Making war

Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman here confronts one of the momentous issues of American history and the American present--the contending prerogatives of the president and Congress in making war. Lehman, a lively controversialist and scholar, examines the history of American military decision making from the Revolutionary period to the Gulf War. Whose power is it to declare war, to carry it out, and to sustain its course and bring it to an end? In addressing these major constitutional questions, Lehman is vibrantly contemporary, too, writing as a government insider to offer a…