On Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019, the Strauss Center and Clements Center welcome Tom Ricks, a military historian and author, to give a lecture: "Was George Washington a Strategic Genius?" Washington isn’t often considered a great general. He suffered a series of military defeats, first in the French and Indian War and then at the beginning of the American Revolution. He was the least educated of our first four presidents; one of his Cabinet members considered him semi-literate. He never learned a foreign language or traveled to Europe.
Yet he excelled at learning by experience. And in the first three years of the Revolution, he made a remarkable series of adjustments in the way he fought that war. Ricks argues that if the ability to change in response to events and circumstances is the measure of a general, then Washington was one of our best ever.
Ricks is currently the military history columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and has also written on defense matters in Atlantic Monthly and other publications. He has written six books, the best known of which is Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003–05 (2006), which was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2007. His most recent book, and his fourth consecutive New York Times best-seller, is Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (May 2017).
Ricks is currently a visiting fellow in history at Bowdoin College. As a journalist, Ricks wrote about military affairs for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, reporting from such places as Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. On both papers he was part of reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes.