He was as recognizable by his mellifluous voice as by his rumpled appearance. Everett McKinley Dirksen was one of the most colorful American politicians of the twentieth century and was considered by some the most powerful man in Congress. Now Byron Hulsey takes a new look at the senator from Illinois to show how his interactions with the White House made him a pivotal figure in American politics during the Cold War era. Hulsey traces Dirksen's relationships with four presidents to show how the senator shifted from being a major Republican critic of Truman to an ardent Republican supporter of LBJ. Dirksen learned "suprapartisan politics" from Eisenhower and became Ike's most trusted confidant on Capitol Hill; then as Senate Minority Leader he played a key role in furthering the ambitious goals of the Johnson administration. Hulsey analyzes the reasons for Dirksen's dramatic policy reversals, telling how the senator who in 1950 warned of the dangers of a leviathan executive came to embrace the power of the presidential office to provide for the social welfare, contain the spread of communism, and guarantee civil rights. Drawing on primary sources at the Johnson presidential library and the Dirksen Congressional Center, Hulsey shows how the senator combined legislative craftsmanship with the ability to get bills passed. He links Dirksen to the issues and events that shaped the 1950s and 1960s and tells how the Johnson-Dirksen coalition moved domestic policy forward through civil rights legislation but ran aground on the insurmountable problem of Vietnam. Hulsey also uses Dirksen's career to explore change, continuity, and conflict in the Republican Party over two decades. He explains how the GOP evolved through internal political and ideological tensions from the Taft-Eisenhower contest through the McCarthy era to the beginning of Nixon administration, revealing Dirksen's role in that process. By the time of Dirksen's death in 1969, the Vietnam War, the explosion of urban riots, and President Nixon's preference for the politics of resentment put an end to the suprapartisan spirit. Hulsey's book recreates a Washington milieu the likes of which may never be seen again, offering a lens for viewing postwar American politics while painting the definitive political portrait of one of our most remarkable leaders.

"Containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the President", 1956-1992.

Using M. G. Hermann's Personality Assessment-at-a-Distance (PAD) profiling technique as well as exhaustive archival research and interviews with former advisers, the author develops a leadership style typology. He then compares his model's expectations against the actual policy record, using six foreign policy episodes.

Because of the power-fearing drafters of the U.S. Constitution, the president's tools for influencing Congress are quite limited. Presidents have had to look beyond the formal powers of the office to push a legislative agenda. In Between the Branches, a book of unprecedented depth, Kenneth Collier traces the evolution of White House influence in Congress over nine adminstrations, from Eisenhower to Clinton. It will enlighten students of the presidency, Congress, and all those interested in American politics.

The United States had never lost a war —that is, until 1975, when it was forced to flee Saigon in humiliation after losing to what Lyndon Johnson called a "raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country." The legacy of this first defeat has haunted every president since, especially on the decision of whether to put "boots on the ground" and commit troops to war. In Haunting Legacy, the father-daughter journalist team of Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb presents a compelling, accessible, and hugely important history of presidential decisionmaking on one crucial issue: in light of the Vietnam debacle, under what circumstances should the United States go to war? The sobering lesson of Vietnam is that the United States is not invincible —it can lose a war —and thus it must be more discriminating about the use of American power. Every president has faced the ghosts of Vietnam in his own way, though each has been wary of being sucked into another unpopular war. Ford (during the Mayaguez crisis) and both Bushes (Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan) deployed massive force, as if to say, "Vietnam, be damned." On the other hand, Carter, Clinton, and Reagan (to the surprise of many) acted with extreme caution, mindful of the Vietnam experience. Obama has also wrestled with the Vietnam legacy, using doses of American firepower in Libya while still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The authors spent five years interviewing hundreds of officials from every post war administration and conducting extensive research in presidential libraries and archives, and they've produced insight and information never before published. Equal parts taut history, revealing biography, and cautionary tale, Haunting Legacy is must reading for anyone trying to understand the power of the past to influence war-and-peace decisions of the present, and of the future.

The Last Liberal Republican is a memoir from one of Nixon’s senior domestic policy advisors. John Roy Price—a member of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, a cofounder of the Ripon Society, and an employee on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaigns—joined Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and later John D. Ehrlichman, in the Nixon White House to develop domestic policies, especially on welfare, hunger, and health. Based on those policies, and the internal White House struggles around them, Price places Nixon firmly in the liberal Republican tradition of President Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and President Dwight Eisenhower. Price makes a valuable contribution to our evolving scholarship and understanding of the Nixon presidency. Nixon himself lamented that he would be remembered only for Watergate and China. The Last Liberal Republican provides firsthand insight into key moments regarding Nixon’s political and policy challenges in the domestic social policy arena. Price offers rich detail on the extent to which Nixon and his staff straddled a precarious balance between a Democratic-controlled Congress and an increasingly powerful conservative tide in Republican politics. The Last Liberal Republican provides a blow-by-blow inside view of how Nixon surprised the Democrats and shocked conservatives with his ambitious proposal for a guaranteed family income. Beyond Nixon’s surprising embrace of what we today call universal basic income, the thirty-seventh president reordered and vastly expanded the patchy food stamp program he inherited and built nutrition education and children’s food services into schools. Richard Nixon even almost achieved a national health insurance program: fifty years ago, with a private sector framework as part of his generous benefits insurance coverage for all, Nixon included coverage of preexisting conditions, prescription drug coverage for all, and federal subsidies for those who could not afford the premiums. The Last Liberal Republican will be a valuable resource for presidency scholars who are studying Nixon, his policies, the state of the Republican Party, and how the Nixon years relate to the rise of the modern conservative movement.