Commager

The historian Henry Steele Commager called the book “the most persuasive critique of American foreign policy over the last 20 years.”

He also received, as birthday gifts from his mother’s friends, books by the historians Henry Steele Commager and Henri Pirenne.

Bruce Springsteen famously developed a profound political consciousness after happening upon Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager’s “A Pocket History of the United States,” first published in 1942.

Although some of Commager’s language, such as the use of “he,” grates on the modern ear, the paradox that he identifies survives to this moment, and it is doing untold harm to this country.

If some of these reforms involve making significant alterations to the system of government that the founders created, which is still accorded the same level of veneration in some quarters that it was in Commager's day, so be it.