Heroes' Path Podcast

When we take leaders to Gettysburg, we don’t start them on the ridge where the generals stood. we start them in the fields, the morning after, where you can see what actually happened and who paid for it. The view from the ridge tells you who won. The view from the field tells you what it cost and what comes next.

This week’s Dispatch is the morning after.

Everyone already knows the score. Jeff Steinberg and I didn’t spend forty minutes repeating it. We walked the field instead, and a few things turned up that I haven’t seen anyone else put together.

Here’s some of what you’ll hear.

• Everybody has a theory about why Tuesday went the way it did. Jeff thinks most of them are wrong, and he says why.
• Two hours before we went on the air, Jeff got word of a staff change at the White House. He thinks it matters more than the election. So do I.
• Oil fell nine percent in one day. Your heating bill didn’t. We explain the gap.
• The First Lady got the credit for a ceasefire in Ukraine. She had help, and I didn’t know from whom until Jeff told me.
• Jeff heard a story from inside Russia about what the war has done to its young men. I’m still thinking about it.
• Something is scheduled in Jerusalem this Sunday that could finally end Netanyahu’s run. People have said that before.
• And I make a call on the next two years in Washington. It isn’t a quiet one.

We also did something most commentators avoid. We went back through every episode and graded ourselves, right calls and wrong ones. The results are in the video, along with the confession of a lifelong Yankees fan.

If you’ve ever finished the news feeling like you heard a lot and learned very little, give us forty minutes. We try to end every story with what it means for you, and this week that list is longer than usual.

Two Invitations Before You Go.

Tomorrow evening, Colonel Gerry Tertychny leads a Heroes’ Path webinar on Yorktown, the campaign that turned a losing war around in a single season.

Heroes’ Path webinar on Yorktown

Register (free) for the live webinar here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Wec_VFwxSlaiqZwS649ffQ

Saturday, November 7, 2026 · 7:00 PM ET · Live on Zoom, with audience Q&A. Registrants get the recording afterward.

And next Friday we open a new series on the assassination of President Kennedy, with guests who have spent decades on the evidence.

JFK Assassination webinar #1

Reserve a seat (free): 

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cdKNEsUPQMKvg6yapqI_Rg

Friday, November 13, 2026 · 8:00 PM ET · Live on Zoom, with audience Q&A.

Watch the full episode. Then go find a veteran and say thank you before Wednesday.

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This week a group of Marines at Camp Lejeune ran two hundred forty-one miles. Not a marathon. A relay, for two days and two nights, one mile for each American killed in the barracks at Beirut airport on October 23, 1983. Nobody paid them to do it. Nobody filmed a commercial. They just ran, in the dark, in the rain, one man handing off to the next, until they got to the memorial on Friday morning at ten-thirty.

Jeff Steinberg and I recorded this week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch about an hour before that service began. We opened with Beirut and we closed with it. Everything in between turned out to be connected to it, which I did not entirely plan.

The episode runs about twenty-nine minutes. This week it’s on video too, so you can see the faces along with the voices. Here’s some of what’s in it. I left most of the good parts where they belong.

We Owed Jeff One

Two weeks ago Jeff said on the air that the President had cut a deal with Putin for Russian diesel. Afterward I wrote that we couldn’t confirm it.

It was true.

So the first thing we did this week was say so. I’ve spent a lot of my life around people who would rather walk through a minefield than admit they were wrong. I’d rather admit it. It’s faster, and the minefield is still there either way.

Here’s what the deal actually means for your truck stop, in one sentence: Russian diesel isn’t coming to the sign down the road, and the price went back up after the deal anyway. What it does mean, and who Jeff thinks it’s really for, is on the episode. He doesn’t pull punches.

The Thing Nobody Puts Together

Jeff said something this week I keep thinking about. The news splits these wars into separate stories: Iran here, Ukraine there, Ebola over in the corner. They aren’t separate. He laid out how they connect, including a summit proposed for next month in China that would settle Ukraine’s future without Ukraine in the room.

There’s a word for this, and we used it in an earlier episode. Polycrisis. It sounds like something a consultant invented to bill more hours. It’s really just the weather we’re living in now.

Inside the Wall

Two weeks ago I said the thermometer at the airport is a sieve and the hospital is the wall. Then three health workers at Nairobi Hospital caught Ebola from the first patient, along with the man who washed his linens and his dishes.

So I took the line back on the air. The risk to you is still low. That’s the CDC’s word this week. But if somebody in your family travels through Nairobi, Addis Ababa or Abuja this fall, there’s one thing you should know to do. It’s in the episode. It takes ten seconds to explain.

Ten Special Forces Warrant Officers

On October 2, at Fort Bragg, ten Special Forces warrant officers graduated as the first robotics technicians in the history of the Army. The job didn’t exist until the day before. Part of their field training happens at Camp Mackall, which I commanded a long time ago, back when it was a lot smaller and the coffee was worse.

When the Army builds a school, it’s made up its mind. If you have a kid or a grandkid who takes things apart and puts them back together, there’s now a career in uniform for exactly that. I told my own daughter, an artillery officer, something about this after I came back from Ukraine. I’ll let you hear what it was.

Jeff explained why a twelve-man team now needs its own robot builder. His answer involves mini tanks with no one inside, and it’s worth your time.

Eleven Days

We talked about the election the way we always do. Know your polling place. Know your state’s rules. If something at the polls bothers you, ask the volunteer at the table, not the internet. Those volunteers do the Lord’s work for not much more than coffee and a sticker, and they deserve our patience.

I also said something I don’t say lightly. I took an oath when I came on active duty the year after Beirut. It was to the Constitution, not to a person. Every officer who serves today took the same one. You’ll hear why I brought it up, and why I think it matters more in the weeks after November 3 than on the day itself.

Jeff covered Israel’s election next Tuesday, and something written inside Israel’s security establishment that he says has rattled people there more than any poll. You won’t read about it in most American papers.

The Kitchen Table

Gas is $4.26. Diesel is $6.28 and climbing again. The ten-year Treasury is around 5.1. Social Security went up about $75 a month, which sounds fine until you buy heating oil. Jeff thinks the next shock after fuel lands on the food aisle, right around the holidays. I hope he’s wrong. He’s been right a lot lately.

Two Hundred Forty-One

At the end we went back to Beirut. Two hundred forty-one families got a knock on the door that week in 1983. Some of those children are grandparents now. One survivor told a North Carolina TV station this week that the man who died that morning was sleeping in the cot he was supposed to be sleeping in.

Jeff told a story about what President Reagan decided afterward, and why it may hold a lesson for the next eleven days. I’m not going to tell it here. You should hear him tell it.

Watch, Listen, Join

The full Dispatch runs about twenty-nine minutes. Watch it over coffee, or listen on the drive. Somewhere in the middle my dogs tried to join the broadcast. Jeff assures me they were filtered out. I’m choosing to believe him.

If you want more detail on all of this, subscribe. And if you want to help us build Heroes’ Path, which we formally launch next month, become a paid subscriber. We have news coming soon, and the people who come in early get to hear it first.

If you know a Beirut family or a Beirut veteran, call them this weekend.

Hold your people close. Make your voice heard on the third. Thank you for walking the path.

John Fenzel

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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 half a world away. A President who put a date in writing. A man with Ebola who walked through airport screening like it wasn’t there. A room in the West Wing that only two people could enter.

And a ten-minute exercise with your Social Security statement and a pencil that could spare you a nasty surprise in 2032.

None of this is entertainment. It’s the plumbing. You won’t see most of it, but you’ll pay for all of it: at the pump, on the mortgage quote, on the heating bill this winter. The same gallon of diesel runs through Alabama and the Strait of Hormuz on its way to your driveway.

The episode runs twenty-five minutes. That’s one commute, or one load of laundry.

If you heat with oil, call your dealer this week. If you see a bucket truck on your street, wave.

Thank you for walking the path.

John Fenzel

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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 Senate voted on whether to pull American forces out of the war. It failed by one vote, forty-nine to fifty. Four Republicans voted to end it. One Democrat voted the other way. A Republican congressman has filed eight articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Defense.

And on the twenty-second, the boards outside American truck stops read six dollars and fifty-three cents for a gallon of diesel. Nobody held a press conference. The numbers changed the way numbers on those boards always change, and the drivers who saw them went inside and paid. It was the highest price for diesel ever recorded in this country.

Jeff Steinberg and I walked through all of it on this week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch. It takes about twenty minutes.

