Chief of Staff to the President is perhaps the most important political appointment in our nation's government. Aside from handling the myriad of day-to-day details that keep the White House running, the Chief of Staff is often the President's closest confidante and gatekeeper-anyone who wants access to the Oval Office goes through the Chief of Staff. President Lyndon Johnson bestrode the American political scene as a colossus of energy, ambition,...

Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader? Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely -- Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights) -- to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized...

LBJ aims to prove that Vice President Johnson played an active role in the assassination of President Kennedy and that he began planning his takeover of the U.S. presidency even before being named the vice presidential nominee in 1960. Lyndon B. Johnson's flawed personality and character traits, formed as a child, grew unchecked for the rest of his life as he suffered severe bouts of manic-depressive illness. He successfully hid this disorder from...

A behind-the-scenes history of the most momentous decade in American politics, now with a new introduction by the author. Richard N. Goodwin entered public service in 1958 as a law clerk for Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter. He left politics ten years later in the aftermath of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. Over the course of one extraordinary decade, Goodwin orchestrated some of the noblest achievements in the history...

The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics. Using newly available documents from both American and Vietnamese archives, Hunt reinterprets the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention in Southeast Asia, and renders more comprehensible-if no less troubling-the tangled origins of the war.

The first comprehensive account of the relationship between President Johnson and Martin Luther King uses FBI wiretaps, Johnson's taped telephone conversations, and previously undisclosed communications between the two to paint a fascinating portrait of this important relationship. Opposites in almost every way, mortally suspicious of each other at first, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., were thrust together in the aftermath of John...