Prize-winning reporter Robert Shogan draws on the lessons of nine presidential elections to assess the power and role of the press in presidential elections.
On election night 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt was sitting on top of the political world. Within a year, two seismic events would transform the political landscape. A nationwide outbreak of labor unrest, particularly the spread of a new and potent union weapon, the sit-down strike, and FDR's launching of a scheme to overhaul the Supreme Court would combine to generate a fierce public backlash that tarnished Roosevelt's mystique and drained the ...
As the 2000 presidential campaign has once again demonstrated, political journalism is empowered to do good and also harm. Now a journalist offers a manual of self-defense against the excesses and distortions of presidential politics.
In this first full-scale account of Harry Truman's evolving views on civil rights, Robert Shogan recounts how Truman outgrew the bigotry of his Missouri upbringing to become the first president since Lincoln to attempt to redress the US's long history of injustice toward its black citizens - and in the process transformed the course of race relations in America. Shogan vividly demonstrates the full significance of the 33rd president's contribu...
With a journalist's eye for revealing detail, Robert Shogan traces the 1954 Army-McCarthy Senate hearings and analyzes television's impact on government. Despite McCarthy's fall, Mr. Shogan points out, the hearings left a major item of unfinished business-the issue of McCarthyism, the strategy based on fear, smear, and guilt by association.
The Jews who so deeply admired Roosevelt made up the richest, most influential Jewish community in the world, leaders in government, commerce, and the arts. Yet by the time Franklin Roosevelt died in office, six million European Jews had been murdered by the Nazis while neither FDR nor American Jews lifted much more than a finger to help them. How did the president, the nation he led, and American Jewry allow this to happen? There is no simple...
A veteran journalist describes how the cultural upheavals of the sixties rocked the balances of political power in America - and continue to do so. America's culture war - which pits traditionalists, unrelenting defenders of the social orthodoxy, against modernists, agitators for social change - has simmered and seethed since the birth of the nation. But in the turbulent decade of the 1960s, the culture war erupted in the political arena, wher...
An account of Franklin Roosevelt's secret deal with Winston Churchill to provide England with American ships before America's entrance into World War II.