Why We Do This at All

There is an old line in the military about pressure. You do not rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training.

Most of the people who listen to this program have made a hard decision on short notice, and most of them will tell you the same thing about it afterward. The decision was not the hard part. The hard part was everything they had learned, or had not learned, before the moment arrived and stopped asking whether they were ready.

That is as true at a closing table, or in a doctor’s office, or in a voting booth, as it ever was in a hallway at three in the morning. Nobody assembles an understanding of the world in the same hour they are asked to act on it. You gather it slowly, in ordinary weeks, when nothing is at stake — and then it pays out all at once, on a day you were not planning for.

We are not going to make anyone an expert on Iran. We are trying to see to it that when something reaches your door, you have already watched it coming.

And Why Early Matters

Two weeks ago we told you a missile had struck a pipeline in the Saudi desert, and that it would arrive at your grocery store, as the price of ground beef, in the second week of October. Nobody else was covering that as a food story.

Last week we explained why the interest rate on your credit card had gone up, before the statement came that said so.

Nine days ago we gave Congo’s Ebola outbreak a full minute of a twenty-minute program, when it was a single sentence everywhere else. This week the case count passed eight thousand, and new cases have fallen by two thirds. Fifty health workers have died since May.

We also got two things wrong in those same nine days, and said so on the air before anybody asked. We blamed the wrong group for the pipeline strike — Saudi Arabia blamed Iran-backed Iraqi militias, not the Houthis. And we told you to watch for a Russian order calling up three hundred thousand men. No order has come.

We would rather hand you a correction than a reputation.

Moscow Wrote It Down

Last Monday somebody in Moscow finished a spreadsheet. It goes to the Russian parliament this week.

It puts seventeen point one trillion rubles into defense for 2027 — twenty-seven percent more than was planned, about two hundred billion dollars. Across three years, fifty trillion. On the same pages the government marks down what it expects to earn from oil and gas by one point three trillion rubles, doubles the deficit, and raises borrowing by forty-three percent.

A government will say almost anything. It only has to fund one document.

Nobody budgets fifty trillion rubles for a war they expect to end next year. Moscow wrote down, in the only document that cannot lie, that it is planning through 2029. Whether Russia is right about that is a different question, and on the program Jeff makes the case that it is not. But everything in your life this war touches — diesel, groceries, the cost of borrowing, whether somebody you love gets orders — is priced off how long people believe it lasts.

And the Money at Home

Somewhere in this country last week, a couple sat down with a lender the way couples do every week, and heard seven and a half percent. A year ago, on the same loan, they would have heard six and three-eighths. The difference is about four hundred dollars a month, every month, for thirty years.

Nobody in that room caused it. A good part of it was settled on September twenty-third, when the Treasury auctioned five-year notes and not enough buyers came. The notes sold at a worse price than the market expected, by the second-largest margin ever recorded for that maturity. By Monday the ten-year Treasury had reached its highest level since 2007.

That couple did not need to understand the auction. Three weeks of warning might have been worth four hundred dollars a month to them. Three weeks is roughly what we are offering.

The cost-of-living raise announced on October fourteenth looks like about three and a half percent, against diesel up seventy-five percent in a year and gasoline up forty-three. Meanwhile claims for unemployment are near a fifty-seven-year low. People are working. This is not a collapse. It is an economy where the work is there and the money costs more, and that is a problem a family can plan around, if somebody tells them in time.

We also cover the federal judge who ruled against the administration that appointed him, the worst measles year in this country since the disease was declared beaten here, and a rocket that reached orbit on Sunday after ten years of trying.

The Fourth Decision

Three men made large decisions this month, in rooms that none of us will ever enter. There is a fourth decision, and it belongs to us. Whether to pay attention. Whether to check a thing before repeating it. Whether to understand what is happening before somebody else tells us what to think about it.

Thirty minutes for this episode. On the drive home, on a walk, or over coffee. Then write and tell us what we missed, because people do, and we read every one of them.

One Ask

The Heroes’ Path Dispatch is free to listen to, and it will stay that way.

What is not free is the week behind it — the reading, the second and third sources, the hour it took to find out that Riyadh blamed Iraqi militias and not the Houthis, and the calls we make out loud and then grade in public whether they went our way or not. There are also the pieces we write for subscribers between episodes. Last week’s explained what the Federal Reserve had just done to the rate on your credit card, and four things worth doing about it this month, including the words to use when you call the number on the back of the card.

