H r mcmaster biography of barack
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Online Book Event: H.R. McMaster: Battlegrounds
Seth Center: Welcome, everybody, to CSIS this afternoon, or whatever time it might be in whatever Zoom-land you’re in. My name is Seth Center. I’m the director of the Project on History and Strategy here today. And I’m really thrilled that everyone’s with us, and I’m thrilled that we’re joined by H.R. McMaster. I have to say, it was a big bummer to work for you. I had spent my career trying to get to the NSC as NSC historian, and then I got to the pinnacle of my career and my boss’s boss was a historian, and a better historian than me. And so, you know, I don’t think I had anything to help you with, and I’m just glad that you didn’t kick me out on day one.
I will say, I learned some pretty important lessons H.R. McMaster when he was national security advisor. I learned how to approach strategy, frame problems, define clear objectives, use history to inform and understand current challenges. Probably the most important thing I learned was the importance of integrity and leadership in an organization, the way in which confidence and vision play out, and the power of character to change an organization overnight.
I think those are all important lessons. And I think what’s most striking is what many of us witnessed serving
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A refreshingly honest take on the American presidency
I generally read books that I expect to enjoy. But based on reviews I had seen, I was prepared to be more frustrated than fascinated by Robert Gordon’s new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered how much I liked it.
Most reviews have focused on the “fall” indicated in the title: the last hundred pages or so, in which Gordon predicts that the future won’t live up to the past in terms of economic growth. I strongly disagree with him on that point, as I discuss below. But I did find his historical analysis, which makes up the bulk of the book, utterly fascinating. (And, at 743 pages, the book has a lot of bulk. Gordon’s two-part piece in Bloomberg View is a helpful summary for anyone who won’t get through the whole thing.)
Gordon paints a vivid picture of the years between 1870 and 1970, a century of unprecedented growth in the United States. This was the century that brought us the great inventions that fundamentally changed our standard of living—inventions like the electrical grid, indoor plumbing, automobiles, and antibiotics.
Gordon does a phenomenal job illustrating just how different life was in 1870 than it was in 1970, through both an economic analysis and en