The forefathers of imperialism

First Great Triumph

How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power

Warren Zimmermann

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 562 pp., $30

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Warren Zimmermann's "First Great Triumph," an account of the imperialist era in American foreign policy at the turn of the 20th century, is one of the most readable and important books on American foreign policy in recent years. Zimmermann, a distinguished U.S. diplomat who did his best to warn the world about the looming Yugoslav wars, combines formidable scholarship with a sense of narrative drama and a firsthand knowledge of the politics of American foreign policy. With Iraq, Afghanistan and a war on terror preoccupying United States foreign policy, Zimmermann's book is a timely and gripping account of another critical period in American history that leaves readers better prepared to understand the dangers that face us.

Zimmermann's basic approach to his material is reminiscent of the way African gamekeepers have identified a "big five" group of animals for tourists to look out for on safari (the big five are lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos and buffalo). Zimmermann's big five are the men who made America an imperial power 100 years ago.

Leading his group is Theodore Roosevelt, who shot and stuffed many specimens of the African big five and is one of the most famous figures in American history. The other four, though somewhat less well known, all played key roles in American and world history.

Henry Cabot Lodge, who defeated Woodrow Wilson and blocked Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles to keep America out of the League of Nations, is shown rising from a young Boston politician to a national leader of the imperialist movement. The group also includes John Hay, Abraham Lincoln's confidential assistant and later ambassador to Britain and secretary of State, and Elihu Root, the New York lawyer who succeeded Hay as secretary of State and later helped to start the Carnegie Endowment and the Council on Foreign Relations. In highlighting Root's role, Zimmermann does justice to an important historical figure who is almost entirely forgotten by nonspecialists today. The final place in this core group belongs to Rear Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose 1890 book, "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783," is the most important work of strategic thought ever written by an American.