Michael J. Gerhardt has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Lincoln's Mentors.
Martin Van Buren
Summary
President Martin Van Buren, a Jacksonian Democrat, did his best to project a strong executive image, like that of his predecessor. However, the Panic of 1837 crippled Van Buren’s economic plan. His effort to influence the courts in the Amistad case—involving a group of Africans who had staged a revolt from their Spanish captors on the high seas—only fueled his abolitionist opponents. And Van Buren’s effort to prevent Congress from having any supervisory role with respect to the postmaster general chipped away at the power of the executive branch and cemented his reputation as an ineffective president.
©2016 New York University (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Barack Obama
Summary
President Barack Obama, the first African American chief executive in the history of the United States, inspired millions of people to believe in his message of hope. His administration’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, came under persistent attacks as he sought to implement sweeping health-care reform. The Obama administration exercised executive powers aggressively—refusing to deport many undocumented immigrants who had entered the country as children, and refusing to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), becoming the first administration to support same-sex marriage. In the war on terror, President Obama used an elite team of Navy SEALS to kill al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden. Yet, he was criticized for using drones to kill American citizens on foreign soil, for continuing his predecessor’s use of NSA data collection to gather intelligence, and for overusing executive orders. President Obama’s presidency will doubtless be viewed as transformational; however, some critics will charge that he overreached in exercising his own executive authority, particularly in certain controversial areas that might have been left to Congress.
©2016 New York University (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Lincoln's Mentors
Summary
A brilliant and novel examination of how Abraham Lincoln mastered the art of leadership, revealing how five men mentored an obscure lawyer with no executive experience to become American’s greatest president. “Gerhardt has devised an ingenious solution for demystifying America’s most enigmatic president: examining the key people who influenced Lincoln as he developed his own unique skills and leadership style.” (Russell L. Riley, UVA’s Miller Center) In 1849, when Abraham Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, after two seemingly uninspiring years in the US House of Representatives, his political career appeared all but finished. His sense of failure was so great that friends worried about his sanity. Yet within a decade, Lincoln would reenter politics, become a leader of the Republican Party, win the 1860 presidential election, and keep America together during its most perilous period. What accounted for the turnaround? As Michael Gerhardt reveals, Lincoln’s reemergence followed the same path he had followed before, in which he read voraciously and learned from the successes, failures, oratory, and political maneuvering of a surprisingly diverse handful of men, some of whom he had never met but others of whom he knew intimately - Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Todd Stuart, and Orville Browning. From both their experiences and his, Lincoln learned valuable lessons on leadership, mastering party politics, campaigning, conventions, understanding and using executive power, managing a cabinet, speechwriting and oratory, and - what would become his most enduring legacy - developing policies and rhetoric to match a constitutional vision that spoke to the monumental challenges of his time. Without these mentors, Abraham Lincoln would likely have remained a small-town lawyer - and without Lincoln, the United States as we know it may not have survived. This book tells the unique story of how Lincoln emerged from obscurity and learned how to lead.
©2021 Michael Gerhardt (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers