President Eisenhower's 1953 Cross of Iron speech is often not recalled. The former general said: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all." Two decades earlier, Smedley Butler, another general, not as well known, put it succinctly: "War is a racket. It always has been. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." Today Washington, the global policeman, is in a long war with no end in sight.

Tom Hayden has been involved in many of America's social movements for decades. He was the main author of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society, the campus-based, activist movement. He went from street protests and being indicted by the Nixon Administration to holding office in Sacramento. He served eighteen years in the California State Assembly and State Senate. Among his many books are Voices of the Chicago Eight, Writings for a Democratic Society, and The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama.