I am a successful small businessman and a patriot who loves America and always sees its greatness. I am also an optimistic, positive thinker who always sees the glass half full. - But not this time.

In the mid-1990s, when I was engaged in the research that would eventually be published early in 1997 in an article titled “Regime Uncertainty” (a modestly revised version of which appears as chapter 1 of my Depression, War, and Cold War), I had not read Raymond Moley’s book After Seven Years, published in 1939. Mea culpa. I should have read it much earlier. I am embarrassed to admit that although I purchased a copy in a used-book store many years ago, it sat on my shelf unread until recently.