For the extreme Left, he’s the President who is still fighting a war in Iraq, an escalating war in Afghanistan, and possibly thinking about taking out Iran’s nuclear capability. For the extreme Right, he’s a foreign born egomaniac who is getting ready to allow gays to serve in the military and planning to cut and run from all American military engagements. However, it is instructive to read the President’s Nobel Prize citation and see how Obama is being perceived abroad:

“Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the United States is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.”

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population,” 

My favorite part of the news stories about the Prize is the way the President was informed of this award. Due to time zone differences, American Nobelists are typically informed of their win in the middle of the night. Not this time.  According to Nobel Committee Chair Thorbjoern Jagland , the Committee decided not to inform Obama early because it didn't want to wake him up. "Waking up a president in the middle of the night, this isn't really something you do,"  Yes, he might think the nation was being attacked.. Deploying  the air force would not be the correct response to winning a peace prize.

Of course, Obama is not the first sitting American President to win the Prize. Teddy Roosevelt won in 1916 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919. The move by the Nobel committee serves to reinforce the central position of American diplomacy and the continued importance of the American Presidency. With Europe, China, India, and Russia emerging as world powers, the United States continues to retain its critical position, with the world’s most powerful military and a huge if struggling economy. Of equal importance is America’s central position in the world’s media, on the web and in the popular imagination. Images of America are communicated throughout the world and continue to dominate the world’s collective bandwith.

It matters what the American President does, how he does it and what he says. When President George W. Bush swaggers on to an aircraft carrier to declare “mission accomplished” it says one thing. When President Barack Obama goes to Cairo to hold out an olive branch to the Muslim world, it says something quite different. While being popular outside the United States may not be the main objective of the American President, Machiavelli aside, being feared and loathed is not always the best way to promote American interests in an interdependent global system.

A number of polls this summer show that the United States is more respected abroad than it was during the Bush Administration and it is clear that the Obama team sees diplomacy as well as the military as tools for advancing American interests. Obama is a masterful communicator and a compelling figure on the world stage. While it is too early to know if all of this promise will translate into performance, the Nobel Committee seems to be betting on our still new President. I admit that I am too. Obama has written his own story and termed it the Audacity of Hope. I think the Nobel committee has added its voice to that story- making the case for the persistence of hope. I think it is a wonderful gesture, worthy of the traditions of this important prize.

Trudy grew up in the 1930s in Westchester, in a big house with a 40-foot living room. Her father was a German who emigrated at the turn of the century to open a branch of a family business. He was worldly. He went skiing in Switzerland in natty attire, he flew airplanes, and his attitudes were typical of assimilating Jews of his generation. He told his daughter that Judaism was a religion, it was not a nation. So he was anti-Zionist. Once Trudy asked her father who the two pretty blonde girls were in the photograph in the living room. "Those are your cousins; they died in the war," he said. Along with many other relatives or hers, in concentration camps. But the word Holocaust was not used.

In Trudy's family, they did not make giant distinctions between gentiles and Jews. Trudy's family went to temple. Their friends were other Jewish families. And the four kids all married Jews. But some Jews were felt to be "too Jewish." This attitude was not so different from what Columbia historian Fritz Stern, a baptized Jew whose family fled Germany in '38, describes in his recent book Five Germanys I Have Known as "harsh" comments his family sometimes made about Jews.

Trudy raised two baby-boomer children without a strong sense of Jewishness. A little Hebrew school, a bar mitzvah. The social distinctions that my family of Eastern European Jews trafficked in--WASPy Jews, Jewishy Jews, religious Jews, and Christians, were not a big deal in Trudy's more privileged household. Her daughter married a gentile, then another. Her son married 1, 2, 3 Jews. The son is much more Jewish-identified. My outmarrying cousin moved into the American heartland. My inmarrying one stayed on the east coast. The results are what you would expect: Trudy's grandkids are Jewish-identified on one branch, "American nothings" on the other.

A few comments.

Trudy's two children are representative of my generation. About half of us married out, half stayed in. The Israel lobby derives its power from the second half. These Jews had tribal allegiance. They cared more about being Jewish, and Jewishness in our generation came to be defined not as a religion, but a faraway country: Israel. I think my inmarrying cousin gives real money to a cause his grandfather rejected... I must say, I find my outwardlooking girl relative a lot more fun and interesting than my inward-looking boy relative.

Trudy's father's attitudes were typical of assimilationist Jews'. Many of them supported the anti-Zionist cause (per Thomas Kolsky's superb book, Jews Against Zionism). They were made uncomfortable by Jewish nationalism, they saw a risk of dual loyalty. A crucial development in American Zionism was the defection of just such a German Jew, Louis D. Brandeis, who after caring nothing about things Jewish converted to Zionism in 1912, or so, in his late 50s, following a meeting with a disciple of Theodor Herzl's. The cynical view (offered but not endorsed by Peter Grose in Israel in the Mind of America) is that Woodrow Wilson overlooked Brandeis as Attorney General in 1912 after leading Jews told Wilson that Brandeis was not "representative" of American Jewry—which over the last 25 years had become largely eastern European and Russian (my ancestors). Brandeis became representative by embracing a creed of the pogrom-fleeing new-Jews: Zionism. Wilson appointed him the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice in 1916.

Brandeis's adopted creed is now the creed of American Jewishness. Back then, before the Holocaust, the non-Zionist or anti-Zionist assertions—Jewishness is a religion, not a nation, and Jews are NOT homeless—were openly and widely expressed among Jews. Many Jews worried about charges of dual loyalty if the Zionists held to a political agenda—forming a state—rather than a strictly cultural agenda, Let's move to Jerusalem. Today all Jews in America are supposed to embrace the political agenda, the Jewish state, and if you raise an issue that leading Jewish critics of Zionism raised again and again (as did Balfour, Truman, and Carter), "Have you figured out a fair answer to the fact that Arab people are already living there?" you don't count. Other concerns of the assimilating Jews' have also been suppressed. And so you have a top aide to George Bush, Elliott Abrams, writing that Jews must segregate themselves socially from gentiles and that Jews are essentially homeless outside Israel, and statements like this have fueled wide but largely subterranean suspicions that Jews have pushed a foreign policy that is more in Israel's than in America's interests. The New Yorker and the Times dismiss these suspicions as "conspiracy theories," without even fully describing them.

