Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics
Author: Joe Biden
“Nearly forty years after I first got involved, I remain captivated by the possibilities of politics and public service. In fact, I believe that my chosen profession is a noble calling. That’s why I wanted to be a part of it.”
–Joe Biden
As a United States senator from Delaware since 1973, Joe Biden has been an intimate witness to the major events of the past four decades and a relentless actor in trying to shape recent American history. He has seen up close the tragic mistake of the Vietnam War, the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a presidential impeachment, a presidential resignation, and a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court. He’s observed Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and two Bushes wrestling with the presidency; he’s traveled to war zones in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and seen firsthand the devastation of genocide. He played a vital role by standing up to Ronald Reagan’s effort to seat Judge Robert Bork on the Supreme Court, fighting for legislation that protects women against domestic violence, and galvanizing America’s response (and the world’s) to Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal march in the Balkans. In Promises to Keep, Biden reveals what these experiences taught him about himself, his colleagues, and the institutions of government.
With his customary candor, Biden movingly recounts growing up in a staunchly Catholic multigenerational household in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware; overcoming a demoralizingstutter; marriage, fatherhood, and the tragic death of his wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi; remarriage and re-forming a family with his second wife, Jill; success and failure in the Senate and on the campaign trail; two life-threatening aneurysms; his relations with fellow lawmakers on both sides of the aisle; and his leadership of powerful Senate committees.
Through these and other recollections, Biden shows us how the guiding principles he learned early in life–the obligation to work to make people’s lives better, to honor family and faith, to get up and do the right thing no matter how hard you’ve been knocked down, to be honest and straightforward, and, above all, to keep your promises–are the foundations on which he has based his life’s work as husband, father, and public servant.
Promises to Keep is the story of a man who faced down personal challenges and tragedy to become one of our most effective leaders. It is also an intimate series of reflections from a public servant who refuses to be cynical about political leadership, and a testament to the promise of the United States.
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The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game
Author: Alvin S Felzenberg
It’s a perennial pastime to rate U.S. presidents on an all-time ranking: Certain presidents were “Great,” others were “Near-Great,” and so on down to “Failures” and “Unmitigated Disasters.” (OK, we made that last category up.) But as Alvin Felzenberg points out, there are many flaws with these rating systems. Despite reams of new historical information, the rankings never seem to change very much. They all favor a certain kind of president-those who tended to increase executive power. That aside, the idea of rating presidential performance on a simple linear scale is absurd. The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t) breaks presidential performance into easily understandable categories-character, vision, competence, foreign policy, economic policy, human rights, and legacy-and assesses, for each category, the best and worst. The result is a surprisingly fresh look at how the various presidents stack up against each other, with some of the “greats” coming off far worse than their supposedly mediocre colleagues.
Bryan Craig - Library Journal
Felzenberg (political science, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Governor Tom Kean) attacks the historians' rankings of U.S. Presidents conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (1948, 1962) and by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1996). The author argues that these rankings used no precise criteria, were never entirely explained, and relied on experts who tended to be politically liberal. Felzenberg's approach is sound. He attempts to rectify the situation by newly systematizing such rankings into six different categories, e.g., character, vision, competence, economic soundness, the protection and expansion of liberties, and handling of defense and foreign policy. These categories and his in-depth discussions of their meaning, together with his selected top-, middle-, and bottom-ranked Presidents for each category, are the book's strength. Unfortunately, Craig's execution is flawed; like his predecessors, he gives no explanation of how he used these categories to obtain his own rankings of selected Presidents, and some Presidents are neither ranked nor discussed. But his criteria remain sound and carefully considered, and their consistent application would add depth to the ever-popular practice of ranking our Presidents. For public and academic libraries.
Table of Contents:
1 The Rating Game 1
2 Character 11
3 Vision 79
4 Competence 109
5 Economic Policy 171
6 Preserving and Extending Liberty 255
7 Defense, National Security, and Foreign Policy 331
8 What Does It All Mean? 365
The Presidential Scorecard 378
Acknowledgments 379
Economic Data Sources 381
Notes 385
Index 423
