426 notes to pages 347‒358
- Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). - Although wars have put an end to liberal presidents’ eff orts to expand the
federal government, some groups have received expanded social benefi ts
as a reward for their wartime sacrifi ces. Near the end of the Second World
War, Congress approved the GI Bill of Rights, a package of education and
housing benefi ts for those who served in the armed forces. As I noted, the
British response to popular demands for increased social benefi ts covered
the entire population, but the British people as a whole had suff ered
far more and for far longer than Americans had. Sometimes Americans
who did not serve in uniform have pressed a claim that their wartime
contributions be recognized. Women parlayed their eff orts on behalf of
mobilization in the First World War into approval of the constitutional
amendment that granted them the right to vote. So long as the United
States fi ghts wars with a professional military and no broad social mobi-
lization, however, it is unlikely that any other group will be able to build
on the idea of wartime sacrifi ce as the basis for receiving social benefi ts. - Rose, How Wars End , 284–85.
- John F. Kennedy popularized this phrase after the Bay of Pigs fi asco in
1961, but the quote has been attributed to several earlier public fi gures.