I will order these books today.....(NYT reviews of "15 Stars" and "Partners in Command").

[Aviation Pro]

....and make copious notes in the margins.

Not the President’s Men
By MICHAEL BESCHLOSS

Every American generation looks at history through the lens of its own preoccupations. If a book on those towering World War II generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur had been published in the late 1960s or early ’70s, at the zenith of anti-Vietnam War sentiment, many readers would have found it (in a catchphrase of the time) “not relevant.”

Some of the most vehement doves might have complained that a book hailing our involvement in World War II — or any war — was a malign gift to the hawks. Hadn’t Lyndon Johnson defended his Vietnam escalation by insisting that he didn’t want another Munich?

Had such a book been issued in the 1990s, at the peak of a World War II craze that embraced Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” and, later, “Band of Brothers” on HBO, it would have been a stirring reminder of how military leaders of unquestioned character led a united country against the armies of unimaginable evil.

How about now? Well, it would be difficult for even the most nonpolitical reader to scan more than a few pages of Stanley Weintraub’s “15 Stars” or Mark Perry’s “Partners in Command” without grimly noting the gargantuan difference between those sunlit accounts of our World War II commanders and the more troubling reports about the United States generals in the Iraq war.