State of the Union [antikvár]

Prolog He was the first President of the United States to be born after World War II. He grew up in a small town in a poor state. He was the first member of his family to go to college. Wlien he was a boy, he lived for a while on a farm without an indoor toilet. It makes a good story—"not as good as being born in a log cabin," he has admitted, "but it's true." He came from Arkansas, born one August day in 1946 at a place called Hope, population 1,000. He never knew his real father. His stepfather did not have a high school diploma and his grandfather, who was a true inspiration to him, had a sixth-grade education and ran a grocery store across the street from the cemetery. A fifth-generation Ai'kansan, the boy grew up in a segregated society but in a pro-civil rights family, one that endured alcohol abuse (his stepfather), domestic violence (his mother was beaten), and, later, drug addiction (his brother). In fact, at age 14, he was forced to stand up to his stepfather to stop the abuse once and for all. He lived in a family where everybody worked long and hard—his mother and grandmother had full-time jobs to help make ends meet—and the kids were expected to study just as hard. But he also had a lot of opportunity given to him by his community, when others recognized his thirst for learning and his commitment to work hard and get ahead. He had attentive teachers at the public schools he attended. And when he needed scholarships and after-school jobs, he found them. Along the way, he saw what happened to good people who had no opportunity because they happened to be black, or because they happened to be poor, white, and isolated in the hills and hollows of the mountains of his home state. As a 16-year-old, he made a fateful trip to Washington, D.C., with other delegates to the American Legion Boys Nation. On a sun-drenched Wliite House lawn, he met his and his generation's idol: President John F. Kennedy. Over six feet tall, even then, the impressionable, beaming boy looked eye-to-eye with the