You will also be helping us stand up The Heroes’ Path Foundation, which we will have more to say about soon.

We’re just getting started. If this is the kind of company you want to keep on a Tuesday night, come with us.

Subscribe, so the next one reaches you without your having to look for it. Become a paid subscriber, and you make the next one possible.

— John Fenzel

his video is about Heroes' Path Dispatch (9.29.26)

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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 home in San Francisco.

He hadn’t heard. By the time he reached the house, his wife and three of his children were dead; only his young son had been carried out alive. He rode the train west sobbing the whole way, identified them at the morgue, and stood in the wreckage saying the same thing over and over. They had no chance.

His name was John J. Pershing. Three years later he would command the largest and deadliest battle the United States has ever fought — and almost no one you know can name it.

It isn’t Gettysburg, Antietam, or D-Day, or the Battle of the Bulge. It’s the Meuse-Argonne: forty-seven days in the autumn of 1918, more than a million American soldiers, over 26,000 of them killed. It broke the German army and ended the First World War at eleven o’clock on the eleventh of November. And it has slipped almost entirely out of American memory.

Pushing back against that forgetting is more or less Dr. Mitch Yockelson’s life’s work. He’s an investigative archivist at the National Archives, the author of Forty-Seven Days, and about as authoritative as it gets on Americans in the Great War. He tells it from the paper — the orders, the after-action reports, the letters home — and then he tells it through the people who were there. A few he left me thinking about:

The future of the American century was standing in those woods. A field-artillery captain named Harry Truman, firing the guns. A young tank officer named George Patton, shot on the first morning. Douglas MacArthur, going forward without a helmet. What did the Argonne make of them?

A “Lost Battalion,” cut off behind German lines and running out of everything — and the battle-pigeon that lost a leg carrying out the message that saved them. It’s still on display at the Smithsonian.

A conscientious objector, rejected twice, who walked out of that forest having captured 132 Germans.

Two New York socialites who volunteered as nurses, saw what the field hospitals held, and never made it home — for a reason that will stay with you longer than you’d like.

A second enemy, invisible, killing Americans in their own trenches faster than the Germans could.

And a young man from Baltimore — thirty minutes up the road from where we recorded this — who was killed at 10:59 on the final morning. One minute before the guns fell silent. Running at a machine-gun crew that was waving at him to stop.

Mitch answers all of it, the way only someone who has held the documents in his hands can.

He also has a theory about why the country forgot its own largest battle. I’m not going to give it away.

If you want more history told like this, subscribe — it’s free, and it’s the surest way to catch the next one. And if you’d like to help us keep making them, become a paid subscriber; that’s what keeps this going.

— John Fenzel, Heroes’ Path

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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’s parliamentary election. Western intelligence says Vladimir Putin was waiting for that moment to decide whether to call up three hundred thousand more men. In Washington, President Trump said Sunday morning that he is in “deciding mode” on Iran, four days after Iran sent ceasefire conditions through Qatar. And on Thursday, Xi Jinping arrives at the White House, the same day Iran’s president speaks at the United Nations.

Three men. Three decisions. One week.

At home, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023. The ten-year Treasury crossed five percent. Diesel set the highest price ever recorded in this country.

Jeff Steinberg and I sorted through all of it on this week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch. It takes about twenty minutes.

We don’t try to cover everything that happened in the last two weeks. Cable news and the internet will do that for you all day and all night. We look for the handful of things that will still matter a month from now, and we tell you what they cost.

Washington

We start there. A federal judge ordered thirty days’ notice before any demolition at the Kennedy Center. The Supreme Court reversed itself on mail ballots. The House voted to reclaim its war powers on Iran, then left town for seven weeks.

None of that looks dramatic. Self-government rarely does. Most days it looks like a court order, a phone call to a district office, and two thousand people who decided that something was worth a Friday evening.

Artificial Intelligence

It sounds like a story about the future. But it’s already in your mortgage quote and your car loan and the credit cards you are carrying in your wallets and purses.

The companies building it are borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to do it. That money comes from the same lenders who finance houses, cars, small businesses, and the federal debt. This week Bloomberg named that borrowing as one reason the ten-year Treasury crossed five percent.

