On two consecutive days—Monday, June 10, and Tuesday, June 11, 1963—President John F. Kennedy gave two speeches that led to what many regard as the most significant achievements of his presidency, one in diplomacy and the other in civil rights. Both speeches were unprecedented and politically risky.

Kennedy’s commencement address at American University on June 10 led to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the first of its kind. The next day, JFK made a nationally televised speech on civil rights. Some would call it the single most important day in the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act passed the next year, with Lyndon Johnson as president.

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Andrew Cohen’s Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours that Made History tracks the president’s activities during this short period. Cohen explores the context of the speeches and how they came to be, and shows what else was on the president’s plate.

In what is often called the “Peace Speech,” JFK called for Americans to re-examine the Cold War and relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. President Nikita Khrushchev had the speech broadcast throughout his country and said Kennedy’s remarks were the reason he agreed to negotiations and the final treaty.

The speech on Tuesday had a much different history. Earlier that day, representatives of the Justice Department confronted Governor George Wallace of Alabama as he attempted to keep two African-American students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. Kennedy decided to speak to the nation that night, although only one of his closest advisors, his brother Robert Kennedy, agreed with him. Speechwriter Theodore Sorensen had only about two hours to prepare for the telecast.

The two speeches ultimately changed the course of history. In this important book, Cohen brings it all alive and makes us feel that we are there behind the scenes to see history in the making.

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

While we all know George Washington as our first president and leader of American forces in the Revolutionary War, in The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson illuminates another key role he played: leading the Constitutional Convention.

It was, it turns out, a charge Washington took on reluctantly. After securing victory in the Revolutionary War after nine years of dedicated leadership, the towering 51-year-old general announced his retirement on December 23, 1783. But a private life was not to be his. Less than four years later, with health problems a continuing concern, Washington faced a dilemma: Should he attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia?

As Larson tells us, the future president realized that, “For his own sake and the sake of the country, he should not go unless the convention was likely to succeed, and yet it was not likely to succeed unless he went.”

And so it was. The delegates elected Washington president of the convention to lead them through the morass any rebelling society faces: It is one thing to achieve military victory, quite another to design a functioning government. In America’s case, there was also the need to balance the interests of the central government with the concerns of powerful, independent-minded states.

Larson brings readers into innards of the Constitutional Convention: the formation of committees to tackle issues such as presidential selection and executive power, debates on the power to tax and the length of the president’s term and the crafting of language to meet the desires of both nationalists and their opponents. There was even a “Committee of Style and Arrangement” charged with giving the draft document a “last polish.” And, of course, in the end, Washington accepted the mantle of leadership.

As elections role around once more, Larson’s impeccable research and impressive storytelling acumen may be just the thing readers need to restore appreciation for the system of government we inherited, and still strive to perfect. 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In mid-19th-century America, newspapers were the primary sources of information and opinion. Most newspaper publishers and editors were closely aligned with politicians and, with few exceptions, opinions were emphasized more than news and loyalty to political parties more than the public interest. It was a time of significant change for the newspaper industry with technological innovations such as steam-driven printing presses and, most importantly, the telegraph, making delivery of the news much faster.

In his engrossing and enlightening new book, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, pre-eminent Lincoln authority Harold Holzer explores the complex relationships that influenced the political journalism of the era. He focuses on two of the most widely covered politicians, Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, and the chief journalistic personalities of the day, all from New York City: Horace Greeley of the Tribune, James Gordon Bennett of the Herald and Henry Raymond of the Times. Greeley and Raymond had, like Lincoln, been Whigs who became Republicans. Bennett was deeply conservative and almost always supported the Democrats. Each had strong views and used his paper to influence policy in many areas.

From very early in his life Lincoln devoured newspapers, and they were instrumental in both his rise to the presidency and his leadership while he was president. In his first signed newspaper article in March, 1832, he proposed himself as a candidate for the Illinois legislature. His first major address outside of the legislature was a call for reason in the face of extremist passion, and it was printed in full in a local paper. Lincoln even became co-owner of a Springfield German-language newspaper even though he did not speak that language. He believed that “Public sentiment is everything,” and Holzer shows how he became a master, especially as president, of his rarely acknowledged effort to control the press.

The most important pre-presidential newspaper help for Lincoln came in 1858 when he was the little-known challenger against the well-known incumbent Douglas for an Illinois Senate seat. The Chicago Press and Tribune proposed that the candidates engage in a series of statewide debates. Contrary to the debates’ historical reputation, neither candidate was at his best. And there were problems with the stenographers. They sat behind the candidates and could not always hear clearly what the debaters said, plus they had political loyalties of their own. Holzer demonstrates that the debates achieved their exalted place in history, not because of what the debaters said, but because of what the press made of their words in reprints, summaries and commentaries.

As an ambitious politician, Lincoln spent much time cultivating journalists at their offices throughout Illinois. He continued doing this as president although he never held a formal news conference and except for an 1862 White House visit by Nathaniel Hawthorne, did not grant any major interviews to journalists. He also found a way to reach the public and reduce the influence of newspaper editors by writing what appeared to be personal letters, and then strategically releasing the text of those letters to the press to reach far wider audiences.

The author vividly captures the lives of the colorful “big three” editors and other members of the press as they invented, for better or worse, modern journalism during the most divisive period in our country’s history. As the “first draft of history” was being written, we learn about the raw politics and undisguised philosophies that not only informed, but also divided, readers on issues such as slavery and the Civil War.

Holzer’s book is a fascinating, detailed and very readable look at a crucial aspect of Lincoln’s leadership and political genius. It deserves a wide readership.

At the time Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he did not have a definite plan for dealing with the postwar South. Although 360,000 Union troops had died during the Civil War, the North had not suffered the widespread devastation of the Southern states. The nine million white citizens and four million former slaves who lived in the former Confederacy faced a grim future.

Six weeks after he assumed the presidency, Andrew Johnson revealed his vision for uniting the country. He declared a sweeping amnesty that restored all property, except slaves, to most rebels as long as they swore to “support, protect, and defend” the Constitution and the Union. To Radical Republican leaders such as Senator Charles Sumner and Representative Thaddeus Stevens, it seemed white residents of the South were treated with remarkable leniency.

In his magnificent After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace, A.J. Langguth takes us through the Reconstruction period and its many heroic and tragic events. Among the latter were the so-called Black Codes, stringent state laws passed after Johnson became president. They ranged from a South Carolina law requiring any black man who wanted work other than as a servant or farmer to apply for a license from a judge and pay an annual tax, to Kentucky, where all contracts had to be approved by a white citizen, to Florida where “impudence,” a form of vagrancy, could cause the violator to be whipped. Lynchings and the killing of innocent black citizens went unpunished.

For all practical purposes, Reconstruction ended in 1887 when Republican President Rutherford Hayes joined with Democrats in a deal that led to the removal of federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina. That arrangement brought to an end any hopes that African Americans would enjoy full equality as U.S. citizens.

Langguth skillfully illuminates the roles of key figures and offers enlightening commentary on events. After Lincoln is an excellent choice for readers who want to understand why the post-Civil War period was a major disappointment and why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not come until 99 years after the end of the Civil War.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.