I should note that I'm a Jewish-identified "American nothing." As an assimilating Jew, I hope to make room for a wider definition of Jewishness than the narrow diaspora-nationalist one we're stuck in now.

Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America , by Ted Morgan. Random House, 685 pages, $35.

Way before Ann Coulter decided that a book accusing millions of fellow citizens of being traitors would be career-enhancing, another prominent Washingtonian was up to the same trick. Only with a twist. Instead of writing a best-seller and going on talk shows (they didn't exist yet), he ordered a lengthy list of Americans who were, could be, or knew someone who knew someone else who maybe was entertaining thoughts of overthrowing the government of the United States by force.Commies,in other words.

At his instigation, all manner of stratagems were deployed to rout them out. In the process, a number of lives were ruined, and for a while the Constitution went out the window.

The culprit behind thissordidness? Woodrow Wilson.

What, you may wonder, is the sainted 28th President of the United States (much less the blousy Ms. Coulter) doing in a review of a book about Joe McCarthy, who blessedly drank himself to death in 1956? Well, it's a long story (685 small-type pages, to be exact), and in Reds: McCarthyism inTwentieth-Century America , Ted Morgan, who specializes in brilliantly crafted, extraordinary sagas (F.D.R., Churchill, the French, Somerset Maugham, Jay Lovestone, on and on), tells the tale as it always ought to have been told-which is to say, from start to finish.

Woodrow comes in at the start. According to Mr. Morgan (who used to be known as Sanche de Gramont-another long story), Wilson was the guy who began the Red-hunting that put Joe in business three decades later-though the dipsomaniacal junior Senator from Wisconsin, who had trouble enough keeping straight how many Commies worked forthegovernment (some days there were 57, others 143, 231 or 269), almost certainly didn't realize it.

This was not the only forgotten accomplishment of the father of the League of Nations. Thanks to Wilson's efforts, an obscure Justice Department factotum named J. Edgar Hoover commenced a march to bigger things; the United States invaded the newly minted Soviet Union (the enterprise-understandably unmentioned in Democratic Party hagiography-did not end well); and a movement was born promoting the notion that America should export its Creator-granted specialness to less well-endowed nations, whether they wanted it or not. To Woodrow Wilson do Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Midge Decter and the entire neocon movement owe an unrepayable debt.

As does Roy Cohn, McCarthy's chief counsel and henchman. Subsequently celebrated as convicted felon and bosom pal of Barbara Walters, Cohn bows into the narrative on page 429. By then, there's little for him and his boss to do: The once rootin'-tootin' U.S. Communist Party had already been snipped into impotency by, among others, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, a young Senator from California named Richard Nixon-and Josef Stalin, whose talent for wholesale killing put off would-be recruits.

Joe McCarthy wasn't deterred. Having already seen the profit of phonying up his own record as a Marine tail-gunner (he claimed to have blasted Japs from the sky, but his only recorded K.I.A.'s some machine-gunned coconuts), he compensated for the lack of actual enemies by inventing imaginary ones. And as it turned out, few were willing to point out that the emperor was starkers.

Dwight Eisenhower, who had the moral authority to stop him with a single press conference, sure wasn't: Though privately he loathed McCarthy, publicly he did nothing-even when close friends such as C.I.A. director General Walter Bedell Smith, his wartime chief of staff, were being disemboweled by the McCarthyite wolves. The handful who possessed the cojones to stand up to him, like Oregon's Wayne Morse (later one of two Senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution that brought us Vietnam) and CBS's Edward R. Murrow, whose half-hour broadside Bill Paley had the guts to televise, did so at their peril. Because courtesy of the Cold War, the Russian A-bomb, the Korean War and Mao Tse-tung, fat, jowly, permanently sweaty Joe McCarthy, the one-time quickie divorce lawyer made good, had the country by the throat.

Unless you lived through those times, Ted Morgan's beautifully rendered account of the multiple horrors done may strike you like a Lyndon LaRouche manifesto about Queen Elizabeth running the international drug trade. George C. Marshall part and parcel of the Communist Conspiracy … Harvard president James B. Conant a fellow traveler … the West Point Debate and Council Forum a vipers' nest. Sure , Senator. And the next time those pointy-eared fellas from Roswell take you for a ride, don't forget to bring along the Thorazine.

But Joe McCarthy actually said those things, and good, decent, otherwise well-informed Americans took them as holy writ. One such family resided at 1559 Crest Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where every evening meal was preceded by prayers on Senator McCarthy's behalf. I know-I was the 7-year-old, head bowed, at the end of the table.

But God either wasn't listening, or He was a registered Democrat. In 1954, the object of our nightly novena set his sights on a bridge too far in the person of Joseph N. Welch, Esq., a patrician of bristling rectitude, who was then lending his legal talents to McCarthy's latest target, that notorious Moscow cat's paw the United States Army. McCarthy's blunder was outing a young assistant on Welch's staff as a onetime member of the National Lawyers Guild-a C.P. front group-despite a pledge to Welch that he wouldn't.

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness," Welch rasped in the committee hearing room, as television cameras zoomed in on his adversary's fidgety derangement. "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

The reign of Joseph Raymond McCarthy ended at that moment. His colleagues pronounced censure-the Senate's harshest penalty-on him a few months later, and on May 2, 1957, he died of "acute hepatic failure" (a nice way of saying booze made cheesecloth of his liver) at the age of 48.

Liberals, however, have yet to get over him. Because hated Joe said Commie spies were everywhere, it appears to be imprinted on every bleeding lefty heart that there were none anywhere. Or at least not many. Who were harmless anyway. An equally fervent, McCarthy-inspired codicil states that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were framed. Or if they weren't, didn't tell the Russians anything they didn't know already. Or even if they did, were merely misguided idealists. As for Alger Hiss, that's not worth discussing; everyone on the West Side knows he was innocent.

One of the great pleasures of Ted Morgan's book is that its scorn for Joe McCarthy is matched ounce for witty ounce by contempt for naïfs. There truly were tons of Reds in places like New York, Washington, Los Alamos and Hollywood during the Communist Party's 1930's and 40's salad days, and they weren't spending all their time going to faculty teas and being nice to the needy. Mr. Morgan derives this intelligence from a source that took exhaustive, contemporaneous notes of the many hoops traversed by folk like Alger Hiss at the K.G.B.'s behest. Namely, the K.G.B. itself.

