Sublime

In 1946, President Truman appointed, by executive order, a blue-ribbon committee to study the civil rights problem in all its aspects, and the committee’s report, “To Secure These Rights,” called not only for a permanent FEPC, abolition of the poll tax, and federal laws against lynchings but also for the establishment of a permanent Commission on C

At the war’s outset in April 1917, Fox Conner had been an undistinguished major, in one of the least glamorous bureaus of the War Department, whose primary battles had been against health problems. Nineteen months later, he wore a general’s star and sat in the inner circle that surrounded America’s most powerful soldier since Ulysses S. Grant. At a

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, called it “boundaryless” communication and worked hard to remove barriers to the flow of information within the corporation. Everybody is in the loop and expected to participate.

If you’re the boss and your people fight you openly when they think you’re wrong—that’s healthy. If your men fight each other openly in your presence for what they believe in—that’s healthy. But keep all the conflict eyeball to eyeball

Republicans had, in fact, voted for the amendment—and against their own President—by a margin of 32 to 14. Eisenhower had won a big victory in the battle that had begun with Bricker’s introduction of S.J. Res. 1, for he had defeated the Old Guard isolationists. But Lyndon Johnson had won a bigger victory. Johnson had hit, in fact, every target at w

The Navy that Daniels and Roosevelt took charge of in 1913 had mastered the transition to modern weaponry but was hobbled by an administrative structure substantially unchanged since 1842.

The two critical judgments behind Plan Dog were that the United States could not decisively prevail in both Europe and Asia at the same time and that defending Britain was more important than defending territories in the Pacific.

Ike put the matter in personal terms. “For forty years I was in the Army, and I did one thing: study how you can get an infantry platoon out of battle. The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.”19

A curb on the practice was enacted in 1917, after President Wilson had added a phrase to the American political lexicon by denouncing “a little group of willful men” (actually eleven senators, including La Follette and his fellow liberal George Norris) who had talked to death Wilson’s proposal to arm American merchantmen against German submarine at