Sublime

The various efforts of Gates, Conway, Mifflin, et al. to discredit and even depose Washington have been known to history as the Conway Cabal. Cabal is much too strong a word for this loosely organized network of foes. In later years Washington confirmed that he thought an “attempt was made by a party in Congress to supplant me in that command,” and

Other men with imperial experience, among them Ralph A. Bagnold and Dudley Clarke, who were instrumental in the creation of the Long Range Desert Group and the Commandos, respectively, served as intellectual conduits to their organizations. But with regard to SOE itself, Gubbins’s influence was unrivaled.

Here, we conclude with a few of the strategic insights that we find most instructive from this quiet, articulate, supremely confident, yet remarkably modest man from whom we have learned so much.

Washington had served as commander in chief for eight and a half years, the equivalent of two presidential terms. His military triumphs had been neither frequent nor epic in scale. He had lost more battles than he had won, had botched several through strategic blunders, and had won at Yorktown only with the indispensable aid of the French Army and

As president-elect he recruited a cabinet of frustrated first lovers or, as the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has called it, a “team of rivals.” They included his major competitors at Chicago—the indignantly disappointed Seward as secretary of state, the transparently ambitious Salmon P. Chase of Ohio as treasury secretary, the corrupt but politic

his human flock, and it was thus right and natural for his subjects to obey him

He, therefore, used space, in war, to restore the Union. He ignored orthodoxies, pored over maps, and calculated capacities. These showed Northern strengths to be the exterior lines along which new technologies—telegraphs, railroads, industrially produced weaponry—could combine with new thinking to allow mobility and concentrated force. All Lincoln