Anyone read it?

I just finished it and have to say it was pretty good. I never realized how much presidents rely on their predecessors.

One thing that struck is almost to a person a new president comes in thinking he's going to dramatically change how things are done, show up the old guy etc. And all quickly find out just how hard the job is and how the guy before them maybe didn't do so bad after all. Granted they never admit it in public most times, but they all gain a respect for the men that came before.

What I found pretty interesting was, in spite of what people may think of his ethics, Nixon really was brilliant. He was a foreign policy savant and was invaluable to numerous administrations after him, including Clinton, when discussing it. Clinton loved the guy and called him frequently.

JFK relied on Ike probably more than any adviser he had and Truman couldn't have been nearly as successful without Hoover, who was basically banned from the White House after he left office.

Seems every president that came after took Carter as a mixed bag. His relationships with foreign leaders, mostly despots, helped defuse a number of bad situations, but his tendency go off script for what can only be described as his own arrogance was a source of pain for both republican and democrat presidents.

Just a few things I thought were pretty interesting. It's a great book with a ton of good info and things many of us probably never knew.