and President Dwight D. Eisenhower had visited the Soviet Union in 1960 as planned? In August 1959, with his second term nearing its end, Eisenhower made the surprise announcement that he and Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev would visit each other’s countries as a means of “thawing some of the ice” of the Cold War. Khrushchev’s trip to the United States in September 1959 resulted in plans for a four-power summit involving Great Britain and France, and for Eisenhower’s visit to Russia in early summer 1960. Then, in May 1960, the Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 surveillance plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers. The downing of Powers’s plane was, in Geelhoed’s recounting of this episode in Cold War history, not just a diplomatic crisis. The ensuing collapse of the summit and the subsequent cancelation of Eisenhower’s trip to the Soviet Union amounted to a critical missed opportunity for improved US-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War. In a blow-by-blow description of the diplomatic overtures, the U-2 incident, and the aftermath, Diplomacy Shot Down draws upon Eisenhower’s projected itinerary and unmade speeches and statements, as well as the American and international press corps’ preparations for covering the aborted visit, to give readers a sense of what might have been. Eisenhower’s prestige within the Soviet Union was so great, Geelhoed observes, that the trip, if it had happened, could well have led to a détente in the increasingly dangerous US-Soviet relationship. Instead, the cancelation of Ike’s visit led to an escalation in hostilities that played out around the globe and nearly guaranteed that the “missile gap” would reemerge as an issue in the 1960 presidential campaign. A detailed account of an episode that defined the Cold War for a generation, Diplomacy Shot Down is, in its insights and revelations, something rarer still—a behind-the-scenes look at history in the unmaking.

Dazed and Confused

Dazed and Confused PDF Author: Blaine T. Browne
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538166100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
While historians have revisited every aspect of America history in the tumultuous 1960s, coverage of the following decade is sparse. As America reflects on the 50th anniversary of the 1970s, Blaine Browne reexamines the decade’s major international, political, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual developments, giving special attention to how its developments continue to impact American life. He views the decade as a major transitional era, given the death of many of the promises and hopes of the Sixties, the collapse of the post-World War II consensus, and the uncertainties of a new age in which the America might well not enjoy the preeminent global position it had held for the previous quarter century. Growing fundamental economic challenges, as well as concerns about the viability of the nation’s political leadership and democratic institutions added to these anxieties. A general angst permeated national life. Whether readers are reliving the years when they came of age or exploring the 1970s for the first time, Dazed and Confused will introduce the topics and cast of characters who defined this pivotal decade in American life.

The Man Who Ran Washington

The Man Who Ran Washington PDF Author: Peter Baker
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1101912162
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • The Washington Post • Fortune • Bloomberg From two of America's most revered political journalists comes the definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III: the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world. For a quarter century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency or ran the White House without the advice of James Addison Baker III. A scion of Texas aristocracy who became George H. W. Bush’s tennis partner, Baker had never worked in Washington until a devastating family tragedy struck when he was thirty-nine. Within a few years, he was leading Gerald Ford’s campaign and would go on to manage a total of five presidential races and win a sixth for George W. Bush in a Florida recount. He ran Ronald Reagan’s White House and became the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. Ruthlessly partisan during campaign season, Baker became an indispensable dealmaker after the election. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, rewrote the tax code, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War, brokered the reunification of Germany, and helped bring a decades-long nuclear superpower standoff to an end. Brilliantly crafted by Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, The Man Who Ran Washington is a page-turning study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late twentieth-century America and the story of Washington when Washington ran the world. Their masterly biography is necessary reading and destined to become a classic.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter PDF Author: E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197581560
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 953

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Book Description
The dual biography of the powerful First Couple who attempted to use their presidency to bring peace, human rights, and justice to all peoples of the world and dedicated the remainder of their long lives to making a safer, more caring world. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter's marriage of over seventy-five years is the longest of any American presidential couple and has been described by them as a full partnership. President Bill Clinton once said that they have changed more lives around the world than any couple in world history. Their lives have been public and private models of honesty and integrity in post-Watergate America. The second of a two-volume biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter by historian E. Stanly Godbold, Jr., this book offers a comprehensive account of the professional and personal lives of the powerful couple who have worked together as reformers in Georgia, President and First Lady of the United States, and founders of the Carter Center to promote international health, conflict resolution, and democracy. It picks up with their departure from the Georgia governor's mansion and their tireless campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, the first time a Southerner won the White House in over a century. It details the Carter couple's struggle for recognition on a national stage, the challenges of rising energy costs, mounting inflation, geopolitical tensions, and the October Surprise that tainted the 1980 election in which they went down to defeat. During these years, Rosalynn demonstrated that she was a better politician than her husband, offering policy advice, serving as ambassador extraordinaire, sitting in on Cabinet meetings, and working determinedly to provide care and respect for those suffering from mental illness. Their post-presidential work has been unprecedented on the international stage with Habitat for Humanity and especially their establishment of the Carter Center to wage peace, fight disease, build hope. Carter, after reaching the zenith of his career in negotiating the Camp David Accords of 1978, continued for decades to work for peace in the Middle East. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, a prize which he quickly said equally belonged to Rosalynn and to the Carter Center. Among the greatest peacemakers of the twentieth century, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter emerge from this account as inspirational giants in American history and a shining example of the power of a couple in public service.

Republican Character

Republican Character PDF Author: Donald T. Critchlow
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081222471X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"Politics makes for strange bedfellows," the old saying goes. Americans, however, often forget the obvious lesson underlying this adage: politics is about winning elections and governing once in office. Voters of all stripes seem put off by the rough-and-tumble horse-trading and deal-making of politics, viewing its practitioners as self-serving and without principle or conviction. Because of these perspectives, the scholarly and popular narrative of American politics has come to focus on ideology over all else. But as Donald T. Critchlow demonstrates in his riveting new book, this obsession obscures the important role of temperament, character, and leadership ability in political success. Critchlow looks at four leading Republican presidential contenders—Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan—to show that, behind the scenes, ideology mattered less than principled pragmatism and the ability to build coalitions toward electoral and legislative victory. Drawing on new archival material, Critchlow lifts the curtain on the lives of these political rivals and what went on behind the scenes of their campaigns. He reveals unusual relationships between these men: Nixon making deals with Rockefeller, while Rockefeller courted Goldwater and Reagan, who themselves became political rivals despite their shared conservatism. The result is a book sure to fascinate anyone wondering what it takes to win the presidency of the United States—and to govern effectively.

Redefining Greek–US Relations, 1974–1980

Redefining Greek–US Relations, 1974–1980 PDF Author: Athanasios Antonopoulos
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030476561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book provides the first bilateral study of Greek–US relations during Greece’s transition to democracy in the second half of the 1970s. Following the 1974 Cyprus crisis, which led to the collapse of the Greek dictatorship and Athens’ partial withdrawal from NATO, many scholars have claimed that Greece moved away from the United States. This book explicitly rejects this view. It argues that Greek political leaders continued to view close relations with the United States as an integral part of Greek national security despite the disappointment felt during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. At the same time, the Greek leadership could not overlook the anti-American movement, and had to respond to and manage it. In the United States, relations with Greece became part of the clash between the executive and legislative branches of government. Both President Gerard R. Ford and President Jimmy Carter proclaimed their commitment to restoring relations with Athens. This book highlights the continuity between the Republican and Democratic administrations of the 1970s in foreign policy objectives. Drawing on Greek, US and British archival records, it charts the evolving connections between Greece and the United States through the Greek–Turkish disputes, the impact of anti-Americanism and the Greek–NATO relationship offering original insight into this Cold War special relationship.

The Cold War [5 volumes]

The Cold War [5 volumes] PDF Author: Spencer C. Tucker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 4179

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Book Description
This sweeping reference work covers every aspect of the Cold War, from its ignition in the ashes of World War II, through the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War superpower face-off between the Soviet Union and the United States dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century and still reverberates around the world today. This comprehensive and insightful multivolume set provides authoritative entries on all aspects of this world-changing event, including wars, new military technologies, diplomatic initiatives, espionage activities, important individuals and organizations, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. This expansive coverage provides readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex conflict. The work begins with a preface and introduction and then offers illuminating introductory essays on the origins and course of the Cold War, which are followed by some 1,500 entries on key individuals, wars, battles, weapons systems, diplomacy, politics, economics, and art and culture. Each entry has cross-references and a list of books for further reading. The text includes more than 100 key primary source documents, a detailed chronology, a glossary, and a selective bibliography. Numerous illustrations and maps are inset throughout to provide additional context to the material.