Download or read book FDR s Funeral Train written by Robert Klara and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The April 1945 journey of FDR's funeral train became a thousand-mile odyssey, fraught with heartbreak and scandal. As it passed through the night, few of the grieving onlookers gave thought to what might be happening behind the Pullman shades, where women whispered and men tossed back highballs. Inside was a Soviet spy, a newly widowed Eleanor Roosevelt, who had just discovered that her husband's mistress was in the room with him when he died, all the Supreme Court justices, and incoming president Harry S. Truman who was scrambling to learn secrets FDR had never shared with him. Weaving together information from long-forgotten diaries and declassified Secret Service documents, journalist and historian Robert Klara enters the private world on board that famous train. He chronicles the three days during which the country grieved and despaired as never before, and a new president hammered out the policies that would galvanize a country in mourning and win the Second World War.
Download or read book No Ordinary Time written by Doris Kearns Goodwin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the distinct leadership roles of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the war years and discusses the dynamics of their marriage.
Download or read book The Hidden White House written by Robert Klara and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1948, Harry Truman, President of the United States, almost fell through the ceiling of the Blue Room in a bathtub into a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution. A team of the nation's top architects was hastily assembled to inspect the White House, and upon seeing the state the old mansion was in, insisted the First Family be evicted immediately. What followed was the biggest home-improvement job the nation had ever seen"--
Download or read book Mornings on Horseback written by David McCullough and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough. Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised. The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. All are brought to life to make “a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail” (The New York Times Book Review). A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about “blessed” mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands.
Download or read book Closest Companion written by Geoffrey C. Ward and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in paperback, the highly acclaimed, remarkably intimate, and surprisingly revealing secret diary of the woman who spent more private time with FDR than any other person during his years in the White house. At once a love story and a major contribution to history, it offers dramatic new insights into FDR—both the man and the president. • Bestselling author: Geoffrey C. Ward is an award-winning biographer of FDR and the bestselling coauthor of many books with Ken Burns, including The Civil War and Baseball. • Widely acclaimed: “A fascinating, very personal view of the man and his life” (USA TODAY). “A remarkable portrait” (The Washington Post). “A new mirror on Roosevelt” (The New York Times). “engrossing” (The New York Review of Books). • Intimate portrait of a president: FDR trusted Margaret “Daisy” Suckley completely—she was allowed to photograph him in his wheelchair, was privy to wartime secrets, and documented his failing health in great detail. • Major contribution to history: Daisy’s diary offers unique insights into FDR’s relationship with Winston Churchill and other wartime leaders, his decision to run for an unprecedented fourth term, and his hopes for the postwar world.
Download or read book The Devil s Mercedes written by Robert Klara and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1938, Mercedes-Benz began production of the largest, most luxurious limousine in the world. A machine of frightening power and sinister beauty, the Grosser 770K Model 150 Offener Tourenwagen was 20 feet long, seven feet wide, and tipped the scales at 5 tons. Its supercharged, 230-horsepower engine propelled the beast to speeds over 100 m.p.h. while its occupants reclined on glove-leather seats stuffed with goose down. Armor plated and equipped with hidden compartments for Luger pistols, the 770K was a sumptuous monster with a monstrous patron: Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party. Deployed mainly for propaganda purposes before the war, the hand-built limousines—in which Hitler rode standing in the front seat—motored through elaborate rallies and appeared in countless newsreels, swiftly becoming the Nazi party’s most durable symbol of wealth and power. Had Hitler not so thoroughly dominated the scene with his own megalomania, his opulent limousine could easily have eclipsed him. Most of the 770Ks didn’t make it out of the rubble of World War II. But several of them did. And two of them found their way, secretly and separately, to the United States. In The Devil’s Mercedes, author Robert Klara uncovers the forgotten story of how Americans responded to these rolling relics of fascism on their soil. The limousines made headlines, drew crowds, made fortunes and ruined lives. What never became public was how both of the cars would ultimately become tangled in a web of confusion, mania, and opportunism, fully entwined in a story of mistaken identity. Nobody knew that the limousine touted as Hitler’s had in fact never belonged to him, while the Mercedes shrugged off as an ordinary staff car—one later abandoned in a warehouse and sold off as government surplus—turned out to be none other than Hitler’s personal automobile. It would take 40 years, a cast of carnies and millionaires, the United States Army, and the sleuthing efforts of an obscure Canadian librarian to bring the entire truth to light. As he recounts this remarkable drama, Klara probes the meaning of these haunting hulks and their power to attract, excite and disgust. The limousines’ appearance collided with an American populous celebrating a victory even as it sought to stay a step ahead of the war’s ghosts. Ultimately, The Devil’s Mercedes isn’t only the story of a rare and notorious car, but what that car taught postwar America about itself.