The machines live in data centers. The loans don’t.

Iran

Most of the coverage stays on the obvious things: warships, missiles, oil, the Strait of Hormuz. Jeff and I spent some time on Iran’s borders instead. A nine-hour gun battle near Pakistan. Two clerics killed. A general strike across the Kurdish cities. Taken together, they describe a government with more trouble than it can handle.

A government in that condition makes larger mistakes. The largest one available to Tehran runs through the strait and ends at your gas pump.

Diesel

You don’t need to follow Gulf politics to understand a fuel pump.

Diesel moves tractors and trucks. Trucks move food, medicine, lumber, clothing, and nearly everything else on a store shelf. Around September twelfth, a Houthi strike knocked out Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, the line built to carry oil around the Strait of Hormuz. Wholesale diesel rose twenty-four percent in one month. The national average reached six dollars and fifty-one cents. That usually shows up as the price of ground beef within a few weeks.

Foreign policy tends to arrive looking like a household bill.

Congo

We also spent a minute on the Ebola outbreak, which has passed seven thousand four hundred cases. Fourteen hundred of them came in a single week.

Nobody in America needs to be afraid tonight. But being afraid and paying attention are two different things. A number repeated every week becomes a curve, and a curve shows you where things are headed before the headlines do. The cheapest time to notice a public-health problem is before everyone agrees it is one.

One Story

On a news feed, none of this looks related. A call-up decision in Moscow. A ceasefire offer passed through Qatar. A vote in Congress. A pipeline in the desert. An interest rate. A disease curve in Central Africa.

It’s one story. Every piece of it ends up on somebody’s table, and eventually one of them ends up on yours.

The Fourth Decision

We close the episode with one more thought.

Three powerful men will make large decisions this week in rooms most of us won’t ever see. There’s a fourth decision, and it belongs to us. Whether to pay attention. Whether to check something before we repeat it. Whether to understand what is happening before somebody tells us what to think about it. And whether to speak while the deciding is still going on.

So. Twenty well-spent minutes.

Play it on the drive home, on a walk with the dog, or over coffee. Then write and tell me what we missed.

Listen to the new Heroes’ Path Dispatch: Three Decisions, One Week, and the Price at Home.

If this was worth your time, subscribe, so the next one reaches you without your having to look for it. And if you really want to help us, become one of our paid subscribers. You’ll receive extra content that you won’t find anywhere else!

— John

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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 important thing he did that year.

This is Part 2 of my interview with my brother, Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel (USA, Ret.). Part 1 stayed in the summer of 2001 and ended when the phone on that desk rang. This one picks it up where that day began.

Michael was thirty-four, an Army major on the counterterrorism staff, the most junior man in every room he walked into that day. When the complex was evacuated, I went with everyone else. He stayed. Where he went and what he was handed over the next eighteen hours on those 18 acres is his to tell, and he tells it plainly, the way soldiers tell things they’ve decided to stop carrying alone.

We built this in two parts because September 11th was never the ending of anything. For the people in those rooms it was the first day. Everything that we now call the war on terror, the longest war this country has fought, started for Michael before lunch, and it didn’t let go of him for twenty years. Iraq. Afghanistan, three times. A battalion on the Pakistan border. A chair, near the very end, across a table from the men who had spent years trying to kill his soldiers. He was in the room on the first day and he was in the room when we tried to end it, and there aren’t many people alive who can say both.

He’s my brother, which meant I could ask him what that costs. I could ask him about the soldiers he lost, who he still thinks about every day. I could ask him what he wants his own kids to understand about that Tuesday when they’re old enough to ask, and I could sit there while he decided how to answer.

There is a story in the middle of this hour that he’s never told outside a handful of people who were in the room. I was one of them. I told him he didn’t have to. But he told it anyway.

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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 security system in the summer of 2001 were living in the present tense. They had bosses and meetings and intelligence reports and a dozen problems that looked urgent because some of them were. What they did not have was the morning of September 11, and everything that began with it.

So Michael and I spend Part 1 in that world. He talks about becoming a soldier and finding out what fear actually is, and about the strange confidence that comes from learning that panic is optional. He talks about mentors, about rooms full of very smart people, and about what it takes to move a room when nobody in it works for you. He talks about the difference between having authority and having credibility, and about a threat that was visible and serious and still very hard to turn into action.

