Wartime leaders need to carry their armies and sometimes their nations through trying ordeals. Accordingly, there are occasions that call for effective rhetoric. This section consists of fourteen speeches during wartime or in the face of impending war. The speakers include Shakespeares Henry V, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Duff Cooper, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush.

For much of the decade prior to 1940, Churchill was out of office and often seen as a warmonger. He saw appeasement as a policy not befitting a country of Britain’s standing that failed to take account of innate German militarism. One of his most effective tactics in opposing it was his evocative use of history, drawing parallels between his own life and that of his eighteenth-century ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. To Churchill, the British government’s dealings with Gandhi and the Congress Party were also a form of appeasement. There was a paradox in his thinking; that the forms of nationalism that bolstered British international power were legitimate, while those that did not were not. Churchill’s opposition to Hitler was based on his own first-hand experiences while researching his Marlborough biography and on his reading of the German ‘mental map’. The chapter traces his evolving response from the German occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 through to the Munich Crisis of 1938 and beyond. It ends by analysing Churchill’s path to power as prime minister, suggesting that far from being a triumph of opportunity, there were simply no other suitable candidates for the post.

Chapter 5 investigates my counter-example, the rogue diplomat whose indiscipline harmed U.S. interests. Joseph P. Kennedy, a contributor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1932 and 1936 election campaigns, demanded Embassy London as a reward, and FDR obliged. Upon arriving in Britain, Kennedy concluded that Adolf Hitler's Wermacht was invincible, that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's strategy of appeasement was correct, and that America had to remain neutral. Kennedy repeatedly misrepresented the Roosevelt administration's anti-fascist policy. Whereas FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were endeavoring to bring American--and world - opinion around to a posture of resistance to Hitler, Kennedy proclaimed that America had no stake in the conflict and that, moreover, he expected Germany to win any war that might break out. No matter how often FDR ordered Kennedy to hold his tongue, he would not comply. Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland horrified the ambassador, who forecast an end to democracy in Europe and America. At the close of Kennedy's thousand days in London, Anglo-American relations were in tatters and Britain stood alone against the Nazi juggernaut. Few did more than Kennedy to bring about this hideous state of affairs.