The Butler: A Witness to History

With a foreword by Lee Daniels A mesmerizing inquiry into the life of Eugene Allen, the butler who ignited a nation's sympathy and inspired a major motion picture directed by Oscar nominee Lee Daniels, The Butler--which stars Oprah Winfrey and eight Oscar winners (including Forest Whitaker, Vanessa Redgrave, Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Jane Fonda), and is already being hailed as epic and buzz-worthy. Coming this fall from The Weinstein Company. Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Wil Haygood had an early hunch that Obama would win the 2008 election and when he did he wanted to publish an article about a black person who had worked in the White House as a servant, someone who had come of age when segregation was so widespread, so embedded in the culture as to make the very thought of a Black president inconceivable. He struck gold when he tracked down Eugene Allen, a butler who had served no less than eight presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan--and in so doing became