C-SPAN Bookshelf

Jonathan Jordan devotes 544 pages and 57 chapters of his book "Ike and Winston" to telling the story of the friendship between Dwight David Eisenhower and Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. President Eisenhower lived to be 78 and died in 1969. Sir Winston died four years before that, in 1965, at age 90. Author Jonathan Jordan says: "Churchill could have had his pick of friendship, but he wanted Ike's. In the beginning, he courted Ike for what Ike could do for Britain. The Kansan held the trust of men like Franklin Roosevelt and George C. Marshall. This influence gave Ike the power to destroy or create, and Ike had the gambler's nerve to use that power. London needed a friend like that."
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eleven days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Congress passed a law establishing the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund to compensate families who lost loved ones on 9/11. Attorney Kenneth Feinberg, author of "What Is Life Worth?," was chosen to head up the taxpayer-funded effort and was solely responsible for determining how much each family would get paid. In all, 5,500 people received a combined total of $7.1 billion, with the average payout being $2 million.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Best-selling author and USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss her book about Queen Elizabeth's relationships with 13 U.S. presidents and her biographies of Barbara Bush, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Walters.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Longtime ABC News war correspondent Martha Raddatz profiled American military service members and their families who have served in the 25 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. She was interviewed by San Francisco ABC7 News Anchor, Dan Ashley, at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California in May of 2026.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the beginning of Scott Greenberger's new book, "The Forsaken Founder," Dawn Davis, publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint 37 Ink, introduces us to this new history of a mostly unfamiliar name. Davis writes: "Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, Madison. These are names we know." However, she writes that "there was another man in the room at the founding, a prodigy whose contributions were just as essential, whose name has largely been forgotten: Gouverneur Morris. Morris, as the penman of the Constitution, wrote the words "We the people," which are his and his alone. The subtitle to Scott Greenberger's book is "Gouverneur Morris, the Unsung Patriot Who Wrote the Constitution, Stood Up to Slavery, and Survived the Reign of Terror."
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices