(’76 Editor) How swiftly did the United States of America burgeon from a handful of settlements on the edge of a wilderness to its dominance today as a superpower bestriding the globe like no other in history? Consider a typical American
who played his small part: my wife’s father, Morton D’Evelyn of Piedmont, California.
Mort would be 100 next year if he were alive. He saw combat in World War II with the Army Corps of Engineers in New Guinea, engaged in local politics to fight communism and defend free enterprise, and testified before Congress to champion offshore drilling.
He was born in the lifetime of Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1920), who took the Philippines from Spain, mediated the Russo-Japanese War, sent the Great White Fleet around the world, and applied to fight under Pershing in World War I.
Roosevelt was born in the lifetime of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), who saved the Union and freed the slaves, deftly fending off British or French intervention until the Civil War was won.
Lincoln was born in the lifetime of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), who authored the Declaration of Independence, doubled America’s size with the Louisiana Purchase, and subdued the Barbary Pirates, the Islamic outlaws of his day.
So Donna and I, in having known her dad, are but three lifespans away from America’s infancy in the French and Indian War of 1754 and the Revolutionary War of 1775. Our country is that young.
What Conrad Black calls “the long, swift rise of America to absolute preeminence in the world, [becoming] a country that would in physical and demographic strength, as well as in moral example, lead the whole world,” happened that fast.
On the actuarial chart of great nations, however, America is getting up there – and it shows. Toynbee, Spengler, Glubb, and other historians have observed that decline tends to set in somewhere around the 200- to 250-year mark. Has that begun happening to us, as a country that hasn’t decisively won a war since 1945, follows a president who boasts of “leading from behind,” and shrugs as both political parties slash defense? [continued below]
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FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE
The Grand Strategies that Brought America
from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
By Conrad Black
New York: Encounter Books, 2013
701 pages, with index
Reviewed by John Andrews
For the Colorado Christian University Review of Books, Media, Life
Fall 2014
Read This Issue of CCU Review
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[continued] Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, says Black, “the United States seems to have lost its vocation for greatness in the absence of any rivals to it…. The country had run out of adversaries, except within, and a ragtag of terrorists abroad.” Always before in our history, he points out, strong leadership has arisen when we needed it most; but as the Obama years lengthen, none is visible “in the present sea of mediocre strivers.”
The Canadian press lord and British peer turned author, admiring and affectionate toward America and Americans despite a rough bout with our justice system (culminating bizarrely in Supreme Court vindication and prison time), appeals for us to “recognize the impulse to self-destruction as un-American, and turn it into one of national renovation.”
The verdict on that won’t be in for a while. But as someone who not only hopes for such renovation but actively works for it through Colorado Christian University’s leadership programs – and who has lived through a quarter of the 260-year flight related in this magisterial work – I highly commend Conrad Black’s chronicle.
Decline, as Charles Krauthammer has said, is a choice. More than an account of great events and great men, Flight of the Eagle can serve as an inspiration and even in some degree a primer for Americans determined to choose against decline and keep the USA preeminent – for mankind’s benefit.
The book is bracingly written, fast-paced, perceptively told, and illuminating for the challenges ahead as only the best histories are. Black’s narrative of epochs, conflicts, and presidencies has a cinematic sweep that never drags or blurs.
Yet he also gives us a depth portrait – showing how national character, institutions, and leaders have always outweighed geographic advantages or material factors in propelling America’s rise.
His drama is structured in a Shakespearean four acts:
“The Aspirant State, 1754-1836,” stretches from Major George Washington, all of 21, helping start a world war at Fort Duquesne on the forks of the Ohio – from which ensued first France’s and then Britain’s expulsion from America – to Andrew Jackson shrewdly buying time for the young nation to overcome the cancer of slavery.
“The Predestined People, 1836-1933,” opens with the mounting crisis of the house divided and then recounts the Civil War that bloodily resolved it, Polk to Buchanan to Lincoln to Grant. Moving into the 20th century, it analyzes TR’s ushering of America onto the world stage and Wilson’s ill-fated crusade for democracy and global security, fading almost to black as economic collapse unmans Herbert Hoover.
For the third act, “The Indispensable Country, 1933-1957,” Black pulls the camera in tighter, devoting as many pages to that quarter-century as he had to the previous hundred years. Franklin D. Roosevelt, about whom Black published a grand biography some years ago, attracts his laudatory closeup here.
But the tense prologue, epic crescendo, and stormy postlude of World War II obviously deserve all that attention – pivotal as the conflict was for modern times. Dwight Eisenhower, military victor in Europe, grand strategist in the White House, is lauded by the author as well.
“The Supreme Nation, 1957-2013,” his final act, brings the story almost to the present day. Crisis by crisis, Black vividly but perceptively tracks America’s growing global mastery (with our share of missteps) in theaters from Lebanon to Cuba to Vietnam, Nicaragua to Grenada to Berlin, Somalia to Afghanistan to Iraq.
The author’s earlier research and reflections as a biographer of Richard Nixon, and his close friendship with Henry Kissinger (who contributed a foreword to this book), show to good advantage. Conservatives will also enjoy his glowing praise for Ronald Reagan.
But readers of whatever partisan stripe will be edified as across the whole span of two-plus centuries, election by election and president by president, Black renders pithy judgments of what Americans were signaling when they voted and where each chief executive was strategically strong or weak. Geopolitical, diplomatic, political, and military history, with garnishes of economic and social history, have seldom been blended more engagingly.
Flight of the Eagle takes an honored place on my shelf alongside the other fine survey histories of our “indispensable country” and its Anglosphere cousins contributed by such men of affairs and men of the right (scholars all, academics none, just like Conrad Black) as William J. Bennett, Paul Johnson, Andrew Roberts, Daniel Hannan, John O’Sullivan, James C. Bennett, Stephen Hayward, Dinesh D’Souza, and, yes, Sir Winston Churchill.
If Morton D’Evelyn were still with us, man of the right and man of affairs that he was, the man who first conscripted me into the battle of ideas, Black’s warm, wise, discerning, and stirring book would surely be my centenary gift to him this Christmas.
John Andrews (andrewsjk@aol.com) is director of the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University, former president of the Colorado Senate, and the author of Responsibility Reborn: A Citizen’s Guide to the Next American Century.
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