J. B. West, chief usher of the White House, directed the operations and maintenance of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - and coordinated its daily life - at the request of the president and his family. He directed state functions; planned parties, weddings, funerals, gardens, playgrounds, and extensive renovations; and with a large staff, supervised every activity in the presidential home.

In one of the most underestimated - and challenging - positions in the world, the first lady of the United States must be many things: an inspiring leader with a forward-thinking agenda of her own; a savvy politician, skilled at navigating the treacherous rapids of Washington; a wife and mother operating under constant scrutiny; and an able CEO responsible for the smooth operation of countless services and special events at the White House.

From the number one New York Times best-selling author of The Residence and First Women - also a New York Times best seller - comes a poignant, news-making look at the lives of the five former presidents in the wake of their White House years, including the surprising friendships they have formed through shared perspective and empathy.

For more than 200 years, a small office has operated on the state floor of the White House executive residence. Known as the Usher's Office, whose mission is to accommodate the personal needs of the first family, and to make the White House feel like a home. The Usher's Office is the managing office of the executive residence and its staff of 90-plus. The staff consists of butlers, carpenters, grounds personnel, electricians, painters, plumbers, florists, maids, housemen, cooks, chefs, storekeepers, curators, calligraphers, doormen, and administrative support.

Secret Service agent Clint Hill brings history intimately and vividly to life as he reflects on his 17 years protecting the most powerful office in the nation. Hill walked alongside Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford, seeing them through a long, tumultuous era - the Cold War; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy; the Vietnam War; Watergate; and the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard M. Nixon.

For 36 years, from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, Tom Pendel saw the daily comings and goings at the center of American political life in the White House. As doorkeeper, he saw senators, congressmen, royalty, citizens, and scoundrels appear on the White House steps.

From the author of the New York Times best sellers First Women and The Residence, an intimate, news-making look at the men who are next in line to the most powerful office in the world - the vice presidents of the modern era - from Richard Nixon to Joe Biden to Mike Pence. In interviews with more than 200 people, Kate Andersen Brower pulls back the curtain and reveals the sometimes cold, sometimes close, and always complicated relationship between our modern presidents and their vice presidents.

Tina Brown has been observing and chronicling the British monarchy for three decades, and her sweeping account is full of powerful revelations, newly reported details, and searing insight gleaned from remarkable access to royal insiders. Stylish, witty, and erudite, The Palace Papers will irrevoca­bly change how the world perceives and under­stands the royal family.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites listeners into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms.

While preparing to sell his home in Alexandria, Virginia, retired Secret Service agent Clint Hill uncovers an old steamer trunk in the garage, triggering a floodgate of memories. As he and Lisa McCubbin, his coauthor on three previous books, pry it open for the first time in fifty years, they find forgotten photos, handwritten notes, personal gifts, and treasured mementos from the trips on which Hill accompanied First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy as her Secret Service agent.

Secret Service agents, acting as human surveillance cameras, observe everything that goes on behind the scenes in the president's inner circle. Ronald Kessler reveals what they have seen, providing startling, previously untold stories about the presidents, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as about their families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides.

From New York Times best-selling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler, The First Family Detail tells eye-opening, behind-the-scenes stories from Secret Service agents about presidents and their families.

Betty Boyd Caroli's engrossing and informative First Ladies is an essential resource for anyone interested in the role of America's First Ladies. Caroli observes the role as it has shifted and evolved from ceremonial backdrop to substantive world figure. This expanded and updated fifth edition presents Caroli's keen political analysis and astute observations of recent developments, including Melania Trump's reluctance to take on the mantle and former First Lady Hilary Clinton's recent run for president. Caroli here contributes a new preface and updated chapters.

Based on hundreds of interviews with friends, family, and lovers over a thirty-year period—as well as previously unreleased material from the JFK Library—Kennedy historian J. Randy Taraborrelli paints an unforgettable new portrait of a woman whose flaws and contradictions only serve to make her even more iconic. “I have three lives,” Jackie told a former lover, “public, private and secret.” In this revealing biography, listeners will become intimately familiar with all three.

Clint Hill will forever be remembered as the lone secret service agent who jumped onto the car after President Kennedy was shot, clinging to its sides as it sped toward the hospital. Even now, decades after JFK’s presidency, the public continues to be fascinated with the Kennedys - America’s royal family. To mark the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Hill recounts his indelible memories of those five days leading up to, and after, that tragic day in November 1963. Hill, as Jackie’s guard, experienced those days firsthand.

In one of the most underestimated - and challenging - positions in the world, the first lady of the United States must be many things: an inspiring leader with a forward-thinking agenda of her own; a savvy politician, skilled at navigating the treacherous rapids of Washington; a wife and mother operating under constant scrutiny; and an able CEO responsible for the smooth operation of countless services and special events at the White House.

As Margaret Truman knows from firsthand experience, living in the White House can be exhilarating and maddening, alarming and exhausting, but it is certainly never dull. Part private residence, part goldfish bowl, and part national shrine, the White House is both the most important address in America and the most intensely scrutinized.

What does it mean to be a Kennedy? If ever three women would be challenged and changed by marriage into a family, it would be Jacqueline Bouvier, Ethel Skakel, and Joan Bennett. None of these radiant brides could have ever been prepared for the fame, the family, and tragedies that would spring from their lives. As they struggled to cope with their husbands' infidelities, the harsh glare of the media, and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, these women would learn what it meant to be sisters, reaching out to one another with comfort and consolation.

A revealing biography of Lady Bird Johnson with startling new insights into her marriage to Lyndon Baines Johnson and her unexpectedly strong impact on his presidency. Long obscured by her husband's shadow, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson emerges in this first comprehensive biography as a figure of surprising influence and the centering force for LBJ, a man who suffered from extreme mood swings and desperately needed someone to help control his darker impulses.

Using remarkable new sources, Sarah Bradford has written a timely celebration of a life that was more private than commonly supposed. Revealing new testimony from many of the couple's friends shows the complexities of this apparently very public relationship and of her controversial marriage to Aristotle Onassis. Here is the private Jackie - neglected wife, vigilant mother, and working widow - whose contradictory and fascinating nature is illuminated by all that Bradford has discovered.

Kennedy family biographer Christopher Andersen makes The Day John Died available for the first time as an ebook. Andersen draws on important sources - many talking here for the first time - to recreate in vivid and startling detail the events leading up to that fateful night off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. An inspiring, sympathetic, and compelling look at one of the most remarkable young men of our time, The Day John Died is more than just the definitive biography of JFK Jr. It is a bittersweet saga of triumph, love, loss, fate - and promise unfulfilled.

Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt’s marriage is one of the most celebrated and scrutinized partnerships in presidential history. It raised eyebrows in their lifetimes and has only become more controversial since their deaths. From FDR’s lifelong romance with Lucy Mercer to Eleanor’s purported lesbianism - and many scandals in between - the American public has never tired of speculating about the ties that bound these two headstrong individuals.

Army Wives goes beyond the sound bites and photo ops of military life to bring listeners into the hearts and homes of today's military wives. Biank tells the story of four typical Army wives who, in a flash, find themselves in extraordinary circumstances that ultimately force them to redefine who they are as women and wives.

In 1932 Eleanor Roosevelt entered the claustrophobic, duty-bound existence of the first lady with dread. By that time she had put her deep disappointment in her marriage behind her and developed an independent life - now threatened by the public role she would be forced to play. A lifeline came to her in the form of a feisty campaign reporter for the Associated Press: Lorena Hickok. Over the next 30 years, until Eleanor's death, the two women carried on an extraordinary relationship.

For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated - uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs - it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal’s greatest mysteries - who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape? - and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew.

A Fine Romance begins with Bergen's charming first husband, French director Louis Malle, whose huge appetite for life broadened her horizons and whose occasional darkness never diminished their love for each other. But her real romance begins when she discovers overpowering love for her daughter after years of ambivalence about motherhood.

