The Dwight Eisenhower of popular imagination is a benign figure armed with a putter. The Eisenhower of journalist Jim Newton's rendering is shrewd and tempestuous. Mocked as a blunderbuss, he was a meticulous manager. Admired as a general, he was a champion of peace. Eisenhower enforced desegregation, built an interstate highway system, ground down Joseph McCarthy - and was the last president until Clinton to leave the country in the black.

An American hero at the close of World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower rode an enormous wave of popularity into the Oval Office seven years later. Though we may view the Eisenhower years through a hazy lens of 1950s nostalgia, historians consider his presidency one of the least successful. At home there was civil rights unrest, McCarthyism, and a deteriorating economy; internationally, the Cold War was deepening. But despite his tendency toward...

"In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy's death, an inspiring collection of his most famous speeches accompanied by commentary from notable historians and public figures. Twenty-five years after Robert Kennedy was assassinated, RFK: Collected Speeches, a celebration of Kennedy's life and legacy, was published and immediately became the standard for activists, elected officials, and lovers of language and history. Now, a quarter century...

It is 1953, a heat wave is sweeping across America and the Grossmans--Ben, Addie and their two children--are moving their lives from the political heart of Washington DC to suburban Long Island. Benny was a successful lawyer in the Department of Justice, but all that has come tumbling down. With the McCarthy era of paranoia, persecution and propaganda at its height, his past has come back to haunt him, forcing him to pack up his family and leave the...

"The bitter feud between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren framed the tumultuous future of the modern civil rights movement. Eisenhower was a gradualist who wanted to coax white Americans in the South into eventually accepting integration, while Warren, author of the Supreme Court's historic unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, demanded immediate action to dismantle the segregation of the public school system....