Abraham Lincoln had a ready rejoinder for wartime critics who accused him of shredding the Constitution. To the contrary, said Lincoln; confronted with domestic rebellion he was willing to temporarily suspend part of the nation’s organic law in order to preserve the entirety, and the nation with it. "Often a limb must be amputated to save a life," he observed drolly, "but a life is never wisely given to save a limb." Lincoln’s pithy logic recurred to me while reading America First, H.W. Brands’s timely reassessment of the fierce debates preceding Pearl Harbor and the United States’ formal entry into World War II.
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