The Accidental President

The Accidental President

Author: Albert J. Baime

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0544617347

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During the atomic, earthshaking first 120 days of Harry Truman's unlikely presidency, an unprepared, small-town man had to take on Germany, Japan, Stalin, and a secret weapon of unimaginable power--marking the most dramatic rise to greatness in American history.


Accidental Presidents

Accidental Presidents

Author: Jared Cohen

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 1501109839

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This New York Times bestselling “deep dive into the terms of eight former presidents is chock-full of political hijinks—and déjà vu” (Vanity Fair) and provides a fascinating look at the men who came to the office without being elected to it, showing how each affected the nation and world. The strength and prestige of the American presidency has waxed and waned since George Washington. Eight men have succeeded to the presidency when the incumbent died in office. In one way or another they vastly changed our history. Only Theodore Roosevelt would have been elected in his own right. Only TR, Truman, Coolidge, and LBJ were re-elected. John Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison who died 30 days into his term. He was kicked out of his party and became the first president threatened with impeachment. Millard Fillmore succeeded esteemed General Zachary Taylor. He immediately sacked the entire cabinet and delayed an inevitable Civil War by standing with Henry Clay’s compromise of 1850. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded our greatest president, sided with remnants of the Confederacy in Reconstruction. Chester Arthur, the embodiment of the spoils system, was so reviled as James Garfield’s successor that he had to defend himself against plotting Garfield’s assassination; but he reformed the civil service. Theodore Roosevelt broke up the trusts. Calvin Coolidge silently cooled down the Harding scandals and preserved the White House for the Republican Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Harry Truman surprised everybody when he succeeded the great FDR and proved an able and accomplished president. Lyndon B. Johnson was named to deliver Texas electorally. He led the nation forward on Civil Rights but failed on Vietnam. Accidental Presidents shows that “history unfolds in death as well as in life” (The Wall Street Journal) and adds immeasurably to our understanding of the power and limits of the American presidency in critical times.


John Tyler, the Accidental President

John Tyler, the Accidental President

Author: Edward P. Crapol

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2012-01-18

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0807882720

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The first vice president to become president on the death of the incumbent, John Tyler (1790-1862) was derided by critics as "His Accidency." In this biography of the tenth president, Edward P. Crapol challenges depictions of Tyler as a die-hard advocate of states' rights, limited government, and a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Instead, he argues, Tyler manipulated the Constitution to increase the executive power of the presidency. Crapol also highlights Tyler's faith in America's national destiny and his belief that boundless territorial expansion would preserve the Union as a slaveholding republic. When Tyler sided with the Confederacy in 1861, he was branded as America's "traitor" president for having betrayed the republic he once led.


The Accidental President of Brazil

The Accidental President of Brazil

Author: Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Publisher: Public Affairs

Published: 2006-03-13

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781586483241

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What is it like to govern one of the world's most notoriously ungovernable, most vibrant countries? Brazil's former president offers a wry and illuminating view. This is his story and his love song to his country.


George W. Bushisms

George W. Bushisms

Author: Jacob Weisberg

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-12-11

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1471108651

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* An hilarious collection of monumental gaffs and verbal faux pas from America's new President * Jacob Weisberg is a regular guest on BBC Radio and a highly regarded political correspondent * The new book is a natural follow-up to his previous book BUSHISMS (1992) a collection of misstatements by George Bush Snr.


The Accidental Victim

The Accidental Victim

Author: James Reston, Jr.

Publisher: Zola Books

Published: 2013-09-09

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1939126096

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Was the assassination of one of America’s most beloved presidents an accident? That is the shocking argument put forth by acclaimed historian James Reston, Jr. Based on years of research and interviews, this revelatory new book makes the case that Texas Governor John Connally, not President John F. Kennedy, was the intended target of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald's motive was personal, not political. After he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union, his military discharge was changed from honorable to dishonorable. The proud ex-Marine protested directly to fellow Texan Connally, then Secretary of the Navy, and received a classic bureaucratic brush-off. From that day on, Oswald began nursing a deep, even murderous grudge. Reston masterfully charts the path Oswald took toward that fated moment in Dallas, his hatred of the governor driving him to purchase a mail-order rifle, position himself in the Texas School Book Depository building, and attempt to settle his score with Connally. There was no conspiracy. There was Lee Harvey Oswald, a mail-order gun, and a missed shot. Marshaling all the available evidence – some of it never before seen – Reston will change the way we understand this epochal event: In one of American history’s most tragic ironies, President John F. Kennedy was as an accidental victim on November 22, 1963. With nearly 30 photos, the book may take a few minutes to download over 3G or slower connections.


The Trials of Harry S. Truman

The Trials of Harry S. Truman

Author: Jeffrey Frank

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-03-14

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 1501102907

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Jeffrey Frank, author of the bestselling Ike and Dick, returns with the “beguiling” (The New York Times) first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly thirty years, recounting how a seemingly ordinary man met the extraordinary challenge of leading America through the pivotal years of the mid-20th century. The nearly eight years of Harry Truman’s presidency—among the most turbulent in American history—were marked by victory in the wars against Germany and Japan; the first use of an atomic bomb and the development of far deadlier weapons; the start of the Cold War and the creation of the NATO alliance; the Marshall Plan to rebuild the wreckage of postwar Europe; the Red Scare; and the fateful decision to commit troops to fight a costly “limited war” in Korea. Historians have tended to portray Truman as stolid and decisive, with a homespun manner, but the man who emerges in The Trials of Harry S. Truman is complex and surprising. He believed that the point of public service was to improve the lives of one’s fellow citizens and fought for a national health insurance plan. While he was disturbed by the brutal treatment of African Americans and came to support stronger civil rights laws, he never relinquished the deep-rooted outlook of someone with Confederate ancestry reared in rural Missouri. He was often carried along by the rush of events and guided by men who succeeded in refining his fixed and facile view of the postwar world. And while he prided himself on his Midwestern rationality, he could act out of instinct and combativeness, as when he asserted a president’s untested power to seize the nation’s steel mills. The Truman who emerges in these pages is a man with generous impulses, loyal to friends and family, and blessed with keen political instincts, but insecure, quick to anger, and prone to hasty decisions. Archival discoveries, and research that led from Missouri to Washington, Berlin and Korea, have contributed to an indelible and “intimate” (The Washington Post) portrait of a man, born in the 19th century, who set the nation on a course that reverberates in the 21st century, a leader who never lost a schoolboy’s love for his country and its Constitution.


John Tyler

John Tyler

Author: Gary May

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-12-09

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1429939214

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The first "accidental president," whose secret maneuverings brought Texas into the Union and set secession in motion When William Henry Harrison died in April 1841, just one month after his inauguration, Vice President John Tyler assumed the presidency. It was a controversial move by this Southern gentleman, who had been placed on the fractious Whig ticket with the hero of Tippecanoe in order to sweep Andrew Jackson's Democrats, and their imperial tendencies, out of the White House. Soon Tyler was beset by the Whigs' competing factions. He vetoed the charter for a new Bank of the United States, which he deemed unconstitutional, and was expelled from his own party. In foreign policy, as well, Tyler marched to his own drummer. He engaged secret agents to help resolve a border dispute with Britain and negotiated the annexation of Texas without the Senate's approval. The resulting sectional divisions roiled the country. Gary May, a historian known for his dramatic accounts of secret government, sheds new light on Tyler's controversial presidency, which saw him set aside his dedication to the Constitution to gain his two great ambitions: Texas and a place in history.


The Accidental Prime Minister

The Accidental Prime Minister

Author: Tom McLaughlin

Publisher: Oxford University Press - Children

Published: 2015-04-02

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0192737775

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When Joe tells a local news reporter exactly what he would do if he were leader of the country, the video goes viral and Joe's speech becomes famous all over the world! Before long, people are calling for the current leader to resign and give someone else a go . . . and that's how an ordinary boy like Joe ended up with the most extraordinary job. Now the fun can really start . . . Hats for cats! Pet pigs for all! Banana shaped buses! Swimming pools on trains! A hilarious story of one boy's meteoric rise to power!


Truman

Truman

Author: David McCullough

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2003-08-20

Total Pages: 1409

ISBN-13: 0743260295

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The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian. The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri” who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.