In the Depression summer of 1932, some 45,000 veterans of World War I descended on Washington to demand the bonus promised them eight years earlier for their wartime service. They lived in shantytowns, white and black together, protested and rallied for their cause. Roy Wilkins saw the model for racial integration here; J. Edgar Hoover built his reputation against the radicals. President Hoover, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, and others feared...

"In September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and initiated World War II, a strong strain of isolationism existed in Congress and across the country. The U.S. Army stood at fewer than 200,000 men--unprepared to defend the country, much less carry the fight to Europe and the Far East. And yet, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the American army led the Allied invasion of North Africa, beginning the campaign that would defeat Germany, and...