A quick walk around our hometown of Annapolis, and a preview of the Veterans Day video we're filming next month. In 1865, President Lincoln told the families of missing soldiers to write to Clara Barton: "Please address her at Annapolis." Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RtVdISTofJE Read the full story: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/please-address-her-at-annapolis

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Tonight, somewhere along the Florida Panhandle, a man in a bucket truck is eating a gas-station sandwich and waiting for the wind to quit. When Isaias moves through, he’ll go up the pole. In the dark. In the rain. Nobody will interview him.

I’ve been thinking about him all day.

Jeff Steinberg and I sat down Friday afternoon, a few hours before landfall, to walk through the week. A hurricane in the Gulf. A contested strait...

A war decision, a Russian budget, and a record at the pump. And why we think knowing about them early is worth something.

Nine days ago we told you the President said he was in deciding mode on Iran.

He decided. On Friday the twenty-sixth he turned down Iran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days. His words: I would like to make a deal, too, but that deal would not be acceptable.

Two days before that, the Senat...

1.2 million Americans. Forty-seven days. The end of the First World War — and a commander carrying a private grief almost no one knows about. Our conversation with Dr. Mitch Yockelson.

One afternoon in 1915, a general in El Paso grew tired of a telephone that wouldn’t stop ringing, picked it up, and barked “Hello” into it. The reporter on the other end went quiet, then asked him to confirm the fire at his hom...

Our apologies--we posted this, but just realized we failed to publish it.  It's live now.

A plain look at how decisions made in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Washington end up on your grocery receipt.

Most weeks the news goes by like traffic. A headline crosses a screen, somebody argues about it for six minutes, and we go back to work.

This week will not go by like that.

In Moscow, the polls closed Sunday night on Russia&rs...

At 8:46 this morning a bell rings in lower Manhattan and somebody starts reading names. It takes most of four hours to get through them. They’ve done this every year for twenty-five years, and every year there are fewer people standing there who remember the sound the first one made.

Twenty-five years ago at 8:46, my brother was at his desk in the White House, finishing a memo. He thought the memo was going to be the most impo...

This is Part 1 of a two-part interview with my brother, Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel, U.S. Army, Retired. We called it “Before the Day” on purpose.

Catastrophe has a way of making everything that preceded it look obvious. Once you know what happened, the warnings get louder and the missed chances get bigger, and the people who were there start to look like they should have seen it. But the people inside the national...

Here’s a fact I did not know until last Thursday night: in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, a foreign navy sailed into New York and San Francisco carrying sealed orders. Those orders, if opened, would have placed the entire fleet under the command of Abraham Lincoln.

It was front-page news in every major paper on both coasts. Then it vanished from the story we tell ourselves about the war.

That’s one of perhaps a doz...

Scaffolding Without a Building

Happy Labor Day! If you build things, teach kids, drive trucks, grow food, patch people up, write code, stand a post — today is yours. This show, and this page, exist for one reason: because every headline we cover eventually lands on the people who get up and do the work. Today we say it plainly. Thank you.

The gas under your road trip today is the most expensive Labor Day fuel ever recor...

Ben Zweibelson was the kid in high school who was always drawing. Then his father died, the money ran out, and a National Guard recruiter at a Connecticut county fair offered him a way to pay for college. He took it — and he stayed for twenty-two years, four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, four Bronze Stars, and the Ranger tab. Along the way the Army also gave him three master's degrees and, on the GI Bill, a doctorate ...

We Weren't There

Eighty-one years ago this month, a young colonel named Paul Tibbets took off from a small island in the Pacific, in a bomber he'd named after his mother, and dropped the first atomic weapon ever used in war. Three days later, another crew did it again over Nagasaki. And the deadliest war in human history came to an end.

I always thought I understood that decision: whether we should have used the bomb. I've heard the ...

The War Moved Closer

For the past two weeks, no American bombs have fallen on Iran.

And yet the consequences of the war have kept moving.

Fewer ships are moving through the Strait of Hormuz, but the effects are traveling far beyond it. They’re beginning to register in fuel prices, shipping and insurance costs, the jobs market, fertilizer supplies, food prices, and even the holiday merchandise being ordered now f...

A war can be thousands of miles away right up until your water stops running.

This week on The Heroes’ Path Dispatch, Jeff Steinberg and I talk Iran, oil, cyberattacks, NATO, Ebola, the Colorado River, and one rocket that finally stopped exploding long enough to do its job.

Different stories. Same question:

How much strain can a system take before ordinary people get the bill?

Watch this week's Her...

Ten Nights

The war came home this week — to three American families, to the sign at your corner gas station, and to a promise the republic made 250 years ago.

There’s a gas station at the edge of my town where the price has become a kind of national instrument panel. Ten days ago it read $3.84 and falling, and negotiators were landing in Oman with a flicker of hope. This week it clicked well past $4.00. That four-dollar s...

The kid who works the counter in our neighborhood gas station spent part of his week on a ladder, pulling numbers off the price board and hanging higher ones. He hung those numbers because Iranian missiles hit oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, seven thousand miles from his ladder. Within hours of the first strike, oil rose six percent. By the weekend the increase reached his pumps, on our street in Annapolis, and your checkbook.

...

This week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch, made especially for our paid subscribers. Pour a coffee. It runs about 30 minutes, and with Jeff' Steinberg’s insights, I think it’s worth every one of them.

When I was 13, my mother took us to see the Freedom Train. Maybe you remember it. It rolled through the country for the bicentennial carrying Lincoln’s top hat and Wilt Chamberlain’s shoes, which were roughl...

What are we actually celebrating this week?

I sat down with Michael Shriver to talk about the founding and the American habit of giving, and how closely the two run together. Mike spent forty-five years around other people's money, raising it early in his career, then giving it away as a foundation executive at MBNA and Bank of America. These days he rebuilds old bicycles in his garage and hands them to people getting back o...

In a small room in Oxford, Florida, a man holds up a brass shell. It stands three feet tall and weighs forty-five pounds.

He had it remade after the war. He pays to haul it from school to school and hall to hall, because when he tells people what he fired at German planes from a ten-thousand-pound gun, they don't believe him. A few veterans, he says, are all liars. So he brings the proof and sets it on the table.

That man is Irving L...

Heroes’ Path is about clarity: about ourselves, our road ahead, and the world around us.

Today we’re launching The Heroes’ Path Dispatch, the first in an ongoing series designed to make sense of the events shaping our lives, our families, and our future.

In this first episode, Professor Jeff Steinberg joins me to unpack Iran, gas prices, China’s rare earth leverage, and the war in Ukraine.

The war may be quiete...