Publisher's Synopsis
"The struggle to preserve the Republic has never been easy or without perils. The rise of conflicting political parties, which the founders opposed, and President John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts repressing First Amendment rights made Franklin's observation at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention - "a republic, if you can keep it" - seem prescient. In the twentieth century, America endured numerous struggles : economic depression, World War II, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the war in Iraq - all of which gave rise to demagogues, as did the growth and reach of mass media. But this wasn't the Founding Fathers' vision for our leadership. The resistance to putting a demagogue in the White House survived the anti-Communist agitation of the 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s. But the latter opened the way for Richard Nixon's election in 1968 and Watergate, which again tested our democratic
