Ryan S. Walters – författare

A pivotal month. A presidency transformed. A nation forever changed.In Turning Point, independent historian Ryan S. Walters delivers a gripping, day-by-day narrative of the most decisive month of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency—when the paths of Vietnam, the Great Society, and American political history converged.This powerful new work reveals how a single month produced the turning points that shaped LBJ’s legacy. From the controversial Gulf of Tonkin incident—and the deceptive intelligence that led to Congress granting Johnson sweeping authority to wage war—to the landmark domestic breakthroughs of the Great Society, Walters exposes how August 1964 set the course for both one of America’s greatest social revolutions and one of its most disastrous foreign wars.Readers will uncover:The truth behind the Gulf of Tonkin, including the attack that never happened and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that pushed the U.S. into Vietnam.How the Economic Opportunity Act and Food Stamp Act, passed in the same month, launched Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty.”LBJ’s dramatic, almost last-minute decision to run for president in his own right—despite deep personal doubts and escalating political crises.The fierce rivalries, race riots, political intrigue at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and the chilling discovery of three murdered civil-rights workers in Mississippi.How persistent questions about LBJ’s personal wealth nearly derailed his political future.Walters masterfully situates these events within the larger themes of Johnson’s presidency: the feud with Bobby Kennedy, chaos in South Vietnam, fractures within the Democratic Party, and the shadow of corruption that followed LBJ throughout his career.Perfect for readers of presidential history, Cold War studies, political biography, and fans of Robert Caro and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Turning Point delivers a fast-paced, authoritative look at the month that defined—and doomed—a presidency.

"Presidents are ranked wrong. In The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding, Ryan Walters mounts a case that Harding deserves to move up—and supplies the evidence to make that case strong. -Amity Shlaes, bestselling author of CoolidgeHe's the butt of political jokes, frequently subjected to ridicule, and almost never absent a "Worst Presidents" list where he most often ends up at the bottom. Historians have labeled him the "Worst President Ever," "Dead Last," "Unfit," and "Incompetent," to name but a few. Many contemporaries were equally cruel. H. L. Mencken called him a "nitwit." To Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was a "slob." Such is the current reputation of our 29th President, Warren Gamaliel Harding. In an interesting survey in 1982, which divided the scholarly respondents into "conservative" and "liberal" categories, both groups picked Harding as the worst President.But historian Ryan Walters shows that Harding, a humble man from Marion, Ohio, has been unfairly remembered. He quickly fixed an economy in depression and started the boom of the Roaring Twenties, healed a nation in the throes of social disruption, and reversed America’s interventionist foreign policy.

On January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into a new spacecraft perched atop a large Saturn rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a routine dress rehearsal of their upcoming launch into orbit, then less than a month away. All three astronauts were experienced pilots and had dreams of one day walking on the moon. But little did they know, nor did anyone else, that once they entered the spacecraft that cold winter day they would never leave it alive. The Apollo program would be perilously close to failure before it ever got off the ground.But rather than dooming the space program, this tragedy caused the spacecraft to be completely overhauled, creating a stellar flying machine to achieve the program’s primary goal: putting man on the moon.Apollo 1 is a candid portrayal of the astronauts, the disaster that killed them, and its aftermath. In it, readers will learn:How the Apollo 1 spacecraft was doomed from the start, with miles of uninsulated wiring and tons of flammable materials in a pure oxygen atmosphere, along with a hatch that wouldn’t openHow, due to political pressure, the government contract to build the Apollo 1 craft went to a bidder with an inferior planHow public opinion polls were beginning to turn against the space program before the tragedy and got much worse afterApollo 1 is about America fulfilling its destiny of man setting foot on the moon. It’s also about the three American heroes who lost their lives in the tragedy, but whose lives were not lost in vain.