The path of America’s rise to global dominance has always attracted the at- tention of distinguished historians and political scientists, ranging from Henry Adams to Walter LaFeber to Stephen E. Ambrose. Warren Zimmermann, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Foreign Service, joins the fray with First Great Triumph, a provocative analysis of the “fathers of American imperialism” at the onset of the twentieth century. Zimmermann examines how President Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, Secretary of State John Hay, and Secretary of War Elihu Root engineered American imperial expan- sion in the decade from 1898 to 1908
