Rick Atkinson is a former

Rick Atkinson is a former Washington Post reporter and the author of an absolutely riveting book on the West Point class of 1966, The Long Gray Line. (Among other things, that book unforgettably recounts the sickening, unavenged murder of Captain Arthur Bonifas, of the class of ’66, by North Korean goons in August 1976.) He is now writing military history full time, and has a new book (the first of two) on the American war against the Germans in WWII. Our friends at RealClearPolitics have posted a fascinating excerpt from the new book that appears in this week’s US News & World Report, “Ike’s Dark Days: How an unlikely leader taught an unprepared army to fight.”
One other piece that is particularly worthy of your attention this morning is an extraordinarily thoughtful column on the difficult statesmanship of pre-emption that appears in this morning’s Washington Times. In “Pre-emption and post-analysis,” security analyst David Isby takes as the starting point for his discussion Winston Churchill’s decision to attack the French naval fleet in 1940.