Thurston Clarke has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is The Last Campaign.
The Last Campaign
Summary
With new research and previously unavailable interviews, The Last Campaign provides an intimate and absorbing historical narrative that goes right to the heart of America's deepest despairs - and most fiercely held dreams - and tells us more than we had understood before about this complicated man and the heightened dramas of his times. After John F. Kennedy's assassination, Robert Kennedy - formerly Jack's no-holds-barred political warrior - almost lost hope. He was haunted by his brother's murder, and by the nation's seeming inabilities to solve its problems of race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. Bobby sensed the country's pain, and when he announced that he was running for president, the country united behind his hopes. Over the action-packed 82 days of his campaign, Americans were inspired by Kennedy's promise to lead them toward a better time. And after an assassin's bullet stopped this last great stirring public figure of the 1960s, crowds lined up along the country's railroad tracks to say goodbye to Bobby. Clarke's The Last Campaign is the definitive account of Robert Kennedy's exhilarating and tragic 1968 campaign for president - and a revelatory history that is especially resonant now.
©2008 Thurston Clarke (P)2008 HighBridge Company
JFK's Last Hundred Days
Summary
A revelatory, minute-by-minute account of JFK’s last100 days that asks what might have been... Fifty years after his death, President John F. Kennedy’s legend endures. Noted author and historian Thurston Clarke argues that the heart of that legend is what might have been. As we approach the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, JFK’s Last Hundred Days reexamines the last months of the president’s life to show a man in the midst of great change, finally on the cusp of making good on his extraordinary promise. Kennedy’s last 100 days began just after the death of two-day-old Patrick Kennedy, and during this time, the president made strides in the Cold War, civil rights, Vietnam, and his personal life. While Jackie was recuperating, the premature infant and his father were flown to Boston for Patrick’s treatment. Kennedy was holding his son’s hand when Patrick died on August 9, 1963. The loss of his son convinced Kennedy to work harder as a husband and father, and there is ample evidence that he suspended his notorious philandering during these last months of his life. Also in these months Kennedy finally came to view civil rights as a moral as well as a political issue, and after the March on Washington, he appreciated the power of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., for the first time. Though he is often depicted as a devout cold warrior, Kennedy pushed through his proudest legislative achievement in this period, the Limited Test Ban Treaty. This success, combined with his warming relations with Nikita Khrushchev in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, led to a détente that British foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home hailed as the "beginning of the end of the Cold War". Throughout his presidency, Kennedy challenged demands from his advisers and the Pentagon to escalate America’s involvement in Vietnam. Kennedy began a reappraisal in the last 100 days that would have led to the withdrawal of all 16,000 U.S. military advisers by 1965. JFK’s Last Hundred Days is a gripping account that weaves together Kennedy’s public and private lives, explains why the grief following his assassination has endured so long, and solves the most tantalizing Kennedy mystery of all - not who killed him but who he was when he was killed, and where he would have led us.
©2013 Thurston Clarke (P)2013 Penguin Audio
Ask Not
Summary
A close-up on one of American history's most splendid events, JFK's inaugural week, and the creation of the speech that inspired a generation and brought hope to a nation. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." On the January morning when John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency and stood to speak those words, America was divided. Citizens around the world were torn by fears of war. Kennedy's speech, called the finest since Lincoln at Gettysburg, the most memorable of any 20th-century American politician, did more than reassure: it changed lives, marking the start of a brief, optimistic era of struggle against "tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself". Ask Not is a beautifully detailed account of the week leading up to the inaugural which stands as one of the most moving spectacles in the history of American politics. At the heart of the narrative is Kennedy's quest to create a speech that would distill American dreams and empower a new generation. Clarke's portrait of JFK during what intimates called his happiest days is balanced, revealing the president at his most dazzlingly charismatic (and cunningly pragmatic). As the snow gradually covers Washington in a blanket of white, as statesmen and celebrities arrive for candle-lit festivities, Kennedy, an obsessed perfectionist, pushes himself, his family, and advisors to the limit to create greatness, to find the words which captured what he most truly believed and, as it happened, which far outlasted his own life. For all who seek to understand the fascination with all things Kennedy, the answer is here. Ask Not explains the phenomenon to the heart and mind.
©2004 Thurston Clarke (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
Honorable Exit
Summary
A groundbreaking revisionist history of the last days of the Vietnam War that reveals the acts of American heroism that saved more than 100,000 South Vietnamese from communist revenge In 1973 US participation in the Vietnam War ended in a cease-fire and a withdrawal that included promises by President Nixon to assist the South in the event of invasion by the North. But in early 1975, when North Vietnamese forces began a full-scale assault, Congress refused to send arms or aid. By early April that year, the South was on the brink of a defeat that threatened execution or years in a concentration camp for the untold number of South Vietnamese who had supported the government in Saigon or worked with Americans. Thurston Clarke begins Honorable Exit by describing the iconic photograph of the Fall of Saigon: desperate Vietnamese scrambling to board a helicopter evacuating the last American personnel from Vietnam. It is an image of US failure and shame. Or is it? By unpacking the surprising story of heroism that the photograph actually tells, Clarke launches into a narrative that is both a thrilling race against time and an important corrective to the historical record. For what is less known is that during those final days, scores of Americans - diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, missionaries, contractors, and spies - risked their lives to assist their current and former translators, drivers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and even perfect strangers in escape. By the time the last US helicopter left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, these righteous Americans had helped to spirit 130,000 South Vietnamese to US bases in Guam and the Philippines. From there, the evacuees were resettled in the United States and became American citizens, the leading edge of one of America's most successful immigrant groups. Into this tale of heroism on the ground Clarke weaves the political machinations of Henry Kissinger advising President Ford in the White House while reinforcing the delusions of the US ambassador in Saigon, who, at the last minute, refused to depart. Groundbreaking and authoritative, Honorable Exit is a deeply moving history of Americans at a little-known finest hour. Includes a PDF of the principal characters list from the book. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Thurston Clarke (P)2019 Random House Audio