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The Premise premise is simple: take twelve men (and unfortunately they are all men, but that's not the author's fault) who have achieved high office and look at each of them. Firstly, take a look at the road to the high office, then how they performed once they reached their goal and finally a look at their private life. Suetonius did it first when he wrote ''The Twelve Caesars'' and now Nigel Hamilton has taken the same journey with ''American Caesars'', a remarkably in-depth look at twelve consecutive American presidents from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, starting with Franklin D Roosevelt and finishing with George W Bush.
Some quick maths suggested that there would be about forty pages for each President and my initial thought was that the result could well be superficial and a regurgitation of already well-known facts and conclusions. I was wrong. President Kennedy was assassinated on the day that I had my college interview and since then I've had an obsession with modern American politics: post Eisenhower I'm reasonably well-versed but pre-Kennedy a little more flimsy. The book almost had to live up to the expectations of two readers.

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