The battle over a National Bank of the United States in the country’s post-colonial, still formative years; the escalating battle over slavery and its expansion into the Western territories during the 1850s; the battle over Reconstruction and the rights of African American freedmen in the post–Civil War South; the battle over the League of Nations and whether or not the United States should continue foreign entanglements following World War I; the battle over the supposed threat of communist infiltration into our government during the Cold War; the battle over civil rights and voting rights as a result of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s; and the controversial decision and battle over returning the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama. Those are the great president versus senator battles this book is about, or, more specifically, the great personal and political rivalries that turned those issues into transformative Washington wars.
If that sounds like a series of domestic war stories, it’s because they were—high stakes political confrontations usually won by the White House, but not always. Each exacted a toll on the nation’s psyche that would never be forgotten. Some were titanic clashes between some of the biggest names in American history, while others relegated their participants to historical also-rans by virtue of what resulted and was revealed for posterity.
Some affected legacies in unexpected ways and some so lowered the bar that their mere mention remains a derisive footnote for an entire era. Others were doomed to failure because of competing ideologies or aversion to compromise. And some became the epitome of partisan intransigence, that bane of our democratic existence to the present day.
Return with us now to these famous battles on Pennsylvania Avenue, when Senate legends and sitting presidents duked it out between the Capitol Dome and the Oval Office with partisan divides seething below the surface of every congressional debate or presidential veto. Watch for the moments when cooler heads might have prevailed and spared the nation needless turmoil. Consider the combatants for each of these conflicts, their personalities, their supporters, and their agendas, and connect the dots with what were usually larger, ideological wars. They exemplified American politics at its most combative, a take-no-prisoners approach that too often takes way too long to resolve or justify. In each instance, too bad it had to be that way … and still does.