What it Takes: the Way to the White House

Richard Ben Cramer
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What It Takes penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that makes a true candidate? As he recounts the frenzied course of the 1988 presidential race -- and scours the psyches of contenders from George Bush and Robert Dole to Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer comes up with the answers, in a book that is vast, exhaustively researched, exhilarating, and sometimes appalling in its revelations.w machine"--was king.


Historical Elections

  • Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime


  • Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win


  • Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876


  • Realigning America : McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896


  • Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.


  • Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign


  • 1960 : LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: the Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies


  • What it Takes: the Way to the White House


  • 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents


  • Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics