Gina M. Bennett, National Security Mom: Why "Going Soft" Will Make America Strong (Deadwood, OR: Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2008), 180 pp., $24.00.
Peggy Noonan, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (New York: Collins, 2008), 208 pp., $19.95.
A long time from now people will probably look back upon our era as one of the few great turning points-and perhaps the greatest turning point-in history. They will perhaps look at it as the age when the human race rescued itself from collective madness and self-destruction by the skin of its teeth. How? By woman power, entering into all its affairs, its concerns, its ideas, in entirely new ways.
-Konrad Kellen, The Coming Age of Woman Power
KONRAD KELLEN got it right most of the time. He left Germany in 1933-immediately upon Hitler's appointment as chancellor and, by emigrating to the United States, avoided the terrible fate of European Jewry under Nazi rule. Three decades later as a counterinsurgency analyst at the Santa Monica, California, headquarters of the RAND Corporation, assessing Vietcong morale and motivation, he was among the first to conclude-in 1965-that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Kellen went on to become among the most astute analysts of terrorism, and the reports that he wrote for RAND's U.S. government clients in the late 1970s and early 1980s identified trends that we see clearly manifested today. Yet, as the above quote suggests, his 1972 book heralding a new era of peace and prosperity, unparalleled human and scientific development, and the various other benefits that a world soon to be led and governed by women would surely entail, proved to be one of the few monumental trends of the twentieth century that he got completely, totally and utterly wrong.