A fresh look at Lady Bird Johnson that upends her image as a plain Jane who was married for her money and mistreated by Lyndon. This Lady Bird worked quietly behind the scenes through every campaign, every illness, and a trying presidency as a key strategist, fundraiser, barnstormer, peacemaker, and indispensable therapist.

"To begin with I was in love and I am in love so that's not hard," Barbara Bush told her granddaughter Ellie LeBlond Sosa. Sosa had asked for the secret to her and President George H.W. Bush's 77-year love affair that withstood World War II separation, a leap of faith into the oil fields of West Texas, the painful loss of a child, a political climb to the highest office, and after the White House, the transition back to a "normal" life. Sosa and co-author Kelly Anne Chase paint the portrait of the enduring relationship of George and Barbara Bush.

A peaceful mountaintop setting crucially removed from the constant scrutiny of the press, Camp David has served as both a site of critical diplomacy and unparalleled tranquility. It is where President and Mrs. Reagan rode horses through the mountains, where Gerald Ford could take a moment to jump on a trampoline with his daughter, where Nixon rode shotgun with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, and where Jimmy Carter could find the ultimate flight-sledding - only to break his clavicle two weeks before the end of his tenure.

Over a span of 18 years, Lady Bird Johnson recorded 47 oral history interviews with Michael Gillette and his colleagues. These conversations, just released in 2011, form the heart of Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History, an intimate story of a shy young country girl's transformation into one of America's most effective and admired First Ladies.

In one of the most underestimated - and challenging - positions in the world, the first lady of the United States must be many things: an inspiring leader with a forward-thinking agenda of her own; a savvy politician, skilled at navigating the treacherous rapids of Washington; a wife and mother operating under constant scrutiny; and an able CEO responsible for the smooth operation of countless services and special events at the White House.

J. B. West, chief usher of the White House, directed the operations and maintenance of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - and coordinated its daily life - at the request of the president and his family. He directed state functions; planned parties, weddings, funerals, gardens, playgrounds, and extensive renovations; and with a large staff, supervised every activity in the presidential home.

For more than two centuries, the White House in Washington, DC, has been the stage for some of the most climactic moments in American history. Its walls and portraits have witnessed fierce power struggles, history-altering decisions, shocking scandals, and intimate moments among the First Family, their guests, and the staff.

From the number one New York Times best-selling author of The Residence and First Women - also a New York Times best seller - comes a poignant, news-making look at the lives of the five former presidents in the wake of their White House years, including the surprising friendships they have formed through shared perspective and empathy.

For more than 200 years, a small office has operated on the state floor of the White House executive residence. Known as the Usher's Office, whose mission is to accommodate the personal needs of the first family, and to make the White House feel like a home. The Usher's Office is the managing office of the executive residence and its staff of 90-plus. The staff consists of butlers, carpenters, grounds personnel, electricians, painters, plumbers, florists, maids, housemen, cooks, chefs, storekeepers, curators, calligraphers, doormen, and administrative support.

From New York Times best-selling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler, The First Family Detail tells eye-opening, behind-the-scenes stories from Secret Service agents about presidents and their families.

There’s a secret world hidden in the halls of the U.S. Capitol! The first stone was laid by George Washington himself, and the building stands today as one of the most recognizable symbols of the oldest democracy in the world. In this home of America’s legislative branch, senators and representatives fight to pass laws they believe are for the good of the country.

The Presidents Club was born at Eisenhower’s inauguration when Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover first conceived the idea. Over the years that followed - and to this day - the presidents relied on, misunderstood, sabotaged, and formed alliances with one another that changed history. The world’s most exclusive fraternity is a complicated place: its members are bound forever because they sat in the Oval Office and know its secrets, yet they are immortal rivals for history’s favor.

For 36 years, from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, Tom Pendel saw the daily comings and goings at the center of American political life in the White House. As doorkeeper, he saw senators, congressmen, royalty, citizens, and scoundrels appear on the White House steps.

Secret Service agents, acting as human surveillance cameras, observe everything that goes on behind the scenes in the president's inner circle. Ronald Kessler reveals what they have seen, providing startling, previously untold stories about the presidents, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as about their families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides.