Organized chronologically to parallel the political, social, and cultural history of the 1980s, this collection of handwritten letters from Ronald Reagan to his constituents during his eight years in the White House shares the former president's political convictions, religious beliefs, and human concerns as he responds to citizens from all walks of life.

In his eight years as president from 1945-1953, Harry S. Truman made some of the most important decisions in U.S. history, particularly in foreign policy matters. This book contains transcripts of conversations with Truman from taped interviews in 1959. The probing questions and straightforward answers cover a wide variety of domestic and foreign policy issues ranging from civil rights in the South to using the atomic bomb on Japan. This book provides a vivid portrait of Truman, 'warts and all.' Through his answers to questions, the threads of his political loyalty, bluntness, frustration, decency, thrift, humanity, and humor become a tapestry of his presidential character. His intense pride and manner surface especially as he explains bitter political and domestic controversies, as well as foreign policy decisions. These interviews reveal Truman's bedrock foundation of deeply held political beliefs as he gives thoughtful answers to queries about major political issues. In addition, he discusses American presidential history; Congressmen such as Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson; Supreme Court Justices; and dozens of other well-known political leaders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. In similar fashion, he describes numerous foreign leaders, including Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-Shek. Evident as well is his firm loyalty to the United States, his family, his friends, and the Democratic Party. Truman also divulges some of his personal dislikes, particularly of political opponents such as Richard M. Nixon and, for over a decade after 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower. However, his personal resentments are more than matched by his fair-minded judgments of former President Herbert Hoover, American farmers, laborers, and racial groups. Discovered by Ralph Weber at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, the interviews were originally to be used as background for Truman's book, Mr. Citizen (1960), but most of Truman's obs (view table of contents)

Spymasters is a collection of interviews revealing enlightening perspectives on the covert operations of this powerful, secretive arm of the U.S. government. Here former top-ranking CIA officials shed light on some of the most sensitive issues and practices in American foreign intelligence to date. These men disclose information about: President Harry S. Truman's demands for a centralized intelligence agency and the stubborn resistance of James F. Byrnes, J. Edgar Hoover, and the military services the tumultuous early stages of the National Security Council the failed Bay of Pigs invasion the confusion surrounding the Kennedy assassination Khrushchev's ousting Operation MONGOOSE the Gulf of Tonkin incident The interviews are especially valuable for their portrayal of the relationships between the agency's directors and the presidents during the most anxious and threatening decades of the Cold War. The CIA's successes and failures are recounted and carefully evaluated by the men who were there, often times issuing the orders. (view table of contents)

United States Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers, 1775-1938 is the first basic reference work on American diplomatic cryptography. Weber’s research in national and private archives in the Americas and Europe has uncovered more than one hundred codes and ciphers. Beginning with the American Revolution, these secret systems masked confidential diplomatic correspondence and reports. During the period between 1775 and 1938, both codes and ciphers were employed. Ciphers were frequently used for American diplomatic and military correspondence during the American Revolution. At that time, a system was popular among American statesmen whereby a common book, such as a specific dictionary,was used by two correspondents who encoded each word in a message with three numbers. In this system, the first number indicated the page of the book, the second the line in the book, and the third the position of the plain text word on that line counting from the left. Codes provided the most common secret language basis for the entire nineteenth century. Ralph Weber describes in eight chapters the development of American cryptographic practice. The codes and ciphers published in the text and appendix will enable historians and others to read secret State Department dispatches before 1876, and explain code designs after that year.