He first steps into the American narrative not as a veteran of a field but as a boy of a household calibrated to history. He watches Bunker Hill’s smoke from the ridge near his father’s farm and feels the country’s lungs fill with a new kind of breath. Before he is old enough to vote he is old enough to leave, ferrying across the Atlantic with a diplomat-father who teaches him that patriotism sometimes looks like dispatches copied by candlelight and sums added carefully at the bottom of each page. Paris, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg—he gathers a grammar of power the way other boys gather heroes, learning that courts conceal boredom inside ceremony, that bankers speak a dialect of caution the bold must learn to translate, that treaties are machines for converting appetite into rules. He keeps a diary because he suspects that the only witness who will ...