Epstein Secrets

D. Eisenhower had served two full terms. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson, overwhelmed by

of the Presidency, and the experience of recent incumbents offered no guidance. No President since Dwight D. Eisenhower had served two full terms. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson, overwhelmed by the war in Vietnam, had declined to run for reelection in 1968. Richard Nixon resigned less than s

like to leave." VII E FTA_R1_02204189 EFTA02720660 After I talked with Plouffe, I wandered down to the basement of the White House to meet with Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national-security adviser. That day, Obama was meeting with Francois Hollande, the new French President; the building was filled w

nt of the Atlantic Council, notes that the partnership was often contentious. In his just-published book, "Berlin 1961," Kempe notes that President John F. Kennedy had to cope with a British prime minister who talked conciliation, a French president who talked belligerence and a German chancellor who mistruste

Berlin 1961," Kempe notes that President John F. Kennedy had to cope with a British prime minister who ta

drawal total and end dates could change somewhat. No one, not even Obama's most intimate national-security aides—Tom Donilon, Denis McDonough, and Ben Rhodes—can be certain of their boss' final calculations, but key officials feel confident that the president's secret thinking will generally hold. Sorti

n." In 2007, at the start of Obama's Presidential campaign, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Richard Goodwin, who worked in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, visited him in his Senate office. "I have no desire to be one of those Presidents who are just on the list—you see the

used everything from the promise of appointment to bald-faced political threats to win passage of the legislative agenda that had languished under John Kennedy, including Medicare, a tax cut, and a civil-rights bill. Publicly, Johnson said of Kennedy, "I had to take the dead man's program and turn it into

an XXL France or Germany." Obama's "long game" on foreign policy calls for traditional categories of American power and ideology to be reordered. Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications, told me that Washington was "trapped in very stale narratives." "In the foreig

declared in his Iowa speech, echoing the advice of his pollsters and strategists. "This party—the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy—has always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people EFTA00712759 when we led, not by polls, but by principle; not by calcu

n, recently suggesting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is primarily responsible for the failure of the Middle East peace process. 8. Ben Rhodes Behind Obama's biggest foreign-policy speeches -- his campaign address before 200,000 people in Berlin, his 2009 Cairo remarks on Middle East poli