EVAN THOMAS

If war is hell, then why do we seem to love it? The bands play on, the soldiers march off—young men to test their courage, sent by old men, many of whom have never seen war. Wars rarely turn out the way we want them to, yet we keep having them, sometimes for good and necessary reasons, more often not.

In 2006, when I was finishing “Sea of Thunder”, about the last great naval battle of World War II, I began thinking about the nature of war fever. The Iraq War was entering its third year, and I was wondering how so many journalists (including me, in my role at Newsweek) got swept up in it. I began looking for a narrative that would capture this eternal phenomenon, and I found my story in the experiences of three war lovers over a century ago—Theodore Roosevelt, seeking glory with his Rough Riders; his friend and colleague, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge; and William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher who believed he could single-handedly start a war. With them on stage is a kind of Greek chorus, the philosopher William James and Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House, a fascinating and tragic figure who saw war coming and tried to stop it.

The story begins in 1895, just as America is starting to forget the Civil War and to dream of empire abroad.

—Evan Thomas, March 2010