Overview
Barack Obama’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of “Change We Can Believe In” was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in Washington. Despite all the coverage, the backstory of Obama’s historic first year in office has until now remained a mystery.
In The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Jonathan Alter, one of the country’s most respected journalists and historians, uses his unique access to the White House to produce the first inside look at Obama’s difficult debut.
What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the president really like on the job and off-hours, using what his best friend called “a Rubik’s Cube in his brain?" These questions are answered here for the first time. We see how a surprisingly cunning Obama took effective charge in Washington several weeks before his election, made trillion-dollar decisions on the stimulus and budget before he was inaugurated, engineered colossally unpopular bailouts of the banking and auto sectors, and escalated a treacherous war not long after settling into office.
The Promise is a fast-paced and incisive narrative of a young risk-taking president carving his own path amid sky-high expectations and surging joblessness. Alter reveals that it was Obama alone—“feeling lucky”—who insisted on pushing major health care reform over the objections of his vice president and top advisors, including his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who admitted that “I begged him not to do this.”
Alter takes the reader inside the room as Obama prevents a fistfight involving a congressman, coldly reprimands the military brass for insubordination, crashes the key meeting at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, and bounces back after a disastrous Massachusetts election to redeem a promise that had eluded presidents since FDR.
In Alter’s telling, the real Obama is an authentic, demanding, unsentimental, and sometimes overconfident leader. He adapted to the presidency with ease and put more “points on the board” than he is given credit for, but neglected to use his leverage over the banks and failed to connect well with an angry public. We see the famously calm president cursing leaks, playfully trash-talking his advisors, and joking about even the most taboo subjects, still intent on redeeming more of his promise as the problems mount.
This brilliant blend of journalism and history offers the freshest reporting and most acute perspective on the biggest story of our time. It will shape impressions of the Obama presidency and of the man himself for years to come.
Synopsis
Alter, who writes and reports on national politics for Newsweek and NBC, comes from a politically involved Chicago family. He knows well the environment from which Obama launched his campaign for the senate and the presidency. Alter first met Obama when he visited the family as it sat shiva for one of its members.
Alter takes the listener into the inner circles of Obama's intimates, those who were there from the start, and the gradually expanding circles, and to show for the first time the...
The Washington Post - Matthew Dallek
Jonathan Alter has delivered an exceptionally well-written account of President Obama's first year in office. Brimming with fresh and judicious ideas, his book fuses political analysis, subtle insights into the president's mind and policy debates into a fast-paced, crisis-filled story. The Promise, based on more than 200 interviews with Obama and his close friends and aides, provides an uncommonly candid look inside a somewhat walled-off White House.
Editorials
Michiko Kakutani
With relentless 24/7 media coverage of President Obama and a floodlet of books about him, the reader might well ask: Why another study of him and his White House, when his presidency is less than a year and a half old? And yet…Jonathan Alter's book The Promise actually does give us a new perspective on the 44th president by providing a detailed look at his decision-making process on issues like health care and the Afghanistan war, and a keen sense of what it's like to work in his White House, day by day. It's an effective and often revealing approach reminiscent of Mr. Alter's 2006 book, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope…and Richard Reeves's 1993 book, President Kennedy: Profile of Power…—The New York Times
Matthew Dallek
Jonathan Alter has delivered an exceptionally well-written account of President Obama's first year in office. Brimming with fresh and judicious ideas, his book fuses political analysis, subtle insights into the president's mind and policy debates into a fast-paced, crisis-filled story. The Promise, based on more than 200 interviews with Obama and his close friends and aides, provides an uncommonly candid look inside a somewhat walled-off White House.—The Washington Post
Jacob Heilbrunn
The Promise offers an excellent opportunity to appraise Obama's initial efforts. Drawing on interviews with over 200 people, including the president and his top aides, Alter examines everything from the economic bailouts to the military surge in Afghanistan. Throughout, he seeks to avoid what he refers to as the "polemics of punditry." This endows his narrative with a lapidary tone that is mercifully free of the breathless sensationalism of recent campaign books…—The New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
Alter's sharply observed narrative follows Obama and his dedicated staff through a difficult, turbulent, and mostly successful first year in office. He reads his book in pedestrian fashion, adding little in the way of color or emphasis. Still, Alter takes us through the material ably enough, and the recording's interest is boosted significantly by an interview appended to the end of the book with President Obama from late 2009. The president is calm and assured in making a case for his first year in office, but it is particularly illuminating to hear Alter subtly prod Obama into considering his successes--and his missteps. A Simon & Schuster hardcover. (May)From the Publisher
Praise for The Promise“Gives us a new perspective on the 44th president by providing a detailed look at his decision-making . . . and a keen sense of what it’s like to work in his White House. . . . Alter uses his considerable access to the president and his aides to give us an informed look at No. 44’s management style.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Jonathan Alter has delivered an exceptionally well-written account of President Obama's first year in office. Brimming with fresh and judicious ideas, his book fuses political analysis, subtle insights into the president's mind and policy debates into a fast-paced, crisis-filled story. "The Promise," based on more than 200 interviews with Obama and his close friends and aides, provides an uncommonly candid look inside a somewhat walled-off White House. . . . Alter's deeply reported and analytically arresting book takes Obama's story in subtler and more contradictory directions than it has gone before.”
—Matthew Dallek, The Washington Post Book World
“Jonathan Alter is the new Theodore H. White. . . .The first 12 months of an American presidency as nonfiction melodrama. The Promise is not a campaign rehash, but a well-informed chronicle, sometimes sober, often raucous. Other books will be written about Barak Obama’s time in the White House; this snapshot fo 2009 will be a durable, well-thumbed guide.”
—Martin F. Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle
“A deeply reported, soberly appraised account of the president’s tumultuous first months in office. . . . The book is rich in the kinds of insider detail that make for an entertaining, as well as informative, reading experience. . . . When it comes to what we’ve all come to call the first draft of history, The Promise is more polished, and far more thoughtful, than most. For those attempting to get a fix on a fascinating but strangely elusive chief executive, it’s essential reading.”
—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
“The Promise offers an excellent opportunity to appraise Obama’s initial efforts. Drawing on interviews with over 200 people, including the president and his top aides, Alter examines everything from the economic bailouts to the military surge in Afghanistan.”
—Jacob Heilbrunn, The New York Times Book Review
“An engaging, blow-by-blow account of the infancy of the Obama presidency. . . . Manna for political junkies. . . . Thoroughly researched . . . humanizes a figure considered periodically out-of-touch even by some of his admirers.”
—Carlo Wolff, The Boston Globe
“Jonathan Alter is a diligent political reporter with more sources than the Mississippi. . . . A calm, solid narrative of the people and events of the first Obama year. . . . The book offers a cascade of detail to please any follower of politics.” (This review also compares Alter to the great Walter Lippmann)
—Zay N. Smith, Chicago Sun- Times
“An impressively reported, myth-debunking and timely combination of journalism and history.”
—Harry Hurt III, The New York Times (“Off the Shelf” Sunday column)