Tom Costello
Washington Correspondent for NBC News
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Tom Costello
“As Bob Riel so masterfully illustrates in his book, Americans have been at each other’s throats for more than two hundred years now. We’ve witnessed moments of great presidential grandeur and ludicrous folly. Occasionally, our passions have drawn blood. Through it all, presidential elections have reinvigorated the body politic or bored us into staying home on election day. . . . You don’t need to be a presidential historian to get drawn into this well-crafted yarn of uniquely American stories, traditions, triumphs, and disappointments. Riel brings the reader along for a journey, dipping into critical moments of history with fascinating anecdotes, twists and turns in our collective story that we might not know as well as we thought.” (from Amazon)
Bob Riel
Quest for the Presidency gathers in a single volume the compelling stories behind every presidential campaign in American history, from 1789 through 2020. Bob Riel takes us inside the 1800 clash between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the 1860 election that launched the Civil War, the 1948 whistle-stop comeback of Harry Truman, the Kennedy-Nixon drama of 1960, the 1980 Reagan Revolution, the historic 2008 election of Barack Obama, the turbulent 2020 battle between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and everything in between. This engaging and insightful book includes a trove of entertaining stories about campaigns and candidates, and it goes beyond the campaign tales to also consider the threads that link elections across time. It sheds light on the continually evolving story of American democracy in a way that helps us to better understand present-day politics.