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In 1932 Sigmund Freud and diplomat William Bullitt completed a well-informed psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, inspired by his irrational handling of the Treaty of Versailles. Released decades later in redacted form, the book was panned by critics and immediately forgotten. Patrick Weil resurrects the original version and reassesses its insights.
“A rich study of the role of personal psychology in the shaping of the new global order after World War I. So long as so much political power is concentrated in one human mind, we are all at the mercy of the next madman in the White House.” —Gary J. Bass, author of The Blood Telegram The notorious psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, rediscovered nearly a century after it was written by Sigmund Freud and US diplomat William C. Bullitt, sheds new light on how the mental health of a controversial American president shaped world events. When the fate of millions rests on the decisions of a mentally compromised leader, what can one person do? Disillusioned by President Woodrow Wilson’s destructive and irrational handling of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt asked this very question. With the help of his friend Sigmund Freud, Bullitt set out to write a psychological analysis of the president. He gathered material from personal archives and interviewed members of Wilson’s inner circle. In The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil resurrects this forgotten portrait of a troubled president. After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, nearly thirty years after Freud’s death and only months before Bullitt’s. The published edition was heavily redacted, and by the time it was released, the mystique of psychoanalysis had waned in popular culture and Wilson’s legacy was unassailable. The psychological study was panned by critics, and Freud’s descendants denied his involvement in the project. For nearly a century, the mysterious, original Bullitt and Freud manuscript remained hidden from the public. Then in 2014, while browsing the archives of Yale University, Weil happened upon the text. Based on his reading of the 1932 manuscript, Weil examines the significance of Bullitt and Freud’s findings and offers a major reassessment of the notorious psychobiography. The result is a powerful warning about the influence a single unbalanced personality can have on the course of history.
From praising dictators to alienating allies, Trump made chaos his calling card. But four years into his administration, had his strategy caused more problems than it solved? Richard Nixon tried it first. Hoping to make communist bloc countries uneasy and thus unstable, Nixon let them think he was just crazy enough to nuke them. He called this “the madman theory.” Nearly half a century later, President Trump employed his own “madman theory,” sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Trump praised Kim Jong-un and their “love notes,” admired and flattered Vladimir Putin, and gave a greenlight to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to invade Syria. Meanwhile, he attacked US institutions and officials, ignored his own advisors, and turned his back on US allies from Canada and Mexico to NATO to Ukraine to the Kurds at war with ISIS. Trump was willing to make the nation’s most sensitive and consequential decisions while often ignoring the best information and intelligence available to him. He continually caught the world off guard, but did it work? In The Madman Theory, Jim Sciutto showed how Trump's supporters assumed he had a strategy for long-term success – that he somehow played three-dimensional chess. Four years into Trump's presidency, it was clear his unpredictable focus on short-term headlines did in fact lead to predictably mediocre results in the short and long run. Trump’s foreign policy undermined American values and national security interests, while hurting allies who had been on our side for decades, leaving them isolated and vulnerable without American support. Meanwhile, Trump had comforted and emboldened our enemies. The White House’s revolving door of staff demonstrated that Trump had no real plan; all serious policymakers—and those who would be a check on his most destructive impulses—were exiled or jumped ship. Sciutto interviewed a wide swath of then-current and former administration officials to assemble the first comprehensive portrait of the impact of Trump’s erratic foreign policy. Smart, authoritative, and compelling, The Madman Theory is the definitive take on Trump’s calamitous legacy around the globe, showing how his proclivity for chaos was creating a world which was more unstable, violent, and impoverished than it had been before.
In their initial effort to end the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger attempted to lever concessions from Hanoi at the negotiating table with military force and coercive diplomacy. They were not seeking military victory, which they did not believe was feasible. Instead, they backed up their diplomacy toward North Vietnam and the Soviet Union with the Madman Theory of threatening excessive force, which included the specter of nuclear force. They began with verbal threats then bombed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong base areas in Cambodia, signaling that there was more to come. As the bombing expanded, they launched a previously unknown mining ruse against Haiphong, stepped-up their warnings to Hanoi and Moscow, and initiated planning for a massive shock-and-awe military operation referred to within the White House inner circle as DUCK HOOK. Beyond the mining of North Vietnamese ports and selective bombing in and around Hanoi, the initial DUCK HOOK concept included proposals for “tactical” nuclear strikes against logistics targets and U.S. and South Vietnamese ground incursions into the North. In early October 1969, however, Nixon aborted planning for the long-contemplated operation. He had been influenced by Hanoi's defiance in the face of his dire threats and concerned about U.S. public reaction, antiwar protests, and internal administration dissent. In place of DUCK HOOK, Nixon and Kissinger launched a secret global nuclear alert in hopes that it would lend credibility to their prior warnings and perhaps even persuade Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi. It was to be a “special reminder” of how far President Nixon might go. The risky gambit failed to move the Soviets, but it marked a turning point in the administration's strategy for exiting Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger became increasingly resigned to a “long-route” policy of providing Saigon with a “decent chance” of survival for a “decent interval” after a negotiated settlement and U.S. forces left Indochina. Burr and Kimball draw upon extensive research in participant interviews and declassified documents to unravel this intricate story of the October 1969 nuclear alert. They place it in the context of nuclear threat making and coercive diplomacy since 1945, the culture of the Bomb, intra-governmental dissent, domestic political pressures, the international “nuclear taboo,” and Vietnamese and Soviet actions and policies. It is a history that holds important lessons for the present and future about the risks and uncertainties of nuclear threat making.
In his widely acclaimed Chasing Shadows ("the best account yet of Nixon’s devious interference with Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 Vietnam War negotiations"-- Washington Post), Ken Hughes revealed the roots of the covert activity that culminated in Watergate. In Fatal Politics, Hughes turns to the final years of the war and Nixon’s reelection bid of 1972 to expose the president’s darkest secret. While Nixon publicly promised to keep American troops in Vietnam only until the South Vietnamese could take their place, he privately agreed with his top military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers that Saigon could never survive without American boots on the ground. Afraid that a preelection fall of Saigon would scuttle his chances for a second term, Nixon put his reelection above the lives of American soldiers. Postponing the inevitable, he kept America in the war into the fourth year of his presidency. At the same time, Nixon negotiated a "decent interval" deal with the Communists to put a face-saving year or two between his final withdrawal and Saigon’s collapse. If they waited that long, Nixon secretly assured North Vietnam’s chief sponsors in Moscow and Beijing, the North could conquer the South without any fear that the United States would intervene to save it. The humiliating defeat that haunts Americans to this day was built into Nixon’s exit strategy. Worse, the myth that Nixon was winning the war before Congress "tied his hands" has led policy makers to adapt tactics from America’s final years in Vietnam to the twenty-first-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, prolonging both wars without winning either. Forty years after the fall of Saigon, and drawing on more than a decade spent studying Nixon’s secretly recorded Oval Office tapes--the most comprehensive, accurate, and illuminating record of any presidency in history, much of it never transcribed until now-- Fatal Politics tells a story of political manipulation and betrayal that will change how Americans remember Vietnam. Fatal Politics is also available as a special e-book that allows the reader to move seamlessly from the book to transcripts and audio files of these historic conversations.
Harry Truman's administration began searching for an American response to the clash in Indochina between Frech colonialism and Vietminh communism in 1945. Thirty years and five administrations later, Gerald Ford and his aides tried unsuccessfully to solicit additional aid for South Vietnam from a reluctant Congress. For Truman, Ford, and every American leader in between, the dilemma in Vietnam hung ominously over the presidency. In Shadow on the White House, seven prominent historians examine how the leadership of six presidents and an issue that grew into a difficult and often unpopular war shaped each other. Focusing on the personalities, politics, priorities, and actions of the presidents as they confronted Vietnam, the authors consider the expansion of presidential power in foreign-policy formulation since World War II. In their analyses, they chronicle the history of executive leadership as it related to Vietnam, assess presidential prerogatives and motives on war and peace issues, and clarify the interconnection between the modern presidency and the nation's frustrating, tragic, and humiliating failure in Southeast Asia. Although other histories have been written about the Vietnam experience, this book is the first systematic and comparative survey on presidential leadership as it relates to the war issue. It is organized by presidential administrations, giving a detailed examination of each president's decisions and policies. Based on the most recently opened archival sources, the essays provide a framework on which to hang the kaleidoscopic events of the war. -- Amazon.com.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The extraordinary account of James Garfield's rise from poverty to the American presidency, and the dramatic history of his assassination and legacy, from the bestselling author of The River of Doubt. "Crisp, concise and revealing history.... A fresh narrative that plumbs some of the most dramatic days in U.S. presidential history." —The Washington Post James Abram Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, a renowned congressman, and a reluctant presidential candidate who took on the nation's corrupt political establishment. But four months after Garfield's inauguration in 1881, he was shot in the back by a deranged office-seeker named Charles Guiteau. Garfield survived the attack, but become the object of bitter, behind-the-scenes struggles for power—over his administration, over the nation's future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic brings alive a forgotten chapter of U.S. history. Look for Candice Millard’s latest book, River of the Gods.
The most frank and intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet Stephanie Grisham rose from being a junior press wrangler on the Trump campaign in 2016 to assuming top positions in the administration as White House press secretary and communications director, while at the same time acting as First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director and eventually chief of staff. Few members of the Trump inner circle served longer or were as close to the first family as Stephanie Grisham, and few had her unique insight into the turbulent four years of the administration, especially the personalities behind the headlines.
What do you know about America’s vice presidents? An “altogether amusing” history filled with oft-forgotten names and fascinating anecdotes (AV Club). How many vice presidents went on to become president? How many vice presidents shot men while in office? Who was the better shot? Who was the first vice president to assume power when a president died? Why did he return official letters without reading them? What vice president was almost torn limb from limb in Venezuela? Which former VP was tried for treason for trying to start his own empire in the Southwest? How many vice presidents were assassinated? In the next presidential election, should you worry about the candidates for vice president? The vice presidency isn’t worth “a bucket of warm spit.” That’s the prudish version of what John Nance Garner had to say about the office—several years after serving as VP under FDR. Was he right? The vice presidency is one of America’s most historically complicated and underappreciated public offices. And Jeremy Lott’s sweeping, hilarious, and insightful history introduces the unusual, colorful, and sometimes shadowy cast of characters that have occupied it—their bitter rivalries and rank ambitions, glorious victories and tragic setbacks, revealed through hundreds of historical vignettes and drawn from extensive research and interviews. “Full of rich veep history.” —Baltimore Sun