Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, And The Twilight Struggle Over American Power
by Mark Landler /
2013 / English / EPUB
16.7 MB Download
The deeply reported story of two supremely ambitious figures, Barack Obama and Hillary Clintonarchrivals who became partners for a time, trailblazers who share a common sense of their historic destiny but hold very different beliefs about how to project American power
In Alter Egos, veteran New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler takes us inside the fraught and fascinating relationship between Barack Obama and Hillary Clintona relationship that has framed the nations great debates over war and peace for the past eight years.
In the annals of American statecraft, theirs was a most unlikely alliance. Clinton, daughter of an anticommunist father, was raised in the Republican suburbs of Chicago in the aftermath of World War II, nourishing an unshakable belief in the United States as a force for good in distant lands. Obama, an itinerant child of the 1970s, was raised by a single mother in Indonesia and Hawaii, suspended between worlds and a witness to the less savory side of Uncle Sams influence abroad. Clinton and Obama would later come to embody competing visions of Americas role in the world: his, restrained, inward-looking, painfully aware of limits hers, hard-edged, pragmatic, unabashedly old-fashioned.
Spanning the arc of Obamas two terms, Alter Egos goes beyond the speeches and press conferences to the Oval Office huddles and South Lawn strolls, where Obama and Clinton pressed their views. It follows their evolution from bitter rivals to wary partners, and then to something resembling rivals again, as Clinton defined herself anew and distanced herself from her old boss. In the process, it counters the narrative that, during her years as secretary of state, there was no daylight between them, that the wounds of the 2008 campaign had been entirely healed.
The president and his chief diplomat parted company over some of the biggest issues of the day: how quickly to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whether to arm the rebels in Syria how to respond to the upheaval in Egypt and whether to trust the Russians. In Landlers gripping account, we venture inside the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Ladens compound, watch Obama and Clinton work in tandem to salvage a conference on climate change in Copenhagen, and uncover the secret history of their nuclear diplomacy with Irana story with a host of fresh disclosures.
With the grand sweep of history and the pointillist detail of an account based on insider accessthe book draws on exclusive interviews with more than one hundred senior administration officials, foreign diplomats, and friends of Obama and ClintonMark Landler offers the definitive account of a complex, profoundly important relationship. As Barack Obama prepares to relinquish the presidency, and Hillary Clinton makes perhaps her last bid for it, how both regard American power is a central question of our time.
