The collapse of America’s standing in world opinion over the past eight years has been catastrophic. With wit, brilliance, and deep affection, Ted Widmer, scholar and former speechwriter for President Clinton, reminds everyone why America had so far to fall. In a sweeping history of centuries, Ark of the Liberties recounts America’s ambition to be the world’s guarantor of liberty. It is a success story that America, and the world, forgets at its peril.

From the Declaration of Independence to the Gettysburg Address to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, America, for all its shortfalls, has been the world’s greatest advocate for freedom. The founding generation imbued America with an ambition that a series of remarkable presidents, primarily Wilson to FDR to Clinton, wielded American power to advance. Ark of the Liberties brims with new insights: America’s centuries-long favorable relationship with the Middle East; why Wilson’s presidency deserves reappraisal; Bill Clinton’s underappreciated achievements; how America’s long history of foreign policy immediately touches on the choices we face in 2008. Fully addressing America’s disastrous occupation of Iraq, Ark of the Liberties colorfully narrates America’s long, complex, and laudatory history of expanding world liberty.