Aspects of the Presidency

New Haven, CT: Ticknor & Fields, 1980. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. 22 cm, xix, [1], 247, [5] pages. Former owner's stamp has left an impression on the flyleaf. Introduction by Robert A. Dahl. In 1950 John Hersey had privileged access to Harry S Truman's activities at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over a period of three months. In 1975 he spent six full days at the White House noting what Gerald Ford did that week and how he did it. A thoughtful and critical analysis of how two U.S. Presidents (Harry S. Truman and Gerald Ford) handled a myriad of political crises during their terms of office. The author has won the Pulitzer Prize for other work. John Richard Hersey (June 17, 1914 - March 24, 1993) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage. Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was adjudged the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department. From 1965 to 1970, Hersey was master of Pierson College, one of twelve residential colleges at Yale University, where his outspoken activism and early opposition to the Vietnam War made him controversial with alumni, but admired by many students. After the trial of the Black Panthers in New Haven, Connecticut, Hersey wrote Letter to the Alumni (1970), in which the former Yale College master sympathetically addressed civil rights and anti-war activism - and attempted to explain them to sometimes-aggravated alumni.