Have you no sense of decency, sir? asked attorney Robert Welch in a climatic moment in the 1954 Senate hearings that pitted Joseph R. McCarthy against the United States Army, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the rest of the political establishment. What made the confrontation unprecedented and magnified its impact was its gavel-to-gavel coverage by television. Thirty-six days of hearings transfixed the nation. With a journalist's eye for revealing detail, Robert Shogan traces the phenomenon and analyzes television's impact on government. Despite McCarthy's fall, Mr. Shogan points out, the hearings left a major item of unfinished business-the issue of McCarthyism, the strategy based on fear, smear, and guilt by association. But television overlooked this portentous omission, and as it went on to transform American political debate it exhibited the same shortcomings exposed by the hearings: an emphasis on razzle-dazzle and a reluctance to challenge power and authority-traits that persist today.

In 1921, some 10,000 West Virginia coal miners- outraged over years of brutality and exploitation- picked up their Winchesters and marched against their tormentors, the powerful mine owners who ruled their corrupt state. For ten days the miners fought a pitched battle against an opposing legion of deputies, state police, and makeshift militia. Only the intervention of a Federal expeditionary force ended this undeclared war. In The Battle of Blair Mountain , Robert Shogan shows this long-neglected slice of American history to be a saga of the conflicting political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped the power structure of twentieth-century America.

When Harry Truman was rescued from political obscurity to become Franklin Roosevelt's running mate, black Americans were deeply troubled. Many believed that Truman, born and raised in former slave-holding Missouri, was a step back on civil rights from Henry Wallace, the liberal incumbent vice president. But by the end of his own presidency, black newspaper publishers cited Truman for having "awakened the conscience of America and given new strength to our democracy by his courageous efforts on behalf of freedom and equality."
In this first full-scale account of Truman's evolving views on civil rights, Robert Shogan recounts how Truman outgrew the bigotry of his Jackson County upbringing to become the first president since Lincoln to attempt to redress the nation's long history of injustice toward its black citizens-and in the process transformed the course of race relations in America. Shogan vividly demonstrates the full significance of the 33rd president's contributions to that transformation. He ordered the integration of the armed forces and threw the weight of the Justice Department behind the long struggle against segregation in housing and education. And he used the platform of his presidency to relentlessly trumpet the cause of equal rights for those least favored Americans, even making an unprecedented address to the NAACP.
Going beyond other accounts of Truman, Shogan points out the political and personal factors that motivated the president and weighs the potential political costs and benefits of his civil rights actions. Shogan also explains Truman's shift away from his formative racial prejudices by shedding light on the forces that shaped his character and leadership qualities. These included his political tutelage under "Boss Tom" Pendergast, which taught him the value of black voters, and the influence of populism, which fostered his support for underdogs such as black Americans.
Illuminating how Truman became the first president to make racial injustice a political priority-and the first to denounce segregation as well as discrimination-Shogan's book opens a new and provocative window on the struggle for civil rights in America.

The dreary presidential campaign of 1996 and Clinton's disillusioning presidency matched the convulsive pattern of events which yanked the nation in every direction except forward throughout the final decades of the twentieth century. The swings of the previous decade with the Republican ascension in Congress and the Democratic presence in the White House, were less an aberration than a continuation of the disruptions that haunted the post-depression American political system."The Fate of the Union: America's Rocky Road to Political Stalemate" illustrates how the circumstances of each quadrennial American presidential contest have piled on the next, melding into the past and suggesting the future. The book explores the Clinton presidency as a continuum: first, placing it in the context of recent predecessors-from Truman to Bush-and then relating to the events that lead to his election in 1992, shaped his inaugural term, and enabled him to win four more years in the White House.Author Robert Shogan's timely examination shows that short of a thorough changing of the Constitution, the best prevention for an ever-worsening political system is to guard against self-delusion.

America's culture war - which pits traditionalists, unrelenting defenders of the social orthodoxy, against modernists, agitators for social change - has simmered and seethed since the birth of the nation. But in the turbulent decade of the 1960s, the culture war erupted in the political arena, where it thunders on today. "Constant Conflict" examines how the evolution of cultural issues as political tools has rocked the balance of political power in America, and continues to do so. Through an expansive coverage of events - from Vietnam, Nixon, discrimination, abortion, economic imbalance, and morality in political behavior - Washington journalist Robert Shogan provides an objective and informed look at how Americans feel about themselves and their country in the first decade of the new millennium. Updates to the paperback show how the culture war has reached new heights in the Bush presidency, with the emphasis on Godliness and the divisiveness against the Axis of Evil. Shogan also discusses how the cultural conflicts will impact the 2004 campaign.

With "Hard Bargain," Robert Shogan offers an account of one of World War II's most dramatic chapters--the story of how Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly brokered a deal to provide the destroyers Winston Churchill needed to save Britain from destruction. At the center of the momentous events of 1940 are two extraordinary leaders: Churchill, the forthright pragmatist, and Roosevelt, the suave politician. As Hitler's war machine threatened to starve England into submission, these two men initiated a complex negotiation that would shatter all precedents for conducting foreign policy. FDR yearned to enter the war, but was handcuffed by domestic politics. Churchill had to plead for American intervention at a time when the United States was intensely isolationist. Drawing on archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Shogan masterfully recreates the President's maneuvers as FDR stepped around the Constitution in order to clinch the deal, a move that has had repercussions from Korea to the Persian Gulf.