The 12 Year Itch

摘要

Dick Cheney likes to read history, especially military history. He disappears into his well-stocked library at the vice president's mansion for hours at a time, reading about Churchill and World War Ⅱ or other war leaders in other crises down through the ages. Last fall, the vice president read "An Autumn of War" by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist who lives on a farm in California. In his book, a collection of columns published online by National Review in the weeks after 9-11, Hanson writes that war is the natural state of mankind. Great leaders understand this, according to Hanson. They are not fooled by Utopian visions about world peace; they face evil and deal with it. Cheney told his aides that Hanson's book reflected his philosophy.