Biography & Autobiography : Presidents & Heads of State

A warm, intimate portrait of President Ronald Reagan by his confidant and friend of over 35 years. Former aide and long–time family friend Michael Deaver first met Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for governor of California and later served him in Sacramento and Washington, DC, as the president's deputy chief of staff. In A Different Drummer, Reagan emerges as charismatic and unwaveringly optimistic, a devoted husband and dedicated leader, disciplined and tough. As Deaver points out in his introduction, ǥ worked eight years doing the toughest job on earth; criss–crossed the world; and survived an assassin's bullet, a devastating riding accident, cancer, and brain surgery all after he turned seventy.'. Deaver also shares the lows, including the tough times that would test the strength of their friendship. Finally, he shares a look at Reagan today as he battles Alzheimer's disease. It is Nancy Reagan's ३ nest hour, Deaver writes, a validation of the greatest love story he has ever known. more...

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As a young speechwriter in the Reagan White House, Peter Robinson was responsible for the celebrated "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. He was also one of a core group of writers who became informal experts on Reagan -- watching his every move, absorbing not just his political positions, but his personality, manner, and the way he carried himself. In How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life , Robinson draws on journal entries from his days at the White House, as well as interviews with those who knew the president best, to reveal ten life lessons he learned from the fortieth president -- a great yet ordinary man who touched the individuals around him as surely as he did his millions of admirers around the world. more...

Price: $11.95

This book, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, illuminates human nature, friendship, love, religious faith, ambition, betrayal, politics, and war in the life and times of the second American President, John Adams - a brilliant, irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution. more...

Price: $18.95

Donald focuses on six figures who were undoubtedly close to Lincoln and who have left full, intimate records of their associations: Joshua F. Speed, William H. Herndon, Orville H. Browning, William H. Seward, John Hay, and John G. Nicolay. Each saw a different side of Lincoln, but, taken together, their accounts tell much about Lincoln's difficulty in making and holding intimate friendships. The evidence is overwhelming that few if any of these and other friends were on intimate terms with Lincoln. Those who knew him best came to realize that behind the mask of affability, behind the facade of his endless humorous anecdotes, Lincoln maintained an inviolable reserve. Herndon found him "incommunicative-silent, reticent-secretive, the most shut-mouthed man" who ever lived. This book is divided into these six portraits-six friendships that Lincoln had through his life-starting with his stepbrother, Dennis Hanks; but his childhood was isolated and lonely and he described himself as "friendless and uneducated" after his mother died and the family moved. As a young man, he became friends with Joshua Speed when he arrived in Springfield. They remained friends and political allies until Speed went back home to Kentucky. Lincoln tried to persuade Speed to accompany him to Washington, but in fact he arrived as president-elect without any staff and without a single intimate friend. Next was William Herndon, his law partner, who wrote about him but did not claim an intimacy he had not enjoyed. Orville Browning, appointed to fill out Stephen Douglas' term, became Lincoln's confidant, but the closeness ended when Lincoln twice passed over Browning for the Supreme Court and when Browning disagreed with his politics and his conduct of the war. William Seward was his best friend in the extremely rambunctious cabinet, but very definitely the junior man. Lincoln did not have a true peer. His much younger secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, were the t more...

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Bill Clinton, forty-second president of the United States, is the quintessential baby boomer: on the one hand blessed with a near-genius IQ, on the other, beset by character flaws that made his presidency a veritable soap opera of high ideals, distressing incompetence, model financial stewardship, and domestic misbehavior. more...

Price: $9.95