“If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”

As with many of Ambrose’s “interviews,” his assertion should be taken with a large grain of salt.

General Marshall, who had been installed as chief of staff nine months earlier, was already trimming deadwood root and branch. His first target was the bloated square division of World War I.25 As early as 1920, General Pershing had urged the square division be scrapped in favor of a 15,000-man “triangular” structure of three regiments, which he be

Ike wrote superb letters, and he continued almost weekly to tell Mamie how much he missed her.

Roosevelt relished the company of pretty, attentive women, and flirting with them was one of his favorite pastimes.

As one military historian put it, “The failures and errors of judgment of high command had been redeemed by the men on the sand.”5 Said another, “This success was principally due to the unquenchable spirit and drive of the 1st Division. Without ‘The Big Red One’ the battle would have been lost.”6

The Germans did not lose the battle of North Africa so much as they were overwhelmed. Hitler’s war machine was no match for America’s assembly line. Despite the heavy losses sustained in November and December, by February the Allies had four times as many planes in North Africa as the Luftwaffe.

The Republicans lost control of both the House and the Senate in 1954. In the midterm elections, the Democrats picked up twenty-one House seats and one in the Senate. That gave the Democrats a comfortable (232–203) majority in the House, and a narrow two-vote margin in the Senate with Wayne Morse of Oregon, still an independent, now voting with the

That changed in 1954 when the Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, reversed the holding in Plessy v. Ferguson and held that racial segregation, in and of itself, was a denial of the equal protection of the laws. The decision of the Warren Court was unanimous, and the case, Brown v. Board of Education, involving the des