Disdain for the new president was palpable within the political, intellectual, and social establishment. Many members of his own Republican Party found his ascendancy horrifying with the party chairman renouncing “that damned cowboy in the White House.” Newspapers censured him…

In his 1994 book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger wrote about the two dominant strains of American foreign policy: realism as practiced by President Theodore Roosevelt and crusading democratism as practiced by President Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt, Kissinger noted, “defined America’s world role…