About the Author

Kate Andersen Brower is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Residence and New York Times bestseller First Women. She is a CNN contributor and has spent four years covering the Obama White House for Bloomberg News and is a former CBS News staffer and Fox News producer. She has written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg Businessweek. She lives outside of Washington, D.C., with her husband, their two young children, and their wheaten terrier.

Reviews

“An intimate, compulsively readable account of the dynamics that have shaped—and sometimes destroyed—relations at the top of the American political hierarchy.... [and] a valuable addition to the literature of the modern presidency.” — Wall Street Journal

“The queen of inside-Washington storytelling has extended her reign. With First in Line, Kate Andersen Brower finds yet another one of the political world’s most intriguing untold stories and delivers it to readers with the unparalleled reporting and compelling, fast-moving prose that have made her one of the few must-read authors of our time. Americans’ understanding of vice presidents — how they’re chosen, how they’ve maneuvered for more power and how they’ve increasingly shaped modern politics — will never be the same.” — Jonathan Allen, co-author, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

“First in Line is a nonfiction book that reads as quickly as a novel you can’t put down. As Kate Andersen Brower pulls back the curtain on the relationships between Presidents and Vice Presidents, readers will be delighted by a trove of stories, secrets, and life lessons. Her interviews and research supplemented my own experience in watching the importance of a strong, loyal, and trusting relationship between the two highest officeholders in the land.”  — Dana Perino, Former White House Press Secretary and author of And the Good News Is... Lessons and Advice from the Bright Side

“Combining fascinating inside stories with astute political insights, First in Line fills a long-missing hole in American history. We learn here how men from Richard Nixon to Mike Pence have played their sometimes essential, sometimes useless roles in the prestigious but peculiar job of Vice President.” — Cokie Roberts, author of Ladies of Liberty

“Kate Andersen Brower has a wonderful reporter’s eye for the telling detail that makes history engaging and real. In First in Line, she explores the fraught relationship between president and vice-president up to the present day in a pithy, revealing, and timely fashion. Her many fans from The Residence will not be disappointed.” — Evan Thomas, author of Ike’s Bluff and Being Nixon

“Crisp, engrossing.... Brower delivers what she did in her previous books, a readable, insightful account of how the vice presidency has evolved and the men could end up in the Oval Office some day.” — USA Today