You might enjoy Noemie Emery’s new piece in The Weekly Standard — comparing today’s “liberal hawks” to the most widely respected liberal hawk of the 20th century: Harry Truman.
Emery doesn’t find much to praise in the current batch:
Their evocations of these people feel and sound hollow–they may like the idea of FDR, JFK, and Harry, but one feels the real men would unnerve them. They are right to look to Truman for a way out of their malaise and their quandary, but the Truman they create is part of the problem: soft-power Harry, Humility Harry, with none of the iron that he had in real life. They don’t like the real Harry–the one of Japan and Korea–and they don’t like his real traits, when they see them in others, like George W. Bush. This is their flaw, and their evasions won’t help them. When they own and admit the genuine Harry, people will trust them with power again.
