Gary Ginsberg is a lawyer by training, but he has spent his professional career at the intersection of media, politics, and law. He worked for the Clinton administration, was a senior editor and counsel at the political magazine George, and then spent the next two decades in executive positions in media and technology at News Corporation, Time Warner, and SoftBank. He has published pieces in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and was an on-air political contributor in the early days of MSNBC. In his debut, First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (and Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents (Twelve), Ginsberg writes a White House history as told through the stories of the best friends and closest confidants of American presidents. Consider Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed. They shared a bed for four years, during which Speed saved his friend from crippling depression. Two decades later, the friends worked together to save the Union. Relationships such as those of Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Daisy Suckley, John Kennedy and David Ormsby-Gore, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, flesh out a provocative exploration of presidential friendships and their impact.