The "Venona Files," as the documents are called, were 20 years from being released the only time I ever encountered one of their subjects. It was 1975, Saigon was on the verge of falling, and I was headed to Washington aboard the Eastern shuttle. In a right-side aisle seat a few rows up, I noticed an elegantly dressed, imperially slim, balding gentleman meticulously examining the contents of a battered brown brief case. Just as in his many newspaper pictures, he was preternaturally clean.

As the plane cleared out on landing, I introduced myself. "Sir," I said, "I have to tell you that I think you are guilty as sin, but that I do appreciate the trouble you've been giving the government all these years." Alger Hiss, I remember, politely smiled.

Mr. Hiss went to the great Harvard Law School in the sky admitting nothing. And the "-ism" Joe McCarthy bequeathed to us endures. In the 60's, the tradition was carried on by J. Edgar Hoover, who searched prodigiously, if vainly, for Communism in the ranks of the civil-rights movement; while in the anti-war 70's, the torch was borne by Richard Nixon and his "Plumbers" (who made Roy Cohn look like a wuss).

Joe himself has been enjoying a revival of late. William F. Buckley gave him a flattering cameo in a recent novel; in 1999, Arthur Herman, a program coordinator at the Smithsonian Institution, penned a friendly revisionist history of his doings ( Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator ); David Frum, the former Dubya speechwriter who coined "axis of evil," had a kind word or two for him in The National Review ; and the ubiquitous Ms. Coulter fairly gushes over his shade in the pages of Treason : "Joe McCarthy bought America another thirty years," she writes. "For this, he sacrificed his life, his reputation, his name."

Those who tread in Joe's footsteps these days are infinitely slicker than the addled Senator, and the collapse of the Soviet Union has imposed on them a few minor tactical adjustments. But whether the message is delivered in a White House briefing, or a Tom DeLay speech, or a Rush Limbaugh broadcast, the essential recipe remains: Cook up an imaginary threat (Iraq's fading, but Syria, Iran and North Korea will do in a pinch); scare the bejesus out of people with visions of nightmares about to be unleashed; brand those who squawk cowards or worse; talk gravely about the urgency of "balancing" civil liberties with security; act as if civility is for sissies; and voila -you're ready to rent the green baize for the witness table.

It's almost enough to make you miss Alger Hiss.

Robert Sam Anson reviews books regularly for The Observer .

In urging the militaristic and hereditary regimes of the Middle East toward reform, Mr. Bush rightly mocked the notion that any nationality or ethnic group should be supposed incapable of self-government and uninterested in liberty because of its nature or history. Although too many of his supporters on the religious right are spreading just such bigoted nonsense about Arabs and Muslims, he insisted: "Islam, the faith of one-fifth of humanity, is consistent with democratic rule." He properly emphasized that many millions of Muslims live as free citizens of many democratic governments, and went on to praise the "progress" he detects in predominantly Muslim nations such as Turkey, Indonesia, Senegal, Albania, Niger and Sierra Leone.

The most quoted line of his address departed from decades of American policy toward the oil-rich oligarchs and military rulers of the world's most strategic region. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," he said, "because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."

From now on, the United States will seek to encourage freedom everywhere, according to the President-perhaps even among the petroleum states where the Bush family and its cronies have so long enjoyed the patronage of oppressive regimes. At least that is what everyone who read the speech assumed, even though the President never mentioned Saudi Arabia by name (and reserved his scourging for Syria and Iran).

Assuming that Mr. Bush meant what he said, however, a hard question arises: Aside from forcible "regime change" throughout the region, how does the President plan to encourage democracy, freedom, women's rights and all the other benefits of enlightenment in that region? Doesn't democratic reform pose a lethal threat to the royalists and other corrupt elites that have prospered from dictatorial rule? Wouldn't the Arab and Muslim peoples, freed from the feudal yoke, immediately throw off those wicked rulers and seize their ill-gotten gains?

They probably would, which leaves the President with the difficult task of persuading his autocratic friends to take such risks. Still, there are reasons to hope that he can persuade them.

As the legatee of a political dynasty founded in part on oil wealth, Mr. Bush provides a fitting role model for the men who will someday inherit the Gulf states. Of all the Western politicians of our time, he may well be the best suited to guide the Mideast autocrats toward democracy. He could point out how little change may be required for them to meet the standards that our own government has set lately.

To a dictator who expresses doubt about imitating American freedoms enshrined in habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, the President could mention the Patriot Act. These days, as he could explain, the President of the world's greatest democracy can order a citizen to be seized and thrown into prison indefinitely without trial or even charges. He can deny the prisoner access to family members or legal assistance for as long as he pleases, simply by applying the term "enemy combatant" to him.

To an autocrat who voices concern about the hobbling of the security services that have kept his kind in power for decades, the President could mention his administration's ongoing "reforms" of certain basic American traditions. Federal agents can now seize library records, credit-card receipts, bank statements and other personal data without review by a judge; they can monitor your telephone and computer without judicial authority, too.

To a king or prince who worries over the outcome of an election in which everyone has only a single vote, the President could point out the enormous fund-raising advantage, not unlike his own, that any of the fabulously wealth oil monarchs would certainly enjoy. And should the king or prince rudely argue that Mr. Bush actually lost the popular vote in 2000 despite spending $65 million more than his opponent, the President could simply note that he doesn't intend to let that happen again-because he expects to outspend his opponent by $150 million or more next year.

So despite the marvelous advances in technology and development that herald worldwide liberty, the autocrats, kings and dictators can be reassured: They can mimic democracy without undue concern about their own political survival. Last week, the President told the world's authoritarians why they inevitably will someday resemble us. But it's hard not to wonder whether that is likely to happen before we begin to resemble them.

In recognition of Mr. Bush's achievement, we might consider memorializing his august puss, if not on Mount Rushmore, then by erecting a new Sphinx. The stones might be hauled to the building site by captured Arabs, who have been convicted of "links" or being "linked," as the American officialdom is wont to say. It may be farfetched, but in light of reports that at least some of the thefts from the Baghdad museum were done by gangs with connections to shady art dealers in the West, one might wonder if money had been passed to ensure that the American military didn't get to the scene of the crime until the thieves had made their getaway with their swag of priceless antiquities.

What an unpatriotic thought on my part! I retract it: Our military never takes bribes and accepts only medals. Besides, agents of our scandal-ridden F.B.I. are reported to be on the scene, and we know what comfort we can take in the knowledge that these fearless, incorruptible and efficient detectives are on the track of the criminals.

If some American officer had been paid to turn a blind eye, it might indicate some appreciation of what has been destroyed. The truth probably is that the American military let these places be ruined simply because they didn't give a good goddamn one way or the other.

Robert Fisk, reporting for the London Independent , added weight to this hypothesis when he wrote, "Yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists …. The National Library and Archives, a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq, were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze. When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning … I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that 'this guy says some biblical library is on fire.' I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English …. [I]t would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air." At about the same time, American TV viewers could see members of the American military speeding through the anarchic streets of Baghdad to foil a gang of bank robbers.

So Bush II will go into the history books as the philistine he is-but as Henry Ford was famously quoted as saying, "History is bunk." Nevertheless, those favoring the invasion of Iraq have a lot of American history, bunky and not so bunky, on their side. If precedent is a justification for breaking and entering, the President and his neocon friends have plenty of it, dating at least as far back as Andrew Jackson driving the Seminoles out of Florida, through the theft of Texas and California from Mexico, the seizure of Hawaii and the bloody occupation of the Philippines. How the United States obtained the Guantánamo Bay enclave, currently being used as what is beginning to look like a concentration camp for Arabs, is best not closely scrutinized.

Starting with the Spanish-American War, the nation began fissuring over militarism, nondefensive war and the rights and wrongs of stealing other people's real estate. While most Republicans couldn't wait to enlist, the Republican Speaker of the House, Tom Reed, was unable to stomach going to war against the decrepit Spanish empire. He was too loyal a party man to go public with his girlish qualms, so he wordlessly resigned the speakership and his Maine House seat and disappeared into private life. Sentiment was turning against attacking people and nations which posed no threat to us. In 1910, the idea of internationalism came into existence when President William Howard Taft came out for binding arbitration, not war, in conflicts between nations.

On the other side of the argument stood Theodore Roosevelt, who, sounding like an editorialist in today's Weekly Standard , sneered at what he called "unrighteous peace" and "mollycoddles" who wouldn't fight. Taft considered Roosevelt, who had seen action in the Spanish-American dustup, to be "obsessed with his love of war and the glory of it," and in 1915 Taft took a leading role in the newly established League to Enforce Peace and its effort to create a system of international law.

Until Iraq, the Spanish-American War was the last one the United States fought for self-aggrandizement; the last large theft of property by the U.S. was Theodore Roosevelt's taking a chunk of Colombia, which we converted into the nation/colony of Panama for canal-building purposes. In the 19th century, such thefts were glorious acts of extending civilization into lands inhabited by backward, savage people who worshipped inferior gods and lacked proper sanitation. England, France, Germany, Belgium and Japan prowled the world for places to steal and colonize in the name of progress and modernity.

Then came Woodrow Wilson, the most important or the least appreciated 20th-century President. The age of empires ended with his proclamation of the self-determination of peoples. Speaking the language of liberty and democracy, Wilson denounced going to war to steal the lands and patrimony of others. In place of rivalries among the powerful, he proposed a system of collective security, international law and justice which found its fullest expression in the League of Nations.

From Wilson forward, no President would use Theodore Roosevelt's language of imperial conquest. After Wilson, America abjured war for profit, war for territory or war for other people's possessions. In this third year of the 21st century, George Bush is also using the Wilsonian rhetoric. But he lies. After saying we sought no territory from Iraq but were engaged in an altruistic crusade (sorry-poor choice of words), it comes out that America is helping itself to this and that military morsel in that bedraggled land. According to news reports, Washington is planning what The New York Times called a "long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region." The expression "long-term relationship" is Orwellian English meaning theft.

The next time a red-white-and-blue-sodden individual asks: "Why do they hate us?", the proper reply should be: "Because we cheat, lie and steal." The supine American press may not make a big thing out of it, but abroad they remember. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.

One is tempted to ask whether Mr. Bush and his people ever seriously believed that Iraq was a threat. Was this charade of war a put-up job from the start, and from before the start? More largely, can they get away with turning Iraq into a colony or a protectorate? Is the nation which threw off its colonial chains now going to take Iraq's independence and make it a de facto colony? A century ago, such things were approved of. But not in the Wilsonian epoch, and not now-when, if there is one principle universally agreed on the world over, it's the self-determination of peoples as Woodrow Wilson first enunciated it. Even in the imperial age, America was unable to successfully digest its Spanish-American War conquests. For 100 years, relations between the United States and Cuba have been poisoned by it.

Internationally, no President-not Franklin Roosevelt, not John Kennedy, no one-was as idolized by the people of the world as Woodrow Wilson. In his 1919 tour, he walked the streets of Europe as millions turned out to shower him with flowers and adulation. George Bush can't step out of the United States without being surrounded by thousands of armed men, and even then he is in constant and real danger. He is as hated as Wilson was loved.

As opposed to President Bush, "Mr. Wilson rose to intellectual domination of most of the civilized world. With his courage and eloquence, he carried a message of hope for the independence of nations, the freedom of men and lasting peace. Never since his time has any man risen to the political and spiritual heights that came to him," wrote Herbert Hoover, in perhaps the only biography of one President by another. Elsewhere in the book, as if to make it clear who is who and what is what, he wrote of Wilson, "Had he lived, he would have seen the League concept rise again from the second bloodbath of mankind under the name of the United Nations. The spirit of Woodrow Wilson came to the world again."

Consider the dimensions of the victory, still incomplete, that the coalition and its allies within Iraq can now claim: In the space of one week, they allowed a plainly confused citizenry to progress from obsessive worries about whether Saddam Hussein's fedayeen would be destroyed in anything resembling the short term to visual assurances that those squads were being cut down like the murderous, frothing animals they've always been. At the same time, the coalition forces put to rest the question of whether and where the vaunted Republican Guard units might be lying in wait by demonstrating that most of them had been transformed into a horrific collection of body parts that filled bomb craters, ditches and ruined entrenchments all over Iraq. The coalition's army, a force unsurpassed by any in history in bravery and daring, and unequaled in its attention to discriminatory tactics, silenced those critics who wondered if Saddam's regime might not in fact enjoy the grassroots loyalty of a majority of Iraqis: They boldly destroyed first the weapons and then the symbols of Saddamite power, and were cheered in their work by a civilian population that began genuinely to believe that the transformation underway in their country might be permanent.

The process of dispelling the deadly black magic of authoritarianism that has for so long enthralled Iraqis was capped Sunday by preliminary reports that caches of chemical weapons may have been found, and then by the news (of equal if not more importance to the fighting morale of Iraqi insurgents and Kurdish forces) that the official most closely associated with the use of those weapons, Saddam Hussein's cousin "Chemical Ali," had been killed by coalition planes. Within a day, another electric rumor circulated: Not only Saddam himself but his brace of sadistic sons had been killed by bunker-buster bombs. In all, it was a week unlike any in modern American military history; and it may seem peculiar that one should encounter in this column anything but unqualified appreciation of and enthusiasm for the achievement.

But scheming politicians and businessmen can deflate the mood of any analyst, and the greedy plotting that has haunted, in the case of Iraq, can no longer be considered separately from the military campaign-not when it stands an excellent chance of tarnishing the great achievements of the campaign itself.

Who will be watching out for postwar Iraq? After the conclusion of hostilities, the focus of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will shift to other matters affecting American national security all around the world-that's his job. The problem is that Mr. Rumsfeld will leave behind a very confused picture, peopled by a cast of dreamy lieutenants and profiteers. It's easy to imagine how this situation could degrade the nascent security that has been won for the Iraqi people.

The working models for postwar Iraq are said to be Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban and the Kurdish free state created in northern Iraq following the first Gulf War. Bits and pieces-and, in some cases, officials-from each experience will be adopted and adapted for use in Iraq generally, in order to create a situation in which (so goes the litany) all Iraqis will eventually feel free to participate in a free, open, democratic government. Since we are talking about one of the oldest civilized regions on earth-one where true democracy has never flourished-this may take some time, but the schemers show every sign of trying to stretch that time out longer than is necessary or advisable.

They hide their work absolutely and loftily: We are, after all, a country that has always profiteered with a noble fig leaf; and the man whose job it is in this case to spin a set of philosophical principles that will serve as a cover for the potentially exploitative occupation of Iraq is Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Possessed of a powerful intellect, along with ideas that, packaged in the best sort of benign American wrappings, are nonetheless characteristically self-interested, Mr. Wolfowitz is thought of as the eminence grise behind the idea that a democratic Iraq is possible, desirable-and will take far longer to embody than did the rehabilitation of Afghanistan (where a pre-assembled government was in place within weeks of the liberation of Kabul and where-not coincidentally-the potential rewards to American business were far lower).

Mr. Wolfowitz has been analyzed and reanalyzed in the press, yet he is not generally paired closely enough with the American to whom he bears the strongest ideological and psychological resemblance: Woodrow Wilson. This is perhaps understandable- Mr. Wolfowitz is a short, unassuming Jew, while Wilson was a puffed-up, posturing Presbyterian-but it's also troubling. For whatever the superficial differences between the two men, they share one overriding quality: a belief in evangelical interventionism. This passion caused Wilson's eight-year Presidency to become the greatest single period of American interference in the affairs of other governments in our nation's history: He was a serial, unilateral interventionist, and one gets the feeling that Mr. Wolfowitz-who increasingly enjoys the ear of another democratic evangelist, George W. Bush-may be trying to duplicate the feat.

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!" Woodrow Wilson once railed; and although Mr. Wolfowitz's statements about Iraq and the Middle East are more soft-spoken and rambling, they often have the same sense of high moral purpose-and the same low estimation of the aspirations and abilities of the local populace. Like Latin Americans in Wilson's day, the people of the Middle East are generally people who have lived under post-imperial petty autocracies for so long that they have almost forgotten that any other type of government exists. And, again like those Latin Americans of a century ago, they look primarily to religion to ease the burdens of repressive regimes.

Indeed, there is entirely too much about the Middle East of today that might attract a Wilsonian missionary. The President-Who-Should-Have-Been-Preacher never did manage to "teach the South American republics" much of anything, except that they didn't understand what he was talking about-and, after enough harangues and bullets, no longer cared to even try.

Can President Bush, following Mr. Wolfowitz's ideas, do better with Muslims than Wilson did with Latin Americans? It seems unlikely, since neither man seems ready to drop the didactic tone, with its attendant belief that the native population in question is made up not of men and women, but of ignorant children. And whatever small chance Mr. Bush and Mr. Wolfowitz might have at success seems further doomed by still another factor that played a central role in giving the lie to Wilson's supposedly beneficent policies: the voracious appetite of international American corporations.

In early to mid-20th-century Latin America, the citizens of country after country heard the rhetoric of Wilson, but came up hard against the practices of American mining, agriculture and construction giants; and children though they may have been in the eyes of both the paternalistic Wilson and the far more sinister corporate magnates, those people understood the game that was being played out within their borders. Yet Wilson at least managed to keep the worst agents of corporate greed out of the White House itself; in our own time, by contrast, we have already seen the heavy, piggish hands of Vice President Dick Cheney and his multinational friends at work in the planning for a postwar Iraq. That Mr. Cheney attempted to secure a $600 million reconstruction package in Iraq for his own former company, Halliburton, without even a blush is almost as remarkable as the fact that, once that idea had been slapped down, he went right ahead and secured a smaller contract for one of Halliburton's subsidiary companies, K.B.R.

Shameless? Perhaps-but that word implies an initial understanding of what "shame" is, and there is nothing in the Vice President's career to suggest that he has ever embraced any philosophy more delicate than the belief that success in a corporate environment is what separates natural leaders from the rest of us. And for this reason, whether or not any company associated with Halliburton does end up biting off a nice, fat mouthful of the dripping Iraqi roast, there are a crowd of other Cheney cronies lined up to do the gorging. One way or another, Iraq is going to be good for those who have been good to the Republican Party-and democracy is not going to be allowed to travel abroad without toting the same cumbersome baggage it carried in Wilson's time.

Nor will Messrs. Bush and Cheney's Democratic opponents weep over this; or, if they do, it will only be because their dispenser of high-priced favors was not clever enough to wrest the great national prize from his opponent in Florida three years ago. Had the pillars of Big Labor known that they would be losing the reconstruction of an entire country in that process, they might well have pushed their Tennessee prince a little harder to play dirty; as it is, they still have such agents as Carl Levin of Michigan at their disposal in Congress, setting traps for the dispensers of Republican largesse in order to make sure that places at the trough are cleared for wealthy yet hungry Democratic interests (although Mr. Levin's constituents are already making out quite well, thanks to renewed defense contracts).

Cynics, of course, will groan and sigh and say that there's nothing new in any of this-and they're right.

But the threat posed to the lives and interests of Americans by Islamic terrorism is, by contrast, unprecedented, and in no way comparable to, say, the bandit raids of Pancho Villa into U.S. territory during Woodrow Wilson's Presidency. Characters such as Villa may have been capable of humiliating Washington, but they could not bring on full-scale crises: Wilson could ultimately afford to play his neurotic games of democratic nation-building in Latin America because they had no real cost to his own people (though he inflicted great suffering on Latin Americans). But the ventures of George W. Bush and Paul Wolfowitz may expose us to greater dangers than any we have known.

But it is to the memory of the military campaign still in its final phase in Iraq-and specifically, again, to the legacy of the men and women who have both fought in it and been killed and maimed as a result of it-that this venerable evangelical paradigm of American international behavior offers the greatest insult. The liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein has not been on a par with the wandering ashore of a detachment of drunken Marines-which was more than once Woodrow Wilson's method of insertion into troubled Latin American countries. Rather, the Iraq war has been (as this column has tried repeatedly to point out) that rarest of rarities in military history, a progressive campaign. In this campaign, we have seen innovative military principles and methods potentially change the political map of a region. Are we to sit back now and watch political and economic business-as-usual squander such momentous, such rare military achievements?

Perhaps. Or perhaps we will instead learn-for what would arguably be the first time in our nation's history-to value superior military methods over self-serving economic ends. Perhaps we will insist that our civilian leaders honor the achievements and sacrifices of our forces, and those Iraqis who have fought beside them, by rejecting the plan that Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz are trying to railroad through Congress, even as various Iraqi opposition groups scream their protests. Perhaps we will recognize that "Iraqi Freedom" may not mean "Iraqi American-Style Capitalist Democracy"; but then, our commanders presumably chose the first name rather than the second because it had a distinctly better ring to it. This ought to tell them something: We have sacrificed and inflicted sacrifices in order to liberate Iraq, and let its people live as they wish-not to remake it in our image. That is the work we must now be about; that is the only work that can match what our troops have done in the field.

Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror (Random House) has been published in a revised and updated edition.

In pre-Miranda America, the cops could and did hold prisoners without telling the friends, relatives and lawyers looking for them where they were. In some cities, prisoners would be taken from one police station to another to thwart the enforcement of a writ of habeas corpus. Confessions extracted from prisoners by force, outside the presence of a lawyer, were admitted in criminal trials. In that era, discrimination and harassment consisted of more than bruised feelings and hate speech. Hateful and injurious acts were performed on persons of color and others generally referred to in that less-than-enlightened period as the poor and downtrodden.

Under the guise of national security, the Bush administration has taken a series of strides back toward the not-so-good old days with its announcement that foreign nationals are now subject to being picked up by the federal police, imprisoned for indefinite periods of time, kept incommunicado and interrogated without benefit of legal representation–and, for all we on the outside know, with benefit of sap and blackjack. If the last seems a bit overblown, please remember that, in addition to the introduction of the lettre de cachet by the U.S. government, various conservatives have been publicly musing on the advantages of torture in questioning non-Americans. Apparently, because we've been attacked and 3,000 of our citizens murdered, we are entitled to exempt ourselves from the standards of common decency. We might hope that a nation which had sustained such a sickening attack would be more, not less, scrupulous in its behavior.

Instead, the Bush administration tells us that some people will be put in chains and tried by military tribunals. It is assumed that the people subject to this rough handling will also be non-Americans, although that's not so sure. In general, the administration seems to be telling us that we who are lucky enough to be citizens are safe and needn't worry about midnight raids by the federal constabulary–but for citizens of any more or less defenseless country, the word is take care and take cover . Non-Americans better hope like hell that Mr. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft don't get a message from their personal Savior (or Saviors) to go after them.

A big thing is being made of the distinction between American citizenship and the lesser, more exposed status of non-citizens, be they legal immigrants, illegal immigrants or people in other countries whom, for whatever reason, the United States government swoops down on. Our position seems to be that when it comes to treatment by the federal government, American citizens get the full protection of the Bill of Rights to the extent compatible with national security; non-Americans get sloppy seconds. We live in a two-law world–one for us and another for them. The Western world has seen this kind of thing before. In the ancient world, the formula of Civis romanus sum ("I am a Roman citizen") got the speaker virtual immunity from all law save that of Rome.

Although the United States is not an empire as empires have been known in the past, its government and its people have cultivated an imperial outlook, an imperial sense of prerogative and an imperially solipsistic view of the planet. Not only is there one law for us and another for the rest of the world, but our losses are dearer, our sadnesses sadder. Our wounds and our deaths are more painful and tragic than the wounds and deaths of others. In Panama, people still mourn those who died at the hands of the U.S. armed forces during the 1989 invasion. Somewhere between 300 and 500 citizens of that impotent little nation perished. The Panamanians, having less money and equipment, do not know exactly how many died when the Americans attacked. They can't afford the costly excavations that we have done at ground zero–and yet, if the two countries are compared in size and population, Panama's loss is comparable to ours. At this point, however, the similarities end. We have been avenged; the American officials responsible for killing the Panamanians have not been called to account, and as for millions in compensation, how does "not one thin dime" sound?

For all the new wrinkles in the meting out of justice–be it military tribunals or clapping non-Americans in jail on administrative whim–the lawyers cite precedent. Since you can get a lawyer to tell you that anything you do is O.K., they're hardly the people to take as authorities, except perhaps for justifying rascality. Finding a precedent for doing something which isn't right counts for little outside a court of law. It is unbecoming a nation that prates about liberty, freedom and justice for all. The Bill of Rights is like foreign aid–something we like to talk about, but are too stingy or too indifferent to give to ausländers .

In the discussions of lettres de cachet , secret trials, trials without juries, trials without knowing the accusations or seeing the evidence, the names of three Presidents are spoken: Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. They–three of our greatest–did it, therefore it is O.K. A lousier argument ad hominem I can't conceive of–and as for viewing their acts as applicable precedents, their situations bore no similarity to ours.

In explanation of his suspension of the Constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus, Lincoln is famously quoted asking, "Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" Compare his circumstances with ours. Eleven states had left the Union and were making war on the United States. It was a desperate situation calling for desperate measures. The destruction of the W.T.C. and flying an airliner into one side of the Pentagon may have been despicable, hateful, homicidal and horrendous acts, but they didn't put the government at peril; they didn't endanger the nation. As many died in one Civil War battle as perished at the World Trade Center. We are not fighting for our collective lives; we are fighting a very, very, very, very small group of terrorists. Some sense of proportion is called for in these lava flows of patriotic gore.

We are not fighting another nation or national government unless it is (or was) the Taliban–a military power so puissant and intimidating that more journalists than American soldiers died in combat. In actuality, you may recall, no American soldiers died in combat: What few fatalities we have suffered were self-inflicted, except for the C.I.A. agent who was killed in a P.O.W. internment-camp insurrection. That's comparable to the Civil War? That gives George Bush the same foundation for the lawlessness of the military tribunal as it gave Abraham Lincoln? (The military tribunal, despite its high-sounding name, is nothing more than take-'em-outside-and-shoot-'em justice. There are no established rules of procedure; they make the rules to fit whatever the foregone conclusion is.)

Woodrow Wilson's gagging the press, chucking people in jail and ending free speech during World War I is also used as a precedent for arguing that John Ashcroft should do the same. If anything, the Wilson repressions should warn us against allowing patriotic transports to sweep away our always-frail individual liberties. No war since the Civil War–not even the Vietnam War–was as unpopular as World War I. The arbitrary acts of Wilson and his attorneys general were what drove Constitutionalists to establish the American Civil Liberties Union; to this day, many historians here and abroad consider them to have been a tragedy whose consequences we're still living with. Who knows what might have happened had dissent against the war been tolerated? The Wilson precedent argues against what Mr. Bush and his fellow authoritarians are doing.

The last President invoked is Franklin Roosevelt and his putting tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese extraction in concentration camps. We have been treated to much speechifying linking Sept. 11 with Dec. 7, 1941–as if a bunch of scraggly-ass fanatics running around a mountain range 10,000 miles from New York in Fieldcrest towels with rusty rifles are the equivalent of the Japanese Imperial Navy, Adolf Hitler and the German army. The terrorists can kill and maim a few of us here and there, but they are not a serious threat. They jump out of the dark and murder us because they are too weak to challenge us. They do what they do because they have no warplanes, no aircraft carriers, no missiles, no tanks or cannons. They can drive us crazy with rage and grief, and that's all they can do.

Imprisoning Americans of Japanese origin was as stupid as it was unjust, and there were many people at the time who knew it, but none of them was sitting on the Supreme Court. The courts will always fail you when the mob is after you. Here and there, you may find a judge who will rule in favor of liberty. Judge Learned Hand found in favor of free speech against Woodrow Wilson, but the robed cowards sitting in the appellate courts above Judge Hand made short work of him.

When push comes to shove, don't count on the courts. Liberty is our personal responsibility. No one will protect us against Mr. Bush and Mr. Ashcroft but ourselves.

year of the last century of the second millennium, we'd be debating World War

I? Or that a three-line, four-column front-page headline in The New York Times would contain the

words "Versailles Pact"? Those two words haven't been featured so prominently

in any American newspaper since the last months of the Woodrow Wilson

Administration. Whatever happened to all that chatter about bridges, tunnels

and other conveyances that would take us from the wreckage of the old century

into the safe harbor of the new?

Pat Buchanan, of course, started all of this retro-brawling

with his curiously timed treatise on the century's two global conflicts. His

thoughts on World War II garnered the most attention, but he also managed to

start an intellectual street fight with his insistence that America's entry

into World War I, otherwise known as the war that failed to end all wars, was a

mistake whose unintended consequence was the vengeful peace settlement reached

at Versailles, which in turn contributed to the rise of Nazism and fascism. If

America's doughboys weren't sharing breakfasts of fried trench rat with the

British and French, Mr. Buchanan argued (as others have), the exhausted empires

of Europe would have fought to a draw and settled their bloody family quarrel

at the negotiating table. Thus, no Allied triumph, no Treaty of Versailles, no

punishment of Germany, no bitterness in the beer halls of Bavaria, no Hitler.

Most journalists,

particularly those who do their research in green rooms, didn't know what to

make of Mr. Buchanan's unorthodox though hardly radical analysis, for they are

generally more comfortable discussing such earth-shattering events as

Representative Howie Cheatum's startling admission that he played spin the

bottle at age 9 with a girl who was not his wife. Confronted with

complexity and substance, they reacted as though Mr. Buchanan somehow were siding with Hitler instead of arguing how Hitlerism might have been averted.

Now, within weeks of the

Buchanan historical dustup, we find ourselves yet again recalling the ghosts of

Flanders fields. The U.S. Senate's stunning rejection of the Comprehensive Test

Ban Treaty on Oct. 13 was described by The Times as "the most

explicit American repudiation of a major international agreement in 80

years"-since the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. The historical

reference seemed more than a little frightening. After all, those of us who

were lucky enough to learn history before the discipline was converted into an

exercise in self-esteem were taught that the Senate's defeat of the Versailles

treaty was one of the most spiteful, parochial and disastrous episodes in the

history of American diplomacy. Lunk-headed Republican isolationists, eager to

stomp on the political grave of the lame-duck Wilson, opposed the treaty for

their own petty purposes and therefore blocked America's membership in the

fledgling League of Nations. Without America the League was powerless, making

World War II and all its horrors inevitable.

Or so went the story.

In fact, as time has demonstrated, the Treaty of Versailles

was one of the most disastrous documents of the 20th century, a triumphalist

"settlement" that humiliated Weimar Germany and did, in fact, lead to the

discontent that Hitler exploited to win the Chancellorship in 1932. (Post-Cold

War cautionary tale: Do not destabilize and encircle vanquished enemies.)

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and France's President Georges

Clemenceau indulged the naïve Wilson his little lectures on world peace and

self-determination for some small nations, i.e., small nations within the

defeated German and Austro-Hungarian empires. (Small nations under the control

of Britain, France and America were not included in Wilson's New World Order.)

