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The scathing complaint of foreign policy critic Roger Morris, registered some thirty years ago, remains apt today. Average Americans, he wrote then, their attention absorbed by the problems of daily life at home, “give the rest of the planet only a distracted, fleeting glance.” Easily persuaded that the United States is called upon to lead, they leave it to others to work out the details. As a result, ordinary citizens remain “heedless of the people and closed politics,” cloaked in secrecy, that formulate policies advertised as essential to the nation’s safety and well-being. From time to time, “dour, mostly anonymous men” emerge from behind closed doors “to announce discreetly some fresh disaster.” Although inquiries and investigations inevitably ensue, the net effect is not to fix responsibility but to disperse it. Then the game continues, the terms of reference all but unaffected, the cast of characters largely unchanged, with Republican and Democratic insiders simply exchanging portfolios at periodic intervals.

“Aside from shedding a handful of figures too badly stained by Vietnam”—Morris was writing in 1980; today we might substitute the Greater Middle East—“no other field of American endeavor over the past two decades has been so little revived by fresh energy, talent, and perspective as our in-grown national security establishment.” The burden of paying for the disasters concocted by this establishment, he continued,

fall[s] most savagely on the majority of Americans with incomes under $20,000, the people whose pocketbooks do the paying and whose sons tend to do the dying for foreign policy but whose voices are largely absent in its making.

Morris unleashed his salvo in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with the drama surrounding the Iran hostage crisis still unfolding. This book appears, in the wake of George W. Bush’s Iraq War, in the midst of what has become Barack Obama’s Afghanistan War. Yet Morris’s central complaint still pertains.

The lethal fault of American foreign policy is a matter of neither left nor right, neither liberal cowardice nor conservative conspiracy, but rather a relatively banal bipartisan mediocrity. . . . A loss of competence more than a loss of nerve, it is not different from nepotism and misrule in one’s county commission or school board, a decrepit commuter railroad or an expiring automobile manufacturer like Chrysler.17

To restore accountability requires first understanding how we got where we are. How exactly did such principles come to be enshrined as central to our national security consensus? Answering this question requires reassessing—and reframing—the narrative of contemporary U.S. history.

The standard story line, promulgated by journalists and indulged by scholars, depicts that history as a succession of presidential administrations. The occupant of the White House defines the age. The inauguration of a new chief executive wipes the slate clean. Each new president starts anew and puts his personal stamp on all that follows. So the period from 1945 to 1952 becomes the Truman era. The Eisenhower era follows, and in Eisenhower’s wake comes John F. Kennedy’s abbreviated yet perpetually mourned age of Camelot. And so on down the line until the age of Obama, informed by the conviction, proclaimed even before the last ballot had been counted, that “tonight . . . change has come to America.”

When it comes to justifying the erection of ever more lavish, self-referential postpresidential libraries, this reliance on the presidency as a vehicle for organizing U.S. history has proven eminently useful. Yet when it comes to assessing reality, slicing the past into neat four- or eight-year-long intervals conceals and distorts at least as much as it illuminates. The fact of the matter is: No president starts with a clean slate. Upon entering the Oval Office each confronts an imposing and often problematic inheritance. Constraints, some foreign, others domestic, limit his freedom of action. Struggling