Download or read book Nothing to Fear written by Adam Cohen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fascinating account of an extraordinary moment in the life of the United States." --The New York Times With the world currently in the grips of a financial crisis unlike anything since the Great Depression, Nothing to Fear could not be timelier. This acclaimed work of history brings to life Franklin Roosevelt's first hundred days in office, when he and his inner circle launched the New Deal, forever reinventing the role of the federal government. As Cohen reveals, five fiercely intelligent, often clashing personalities presided over this transformation and pushed the president to embrace a bold solution. Nothing to Fear is the definitive portrait of the men and women who engineered the nation's recovery from the worst economic crisis in American history.
Download or read book An Unplanned Life written by George M. Elsey and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Unplanned Life is the scintillating memoir of George Elsey, a small-town kid from western Pennsylvania who, at age twenty-four, was assigned to Franklin Roosevelt's top-secret intelligence and communications center in the White House. As an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Elsey helped brief the president and his senior associates on war events. He and his map room colleagues acted as the secretariat for Roosevelt's cabled exchanges with Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek; filed records of "summit conferences"; and stored in safes plans for future operations. He also traveled with the president in order to code and decode the classified messages that flowed between the presidential train or ship and the White House. Elsey's duties continued with Harry Truman's succession to the presidency. He decoded the famous message from Secretary of War Henry Stimson reporting the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and carried it to President Truman. In 1947, he shed his Naval Reserve uniform and joined the White House's civilian staff as assistant to the special counsel to the president. In 1949, he became administrative assistant to the president, and, in 1952, he became a member of the Mutual Security Agency staff. During those years, he grew very close to Harry Truman, and thus, a major portion of An Unplanned Life relates to his experiences then. In the first postwar winter, Elsey was frequently the only staff member who accompanied President Truman on the USS Williamsburg. In September 1946, Elsey submitted a report to Truman on U.S.-Soviet relations, which came to be well known as the "Clifford-Elsey Report." Providing Truman with notes for some two hundred of his "back-of-the-train" informal talks, Elsey played a part in the best remembered feature of the "Whistle-Stop Campaign" that resulted in "the political upset of the century." In addition to his years at the White House, Elsey also touches on his post-White House years-his time in private industry, his months with Clark Clifford when Clifford was trying unsuccessfully to extricate America from Vietnam, and his long association with the American Red Cross. An Unplanned Life is a fascinating look at the life of an extraordinary individual who played an important and unprecedented part in two different presidents' decisions and affected the course of our nation. Anyone with an interest in history will find this memoir fascinating and invaluable.
Download or read book Lincoln s Funeral Train written by Robert Reed and published by Schiffer Publishing. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lincoln funeral and the nearly 1,700-mile epic journey of the funeral train was the biggest single event to happen in the lives of American citizens at the time. Eyewitness accounts and historic images present this remarkable journey of President Abraham Lincoln's remains, from the nation's Capitol to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. Reed draws from reports, documents, and contemporary narratives to finally fully present the event.