While Wilson preached, Lloyd George and Clemenceau

eviscerated Germany, depriving it of natural resources and population centers

while limiting its capacity to rearm. The treaty may have given voice to some

Wilsonian ideals, including the League of Nations, but at its heart it was a

cold-blooded and ruthless piece of political and military vengeance, an example

of Old World politics at its worst.

The difference between the two treaties-Versailles and the

Test Ban-is enormous. The world has, in fact, learned some of the lessons that

a century of assembly-line bloodshed has taught: There are some issues, like

nuclear arms regulation, that are too important to be left to international

brinkmen. Rogue states may very well choose to ignore the proposed ban on

underground tests of nuclear weapons, but presumably they would be subject to

global discipline of the sort that has been visited on Iraq, Yugoslavia and

North Korea in recent years. That's positively Wilsonian in its idealism, but

now we are in the humiliating position of getting lectures in responsibility

from the Chinese Government.

The Test Ban wasn't

the Versailles Treaty. That's why it should have been passed.

I allowed to the lady on the other end of the phone that there are only so many times and occasions that a nation as old as this one can lose its innocence. We were supposed to have lost our national cherry during the Civil War and then grew it back in time to lose it in the disillusionment of World War I, after which America regrew the little, round, red fruit to be ready for history to pluck it away in the Great Depression, and then, quick, quick, we grew another, so as to be able to lose it at Pearl Harbor. There followed a respite of almost 30 years for the thing to bud, flower and ripen so it could be snatched away during Watergate.

America is the perpetual virgin in a Greek myth, growing a new hymen every time some Zeus-like bull jumps her from behind and gives her a screwing.

In another 25 years, the dumb clucks in front of the microphones will be able to celebrate a twofer, Nixon's golden 50th, and Hillary's, Bill's and Monica's silver 25th. It hasn't been officially decided if the President's panky-hanky with les girls is a genuine national cherry-plucker or merely deplorably bad taste, which fails to rise to the level of lost innocence. There's a board of media personalities and experts who vote on those things, but the group hasn't met yet.

In the meantime, Dick Nixon is back to get kicked around some more if people feel up to it. Apparently they do, since most of what we hear is what a rat he was or, from his defenders who still aren't exactly numerous, that he wasn't the first President to pull these stunts. This is about where the argument was quarter of a century ago, when the second Quaker President in our history got into the helicopter and dragon-flied off to California. (The first person who identifies the other Quaker President gets 25,000 frequent-flier miles on an airline of his or her choice.)

It isn't yet time, evidently, to pull the camera back, so that instead of showing a close-up of Nixon's much-photographed warts, we get a historical diorama. Is there nothing else to be said about the cyclonic political events that caught Richard Nixon in a cone of wind and carried him all the way to San Clemente? Is it just that simple, that he was a rat and we were innocent?

That appears to be the judgment of historians, political scientists and the weightier heads of journalism. For the most part, these types have long since abandoned the great-man theory of history in favor of explaining what happened in terms of trends, forces, cultures and the movements of sentiment among the masses, but if the great-man theory of history has been downplayed in the last half-century, the great-villain theory of history remains largely intact, or so it would seem in the treatment accorded Nixon. His fall still is described as a first-class louse getting his just deserts.

Whether or not Richard Nixon was of the species pediculus humanus or not, there is more to his destruction than the paranoid inversions of his brooding personality. His defenders have always maintained that he was a victim of a change in the rules of Presidential conduct, and that previous occupants of the office, notably Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, had done the same things Nixon was accused of doing. That's not much of a defense, although the assertions are true. Furthermore, you could put Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman on that same list.

Those six men have one thing in common. They were all wartime Presidents. The first five threw people in jails and concentration camps, conducted burglaries and witch-hunted their opponents. In fact, three of them, Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt, did these things on a scale Nixon does not seem to have ever contemplated and certainly never attempted. The truth of the matter, when it comes to looking at the record of wartime suppression of civil liberties, is that Nixon may have been the least harsh of the six Presidents, though he was the only one punished for his deeds. The only wartime President who may be said to have had a spotless civil liberties record was William McKinley, who presided over the Spanish-American War.

Four of the Presidents were called upon to conduct a war in the teeth of significant and spirited opposition. They were Lincoln, Wilson and Johnson-Nixon. Whether or not Lincoln's tearing up the Bill of Rights was justified by military necessity, as it may have been, looked at from a civil liberties point of view, his record was horrendous. No more so than Woodrow Wilson's, who padlocked so many magazines and newspapers, jailed, exiled and intimidated so many people that his administration sparked the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union.

A war's unpopularity and an administration's reaction to it don't correlate to visible, popular opposition. The Korean War was immensely unpopular, more so than the Vietnam War, if the public opinion polling in the two periods is to be relied on. Yet that war was fought with no public protest, as contrasted to the Vietnamese conflict, which called forth rallies, demonstrations and even riots on a scale unimaginable to Americans under the age of 30 or 35.

Opposition to the Civil War and World War I was primarily regional or found among immigrant groups (Irish and Germans), socialists and other radicals, the poorer sort of farmers and factory workers. Opposition to the Vietnam War was centered in the middle- and upper-middle class. The antiwar movement of the 1960's and 70's was braced and reinforced by a network of national organizations spun out of the civil rights movement, the professions, universities and important elements in the nation's mainstream churches. No President could lock up and gag these people without having a terrific fight on his hands, as indeed Johnson, whom they ran out of public life, and Nixon found out.

The organized antiwar elements were able to do something that antiwar protesters of the past hadn't a prayer of achieving-they were able to enforce the Bill of Rights and when it was violated they were able to inflict political punishment on the violators. The F.B.I., the red squads in the police departments of half a dozen major cities, the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the White House and the President himself were called to account for acts and activities that previous wartime administrations had routinely carried out without the slightest fear of being challenged.

So Richard Nixon's defenders are correct when they say that the rules were switched on him. They're wrong when they complain it was because he was hated by certain groups and people. He was indeed hated, but the rules were switched, not out of a feudish desire to get Dick the Prick but because of the war he had taken over from Lyndon Johnson and made his own.

Will the rules stay changed? Or will future Presidents and administrations again find overriding reasons of state to quietly lay the Bill of Rights aside? Given the chance, will politicians like a Hillary Clinton be more gentle toward those in her way than Richard Nixon or Woodrow Wilson? Let's hope we don't have to find out.