Showing results for "Friend" in Presidents & Heads of State

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 From the great historian of the American Revolution, New York Times-bestselling and Pulitzer-winning Gordon Wood, comes a majestic dual biography of two of America's most enduringly fascinating figures, whose partnership helped birth a nation...

In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas J. Balcerski explores the lives of these two politicians and discovers one of the most significant collaborations in American political history. He traces the parallels in the men's personal and professional lives before elected office, including their failed romantic courtships and the stories they told about them. Unlikely companions from the start, they lived together as congressional messmates in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse and became close confidantes. 

What was it like to meet and talk to people who knew Jackie Kennedy Onassis well? Each of these eight people gave me a surprising look into what it was like to live and work in Jackie's world. Nancy Tuckerman was Jackie's friend from boarding school and also her lifelong assistant. Jackie was wary around Nan Talese, one of the most important people in publishing. Sarah Giles was an editor at Vanity Fair. She worked with Jackie in her apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue on a book that got them both into trouble. Ruth Ansel knew Jackie via man about town and photographer Peter Beard.

For many people, Jackie was beyond criticism. People who came from her own background, however, were often more detached. They could be more forceful with her and sometimes more openly critical of her than others were. Nan Talese was one of the most important people in American publishing at the end of the 20th century. Nan and Jackie both grew up as bookish debutantes in and around New York. When Nan and Jackie worked at the same publisher in the 1990s, a muted rivalry arose between them.

The Richard Nixon Stein remembers and lovingly describes has almost nothing to do with the Richard Nixon as portrayed in most media. In Stein’s view, Richard Nixon was a born peacemaker, a saint. Stein believes Nixon was tortured, abused, beat up by the Beautiful People, but through it all, above all, he was a peacemaker, a trait he inherited from his Quaker mother.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Nancy Tuckerman were friends over seven decades. Nancy almost never talked to people writing books about Jackie. She made an exception for me because I was working with her former colleagues. She and I met for the first time at the Red Lion Inn on a cold day in February. She was wearing a plain brown sweater and hiding behind a newspaper. At first she was stiff with me. But at lunch the young waiter poured her a cold cup of coffee. When he stepped away, we both laughed. That was how we began a friendlier and franker conversation that lasted 10 years.

President Thug is a serious yet satirical comparison of Donald Trump's presidency and the depths of Dante's Inferno. The book leads Dante, Virgil, and Trump into each Circle of Hell, illustrating the sacrilege of Trump’s sins, shortcomings, and scandals. Given the moniker “President Thug”, Trump sees what he has done during his presidency, walking the imbalanced and nearly impossible terrain of damnation in the circles of Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery.