By clicking “Accept,” you agree to the use of cookies and similar technologies on your device as set forth in our Cookie Policy and our Privacy Policy. Please note that certain cookies are essential for this website to function properly and do not require user consent to be deployed.

First Friends

The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents

Contributors

By Gary Ginsberg

Formats and Prices

Price

$30.00

Price

$38.00 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around July 6, 2021. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! 
USA TODAY “BEST BOOKS OF 2021” PICK! 

In the bestselling tradition of The Presidents Club and Presidential Courage, White House history as told through the stories of the best friends and closest confidants of American presidents.


Here are the riveting histories of myriad presidential friendships, among them:
  • Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed: They shared a bed for four years during which Speed saved his friend from a crippling depression. Two decades later the friends worked together to save the Union. 
  • Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson: When Truman wavered on whether to recognize the state of Israel in 1948, his lifelong friend and former business partner intervened at just the right moment with just the right words to steer the president’s decision. 
  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Daisy Suckley: Unassuming and overlooked during her lifetime, Daisy Suckley was in reality FDR’s most trusted, constant confidant, the respite for a lonely and overworked President navigating the Great Depression and World War II
  • John Kennedy and David Ormsby-Gore: They met as young men in pre-war London and began a conversation over the meaning of leadership.  A generation later the Cuban Missile Crisis would put their ideas to test as Ormsby-Gore became the president’s unofficial, but most valued foreign policy advisor.
These and other friendships—including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan—populate this fresh and provocative exploration of a series of seminal presidential friendships.

Publishing history teems with books by and about Presidents, First Ladies, First Pets, and even First Chefs. Now former Clinton aide Gary Ginsberg breaks new literary ground on Pennsylvania Avenue and provides fresh insights into the lives of the men who held the most powerful political office in the world by looking at the friends on whom they relied.

First Friends is an engaging, serendipitous look into the lives of Commanders-in-Chief and how their presidencies were shaped by those they held most dear.

  • "Intimate...Gary Ginsberg chronicles the unelected yet undeniably powerful people who shape presidencies...advisers of presidents with all-access passes to the Oval [who] can make or break legacies."
    New York Times
  • "Everyone needs a BFF, especially people in high places: someone to lean on in good times and bad. [An] entertaining and enlightening romp through interpersonal presidential relationships."
    USA Today
  • "Gary Ginsberg has brought us a fresh, fascinating and irresistible account of nine presidential relationships that helped to change history. FIRST FRIENDS demonstrates that one of the best ways of understanding the presidents of our past is to discover their relationships with intimate friends, and the author tells us many important things we did not know before.”
    Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of PRESIDENTS OF WAR

On Sale
Jul 6, 2021
Page Count
416 pages
Publisher
Twelve
ISBN-13
9781538702925

Gary Ginsberg

About the Author

Gary Ginsberg grew up in Buffalo New York, home to two US presidents. A lawyer by training, he has spent his professional career at the intersection of media, politics, and law. He worked for the Clinton administration, was a senior editor and counsel at the political magazine George, and then spent the next two decades in executive positions in media and technology at News Corporation, Time Warner and SoftBank. He has published pieces in the the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and was an on-air political contributor in the early days of MSNBC. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons. First Friends is his first book.

Learn more about this author