"Ten years in the making, Presidents of War is a fresh, intimate, irresistibly readable narrative of how a procession of Chief Executives took the nation into major conflicts, mobilized Americans for victory and seized greater power for themselves. Beschloss's findings in original letters, diaries, and declassified documents, and his interviews with surviving participants in the drama, allow him to bring us into the room and into the minds of these...

Shortly after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, with a nation deep in mourning and the world looking on in stunned disbelief, Jacqueline Kennedy found the strength to set aside her own personal grief for the sake of posterity and begin the task of documenting and preserving her husband's legacy. In January of 1964, she and Robert F. Kennedy approved a planned oral-history project that would capture their first-hand accounts of the late President...