Download or read book The Bully Pulpit written by Doris Kearns Goodwin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s dynamic history of Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft and the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. Winner of the Carnegie Medal. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit is a dynamic history of the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. The story is told through the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft—a close relationship that strengthens both men before it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that divides their wives, their children, and their closest friends, while crippling the progressive wing of the Republican Party, causing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to be elected, and changing the country’s history. The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever assembled at one magazine—Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—teamed under the mercurial genius of publisher S.S. McClure. Goodwin’s narrative is founded upon a wealth of primary materials. The correspondence of more than four hundred letters between Roosevelt and Taft begins in their early thirties and ends only months before Roosevelt’s death. Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft kept diaries. The muckrakers wrote hundreds of letters to one another, kept journals, and wrote their memoirs. The letters of Captain Archie Butt, who served as a personal aide to both Roosevelt and Taft, provide an intimate view of both men. The Bully Pulpit, like Goodwin’s brilliant chronicles of the Civil War and World War II, exquisitely demonstrates her distinctive ability to combine scholarly rigor with accessibility. It is a major work of history—an examination of leadership in a rare moment of activism and reform that brought the country closer to its founding ideals.
Download or read book Franklin and Lucy written by Joseph E. Persico and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-04-29 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Just when you thought you knew everything about Franklin D. Roosevelt, think again. Joseph E. Persico [is] one of America’s finest historians. . . . You can’t properly understand FDR the man without reading this landmark study.”—Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University “Persico’s exploration of FDR’s emotional life is fascinating.”—USA Today In Franklin and Lucy, acclaimed author and historian Joseph E. Persico explores FDR’s romance with Lucy Rutherfurd. Persico’s provocative conclusions about their relationship are informed by a revealing range of sources, including never-before-published letters and documents from Lucy Rutherfurd’s estate that attest to the intensity of the affair, which lasted much longer than was previously acknowledged.FDR’s connection with Lucy also creates an opportunity for Persico to take a more penetrating look at the other women in FDR’s life. We come to see more clearly how FDR’s infidelity contributed to Eleanor Roosevelt’s eventual transformation from a repressed Victorian to perhaps the greatest American woman of her century; how FDR’s strong-willed mother helped to strengthen his resolve in overcoming personal and public adversity; and how both paramours and platonic friends completed the world that FDR inhabited. In focusing on Lucy Rutherfurd and the other women who mattered to Roosevelt, Persico renders the most intimate portrait yet of an enigmatic giant of American history. Praise for Franklin and Lucy “Persico is judicious in his treatment of these sensitive matters. . . . He understands that Lucy Mercer helped FDR awaken his capacity for love and compassion, and thus helped him become the man to whom the nation will be eternally in debt.”—The Washington Post Book World “A stylish and well-written book filled with interesting characters, marital dramas and spylike subterfuge.”—Chicago Tribune “A powerful narrative that rarely fails to pull you along to the next chapter.”—Louisville Courier-Journal “Utterly absorbing.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Download or read book 1912 written by James Chace and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with former president Theodore Roosevelt’s return in 1910 from his African safari, Chace brilliantly unfolds a dazzling political circus that featured four extraordinary candidates. When Roosevelt failed to defeat his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, for the Republican nomination, he ran as a radical reformer on the Bull Moose ticket. Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson, the ex-president of Princeton, astonished everyone by seizing the Democratic nomination from the bosses who had made him New Jersey’s governor. Most revealing of the reformist spirit sweeping the land was the charismatic socialist Eugene Debs, who polled an unprecedented one million votes. Wilson’s “accidental” election had lasting impact on America and the world. The broken friendship between Taft and TR inflicted wounds on the Republican Party that have never healed, and the party passed into the hands of a conservative ascendancy that reached its fullness under Reagan and George W. Bush. Wilson’s victory imbued the Democratic Party with a progressive idealism later incarnated in FDR, Truman, and LBJ. 1912 changed America.
Download or read book Lincoln s Body A Cultural History written by Richard Wightman Fox and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-02-09 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A]n astonishingly interesting interpretation…Fox is wonderfully shrewd and often dazzling." —Jill Lepore, New York Times Book Review Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most beloved leader. The fact that he was lampooned in his day as "ugly and grotesque" only made Lincoln more endearing to millions. In Lincoln’s Body, acclaimed cultural historian Richard Wightman Fox explores how deeply, and how differently, Americans—black and white, male and female, Northern and Southern—have valued our sixteenth president, from his own lifetime to the Hollywood biopics about him. Lincoln continues to survive in a body of memory that speaks volumes about our nation.
Download or read book Pearl Harbor Christmas written by Stanley Weintraub and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock—in some cases overseas, elation—was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating as usual, the reality of the just-declared war was on everybody’s mind. United States troops on Wake Island were battling a Japanese landing force and, in the Philippines, losing the fight to save Luzon. In Japan, the Pearl Harbor strike force returned to Hiroshima Bay and toasted its sweeping success. Across the Atlantic, much of Europe was frozen in grim Nazi occupation. Just three days before Christmas, Churchill surprised Roosevelt with an unprecedented trip to Washington, where they jointly lit the White House Christmas tree. As the two Allied leaders met to map out a winning wartime strategy, the most remarkable Christmas of the century played out across the globe. Pearl Harbor Christmas is a deeply moving and inspiring story about what it was like to live through a holiday season few would ever forget.
Download or read book Name Dropping written by John Kenneth Galbraith and published by HMH. This book was released on 2001-10-09 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] charming memoir [that] serves to remind us that idealism and trust once existed in the White House and Washington, a fact that may seem unbelievable” (Newsday). A New York Times Notable Book “Names? You want names? No one knows better ones than John Kenneth Galbraith,” says the San Diego Union-Tribune. Name-Dropping covers the long and remarkable career of this economist and former ambassador, charting sixty-five years of politics, government, and American history as he writes of the many people he has known—among them Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, and Jawaharlal Nehru—“with a wit, style, and elegance few can match” (Library Journal). This “mischievously and merrily unrepentant” memoir offers a rich and uniquely personal history of the twentieth century—a history the author himself helped to shape (The Boston Globe). “Shrewd, irreverent, penetrating, and hilarious.” —Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. “It is not usual for a man past his 90th birthday to write a book that is as fresh and lively as the work of a 30-year-old. But John Kenneth Galbraith is not a usual man, and he has done it.” —The New York Times
Download or read book The White Cascade written by Gary Krist and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The never-before-told story of one of the worst rail disasters in U.S. history in which two trains full of people, trapped high in the Cascade Mountains, are hit by a devastating avalanche In February 1910, a monstrous blizzard centered on Washington State hit the Northwest, breaking records. The world stopped—but nowhere was the danger more terrifying than near a tiny town called Wellington, perched high in the Cascade Mountains, where a desperate situation evolved minute by minute: two trainloads of cold, hungry passengers and their crews found themselves marooned without escape, their railcars gradually being buried in the rising drifts. For days, an army of the Great Northern Railroad's most dedicated men—led by the line's legendarily courageous superintendent, James O'Neill—worked round-the-clock to rescue the trains. But the storm was unrelenting, and to the passenger's great anxiety, the railcars—their only shelter—were parked precariously on the edge of a steep ravine. As the days passed, food and coal supplies dwindled. Panic and rage set in as snow accumulated deeper and deeper on the cliffs overhanging the trains. Finally, just when escape seemed possible, the unthinkable occurred: the earth shifted and a colossal avalanche tumbled from the high pinnacles, sweeping the trains and their sleeping passengers over the steep slope and down the mountainside. Centered on the astonishing spectacle of our nation's deadliest avalanche, Gary Krist's The White Cascade is the masterfully told story of a supremely dramatic and never-before-documented American tragedy. An adventure saga filled with colorful and engaging history, this is epic narrative storytelling at its finest.
Download or read book Fear Itself The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time written by Ira Katznelson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the New Deal era highlights the politicians and pundits of the time, many of whom advocated for questionable positions, including separation of the races and an American dictatorship.
