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Also by Douglas Brinkley:

The Nixon Tapes, August 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Cronkite, June 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
The Quiet World, January 2011
Hardcover
The Wilderness Warrior, August 2009
Hardcover
Gerald R. Ford, February 2007
Hardcover
The Great Deluge, May 2006
Hardcover
Parish Priest, January 2006
Hardcover
National Geographic Visual History of the World, November 2005
Hardcover
The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, May 2005
Hardcover
The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize, May 1999
Trade Size (reprint)

The Boys of Pointe du Hoc
Douglas Brinkley

"Both the novice and D-Day historian will want to read The Boys of Pointe du Hoc." JoAnna McDonald

Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion
William Morrow
May 2005
289 pages
ISBN: 0060565276
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction

"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war." — Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1984, Normandy, France

Acclaimed historian and author of the "New York Times" bestselling Tour of Duty Douglas Brinkley tells the riveting account of the brave U.S. Army Rangers who stormed the coast of Normandy on D-Day and the President, forty years later, who paid them homage.

The importance of Pointe du Hoc to Allied planners like General Dwight Eisenhower cannot be overstated. The heavy U.S. and British warships poised in the English Channel had eighteen targets on their bombardment list for D-Day morning. The 100-foot promontory known as Pointe du Hoc -- where six big German guns were ensconced -- was number one. General Omar Bradley, in fact, called knocking out the Nazi defenses at the Pointe the toughest of any task assigned on June 6, 1944. Under the bulldoggish command of Colonel James E. Rudder of Texas, who is profiled here, these elite forces "Rudder's Rangers" -- took control of the fortified cliff. The liberation of Europe was under way.

Based upon recently released documents from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the Eisenhower Center, Texas A & M University, and the U.S. Army Military History Institute, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc is the first in-depth, anecdotal remembrance of these fearless Army Rangers. With brilliant deftness, Brinkley moves between two events four decades apart to tell the dual story of the making of Reagan's two uplifting 1984 speeches, considered by many to be among the best orations the Great Communicator ever gave, and the actual heroic event, which was indelibly captured as well in the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan". Just as compellingly, Brinkley tells the story of how Lisa Zanatta Henn, the daughter of a D-Day veteran, forged a special friendship with President Reagan that changed public perceptions of World War II veterans forever. Two White House speechwriters -- Peggy Noonan and Tony Dolan -- emerge in the narrative as the master scribes whose ethereal prose helped Reagan become the spokesperson for the entire World War II generation.

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