I’ve always loved history, especially U.S. history, and, as a White House official for President Clinton, I saw it made up close. As a historian, I have focused in particular on America’s role in the world ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when I came to recognize that President Kennedy was right: “Domestic policy can hurt you, but foreign policy can kill you.” Over the last quarter-century, I’ve concentrated my work on America’s efforts to lead the West and promote freedom around the world. I read voraciously, write a column on foreign policy for leading outlets, and discuss global affairs often on TV and radio.
I wrote...
Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World
I love this book, which is warm and beautifully written, because it tells the story of the most vital and consequential political partnership of the last century. Roosevelt and Churchill, both heroes of mine, saved freedom by steering the Allies to victory in World War II over the mighty, ravenous, bloodthirsty, and seemingly invincible Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
This book brings Roosevelt and Churchill to life, showcasing their astounding brilliance and strength, along with their very human pettiness, impatience, and skullduggery, as they work in close concert with one another, press one another, and, when necessary, even work around one another. It’s a marvelous story and a gripping read.
The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in…
I love everything by the renowned historian Max Hastings, and Inferno is one of his most absorbing works. I loved this book in particular because, unlike most World War II books–which focus on either (1) how Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and other leaders conducted the war or (2) how soldiers, sailors, and aviators fought it on the ground, in the seas, or from the air–this book does both.
It puts you in the room with FDR and other world leaders, and it puts you on the battlefield in the Pacific, northern Africa and Italy, the Soviet Union, and finally, Germany and Japan as the Axis Powers fall in ignominious defeat. Even after 651 pages, I didn’t want this book to end.
A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history, from one of the finest historians of the Second World War. A book which shows the impact of war upon hundreds of millions of people around the world- soldiers, sailors and airmen; housewives, farm workers and children.
Reflecting Max Hastings's thirty-five years of research on World War II, All Hell Let Loose describes the course of events, but focuses chiefly upon human experience, which varied immensely from campaign to campaign, continent to continent.
The author emphasises the Russian front, where more than 90% of all German soldiers who…
A spy school for girls amidst Jane Austen’s high society.
Daughters of the Beau Monde who don’t fit London society’s strict mold are banished to Stranje House, where the headmistress trains these unusually gifted girls to enter the dangerous world of spies in the Napoleonic wars. #1 NYT bestselling author…
I love this book because it’s an inspiring story of selfless patriotism, of six men of great wealth and accomplishment who set aside their private careers and personal ambitions to serve their country at a time of awesome need.
Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, Dean Acheson, John McCloy, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen–as America emerged victorious in World War II but uncertain about the future, these friends and colleagues crafted the policies that created what later became known as the “American Century.”
This book is a deeply researched, fast-paced story of unsung heroes that left me nostalgic about the nation’s glorious past and, even after 741 pages, thirsting for more.
The Wise Men introduces the original brightest and best, leaders whose outsized personalities and actions brought order to postwar chaos: Averell Harriman, freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, author of Containment; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense during the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.
I love stories about America at its best, its most uplifting, its most inspiring, and I can’t imagine anyone telling the story of the Berlin airlift and what he calls “America’s finest hour” in more gripping detail than Andrei Cherny in The Candy Bombers.
With style and elegance, he takes you into the White House, where Truman decides to save West Berlin from Stalin’s attempted conquest, and he puts you in the cockpits of the pilots who delivered food and other necessities on a round-the-clock basis to the desperate people of that city. How good is this book? I wish I had written this book myself.
In the tradition of the great narrative storytellers, Andrei Cherny recounts the exhilarating saga of the unlikely men who made the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history.
The Candy Bombers is a remarkable story with profound implications for our own time. Cherny tells the tale of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and secondstringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat, but also won the hearts of America’s defeated enemies, inspired people around the world to believe in America’s fundamental goodness, avoided World War III, and won the greatest…
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
I love this book because I miss the days when people of great influence in America disagreed vociferously about important matters but remained good friends. Top State and Defense Department official Paul Nitze and legendary diplomat and writer George Kennan were the ying and yang of America’s post-World War II foreign policy–the former a brusque “hawk,” the latter a soft-spoken “dove.”
They battled in the halls of power and in public forums throughout the Cold War, each hoping to implant his views on U.S. foreign policy. Nitze lived to 97, Kennan to 101, and they were close pals to the very end. I wish we’d see more of that warm and friendly competition in Washington today.
A brilliant and revealing biography of the two most important Americans during the Cold War era—written by the grandson of one of them
Only two Americans held positions of great influence throughout the Cold War; ironically, they were the chief advocates for the opposing strategies for winning—and surviving—that harrowing conflict. Both men came to power during World War II, reached their professional peaks during the Cold War’s most frightening moments, and fought epic political battles that spanned decades. Yet despite their very different views, Paul Nitze and George Kennan dined together, attended the weddings of each other’s children, and remained…
With President Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe devastated by World War II and the Soviets now America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg worked in a bipartisan fashion to craft a dramatic new foreign policy through which America stepped boldly onto the world stage to lead the West and promote freedom. Under their leadership, the United States birthed the United Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine, launched the Marshall Plan, and established NATO.
This is the inspiring story of a unique political partnership, of bipartisanship at a bitterly partisan time, and of two very different men who overcame great obstacles to do great things.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
