by Ted Widmer.

Hill and Wang. 355 pages. $24.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

This is a rollicking and exuberantly sweeping overview of American history by Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown and foreign-policy speechwriter for the Clinton White House from 1997 to 2001. He takes seriously America’s mythic symbolism as an exceptional country, founded on beliefs in liberty and freedom, which have vastly expanded over the years but still underscore a valiant and courageous pursuit.

His ark is Melville’s from the novel White-Jacket: “And we Americans are the peculiar chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”

Widmer’s heroes, Woodrow Wilson and FDR, took this pursuit and globalized it, offering up liberation for all mankind against every tyranny imaginable — fascist, communist, Islamic, monarchical, hunger — and setting out to accomplish great feats in a journey that can never be completed.

Much of this stems from America’s apocalyptic and evangelical imagination, often linked to millennial messianic missions. The downside conjures up the end of time and demonic destruction, but the barbaric yawps that trumpet progress, often daunted, renew their vigor and offer the rest of the world sanctuary, freedom and peace.

This is fine — as far as it goes. While Widmer clearly recognizes “the disconnect between the ways Americans talk about the world, and the way that they truly enter into it,” and while he understands that liberty has often been “the watchword draped over American aggression,” he nevertheless gets caught up in his own rhetoric, plays to the very millennial hopes he criticizes, tells us it’s always darkest before dawn, and that “the ark of liberties has shown a consistent ability to right its course.”

This is a “yes, but” look at our history. Yes, our CIA has committed atrocities, yes there was McCarthy and Nixon and Bush II and paranoia and jingoism and Manifest Destiny — but the dream remains alive and well. I wish I had his faith.

Perhaps because of his own presidential speechwriting and his research in the genre — his most recent previous book was American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton (Library of America, 2006) — Widmer relies on presidents’ speeches as indications of what’s going on. That strikes me as a bit naïve, and it often leads him to confuse rhetorical and oratorical excess with historical events. Words and ideas do matter, but they may also prove to be icing on a poisoned cake.

His book is filled with superb anecdotes — Calvin Coolidge allowed only one Democrat on Mount Rushmore, Jefferson; “North Vietnam will never beat us,” uttered Robert McNamara. “They can’t even make ice cubes”; “filibuster” is an old French word for pirate, and “penguin” is Welch. . . . But it still reads like a pep talk.

At one point he sets up another of his simplistic polarities between idealists and realists. “Idealism is realism,” he insists, “if the willpower exists to make it so — especially in a nation whose interests and ideals are nearly one and the same.” But on the previous page he comments, “Idealism . . . ceases to be idealistic the second that human beings decide to make it real.”

I love his gusto and optimism, but I shudder when mythic longings “replace” historical consequences. ARK OF THE LIBERTIES: America and the World,

samcoale@cox.net