In September 1970, a month that came to be known as Black September, terrorists belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) simultaneously hijacked three passenger jets bound for the United States in the skies over Europe. Alert air marshals prevented them from hijacking a fourth. Several days later, terrorists from the PFLP hijacked another jet. They flew the jets to a remote airfield in Jordan and held more than three hundred passengers hostage and issued a series of demands for the release of their comrades. The terrorists did not physically harm the hostages, or even threaten...

In the spring of 1967, Lyndon Johnson was agonizing over the escalating war in South East Asia. It had been nearly two years since he announced the fateful decision to commit U.S. combat forces in South Vietnam in order to defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas fighting to liberate South Vietnam and unify it with the Communist North. Johnson, who had assumed office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and went on to a landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election, saw his presidency destroyed by an intractable guerrilla war in the jungles of Vietnam. But by the...

The year 1972 was an election year in the United States. Richard Nixon, who had come into office in 1969 amid mounting protests against the interminable war in Vietnam, already the longest in U.S. history, was seeking a second term. Nixon’s foreign policy agenda was ambitious. Henry Kissinger, who would become both national security advisor and secretary of state in the second Nixon administration, was simultaneously pursuing détente with the Soviet Union, making overtures to the People’s Republic of China, and negotiating the extrication from Vietnam. But by the time Nixon and Kissinger negotiated “peace with honor” in the Paris...

The year 1972 was a year of terrible violence; 1973 would be worse. The year began triumphantly for Richard Nixon, who took the oath of office for a second time in January. The electoral returns the previous November seemed to vindicate the career of one of the more controversial politicians in recent decades. Within days of his second inauguration, Nixon addressed the nation to announce that Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese envoy, had initialed the Paris Peace Accords, which ended the Vietnam War and earned the two men the Nobel Prize for Peace. But 1973 would...

The year 1974 began with the Nixon administration in the throes of the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s abuse of power, coming when American society was already torn by the Vietnam conflict, shook American confidence in the integrity of government. Nixon resigned office on 9 August 1974, leaving Gerald Ford the daunting challenge of restoring the presidency and healing a nation. To ensure continuity, Ford asked Henry Kissinger to stay on as secretary of state and encouraged him to continue his efforts to forge a peace in the Middle East compatible with United States geopolitical interests. Kissinger brokered disengagement agreements between Israel...

In the summer of 1976, Americans celebrated two hundred years of independence, and in the fall they went to the polls to elect the nation’s thirty-ninth president. It was the final year of Gerald Ford’s presidency and Henry Kissinger’s dominance of U.S. foreign policy. The Ford administration could not claim any great foreign policy triumphs. The events that brought the former Representative from Michigan to Washington all but precluded that. Much of Ford’s presidency was consumed by crises whose origins could be traced to the misadventures of his predecessors. So, when Saigon fell to the communists in 1975, after a...

In January 1980, Jimmy Carter entered an electoral year and the final year of his presidency. The historic triumph at Camp David in September 1978 and the conclusion of a formal peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in March 1979 seemed to validate Carter’s foreign policy idealism after so many years of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s Cold War realpolitik. But a series of geopolitical defeats throughout 1979—the Islamic Revolution in Iran in February, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in July, the seizure of U.S. hostages in Tehran in November, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December—strangled Carter’s presidency....

Ronald Reagan began 1984 without fear that the disasters that befell the Americans in Lebanon in 1983 would ruin his chances for reelection in November. The electorate did not blame errors of presidential judgment for the bombings of the U.S. embassy in April or the slaughter of the Marines in October. More controversial were the administration’s policies in Central America, where the United States was arming the Contra rebels in Nicaragua and a brutally repressive government in El Salvador. Reagan’s Central American and Middle Eastern policies eventually collided, and much of his second term was consumed by the Iran-Contra scandal...

George Herbert Walker Bush took the oath of office in January 1989 as investigators collected the wreckage of Pan Am 103 strewn over the Scottish countryside. When he left office four years later, he could speak confidently about the advent of “a new world order freer from the threat of terror.” The archterrorists of the past had fallen into the hands of authorities or had faded into obscurity: Carlos the Jackal had fled to Khartoum, where French authorities finally arrested him in 1994; Abu Nidal descended into paranoia after murdering his primary rival in the Palestinian liberation movement just before...

In 1996 Bill Clinton became the first Democrat to win reelection since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party’s icon, earned a second term a half century earlier. Clinton’s second term would be troubled, despite his domestic and foreign policy achievements: the elimination of a crushing fiscal deficit run up by the two previous Republican administrations, the peace agreements between the Israelis and Palestinians in 1993, and a peace agreement that ended the vicious civil war in Bosnia in 1995. The Republicans, who seized control of both the House and the Senate in the 1994 midterm elections, attacked the Democratic president...

George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001 after the most controversial election in four decades. Twenty-five days before the November elections, Al Qaeda suicide bombers aboard a small skiff blasted a hole in the USS Cole in a Yemeni port, killing seventeen U.S. sailors. President Clinton, who was fixated on a final peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians in the waning days of his presidency, did not retaliate for the Cole attack because the CIA could not give him proof positive of bin Laden’s hand in it. President Bush opted not to retaliate either, or even...

President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress on the night of 20 September, 2001, as rescue workers sifted through a million tons of debris at ground zero, once the site of the World Trade Center. “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war” the president said. Bush alluded to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and like FDR, who addressed a joint session of Congress the day after the attack on the American fleet in Hawaii in 1941, Bush stated the obvious: America was at war. But, unlike FDR, he did not ask Congress to declare...