The year was 1955, the dawn of the cold war, and an old prophet was writing what would be his last book. It was a volume of history – The American Story, he called it – in which he reviewed the cavalcade of twists and turns that had brought us to that moment when we stood “at the top of the world, “ as he put it. There was no terrorist threat back then – not counting the threat of global annihilation that hung over us during those years of “duck and cover” and backyard bomb shelters. Yet Garet Garrett– a former editor of the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post, an Old Right “isolationist” who lived in exile on a New Jersey farm – foresaw our present age, and what we would become:
"How, now, thou American, frustrated crusader, do you know where you are?
"Is it security you want? There is no security at the top of the world.
"To thine own self a liberator, to the world an alarming portent, do you know where you are going from here?"
Garrett knew where we were going, and we are living that reality today, sixty years after he wrote those words.
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