He’s my brother, which changes an interview. I suppose there were questions I could ask that another interviewer would never think of, and answers I understood before he finished them. The conversation wanders into our parents, football, old commanders, and the plain fact that two brothers once walked into the White House every morning convinced they were already having the most remarkable professional experience of their lives. But they had no idea what was coming. Nobody did.

Part 1 ends when the phone on his desk rings the morning of September 11, 2001. I’m going to leave that account to him.

Part 2 comes out tomorrow, Friday, September 11. It goes where you think it goes and then keeps going, through Iraq and Afghanistan and a story Michael has never told outside the handful of people who were in the room. He’s been carrying it for twenty-five years. So have I.

There’s a reason we waited twenty-five years to have this conversation.

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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 dozen moments in this session where I found myself saying, out loud, “I had no idea.” If you’ve followed the first two parts of Jeff Steinberg’s series, you know that’s the whole point. Jeff goes past the textbook version and into the letters, the reports, the newspaper archives, and comes back with something richer and stranger every time.

Part III is the strongest yet. It’s also the one with the hardest lesson.

A war on two fronts

We think of the Civil War as North versus South. Jeff makes the case that it was something bigger: the third and final war for American independence. While the armies fought in Virginia and along the Mississippi, a second, quieter war was being waged across the Atlantic, where Britain and France were actively looking for a pretext to break the Union apart and reclaim a foothold in North America.

The Union’s answer was a spy network run out of embassies in London, Liverpool, Brussels, and St. Petersburg, staffed by diplomats who were not really diplomats. On the other side, the Confederacy’s man in London was running a shadow navy out of British shipyards. His name will surprise you. So will his nephew’s.

I won’t spoil how the European front was won. But it involved an abolitionist ambassador, a Russian tsar, and a conversation that may have shaped the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The First All-Source Intelligence Organization in American History

Back home, the early war went badly, and Jeff is unsparing about why. The Union commander was relying on a private contractor for his intelligence, and that contractor kept telling him what he wanted to hear. Opportunities to end the war early were thrown away on the basis of enemy troop counts that were pure fiction.

What replaced that was built by a New York lawyer almost nobody has heard of. In a matter of months he assembled scouts, cavalry, balloons, signal corps, systematic prisoner debriefings, and a small team of analysts cross-checking every source against every other. It was the first time an American army could truly see the battlefield in front of it, and Jeff walks through exactly how that edge decided Gettysburg.

The most important source in that network wasn’t a balloon or a cavalry scout. It was the men and women the Confederacy had enslaved. One Confederate general wrote a bitter letter to Jefferson Davis describing what he called an “omnipresent spy system” that his army had no way to guard against. Jeff reads it aloud during our webinar. Listen for it.

And then there’s the woman in Richmond, and the freed slave she placed inside the Confederate White House. I’ll leave that one entirely to Jeff.

What Happens When You Throw It All Away

Within a year of Appomattox, the Union Army went from two million soldiers to 54,000. The intelligence bureau that won the war was dismantled. The men who built it went on to build railroads and run ports. We had done exactly the same thing after the Revolution, and we were about to pay for it exactly the same way.

Into that vacuum came the Klan, an insurgency across the South, and a decade-long fight to hold Reconstruction together with a fraction of the tools the country had just proven it knew how to build. Jeff traces that fight through the Freedmen’s Bureau, which quietly became something more than a relief agency, through the first presidential impeachment, and finally to the election of 1876, where a backroom deal ended Reconstruction and the promise of equal citizenship for the better part of a century.

He closes with two chapters I’d never encountered: a team of former Union and Confederate officers sent, together, to stand up a West Point on the Nile, and a retired president’s world tour that was something other than a vacation.

Why it’s Worth your Hour

Heroes’ Path tells stories about people who did the hard, often invisible right thing under pressure. This session is full of them: a consul in Liverpool, an ambassador in St. Petersburg, a lawyer who became a spymaster, a railroad engineer who became another, a woman in Richmond, and thousands of people who never wore a uniform and are buried today under headstones that read simply Citizen.

It’s also a story about a republic that keeps deciding it doesn’t need to see clearly, and what fills the void when it makes that choice. That pattern doesn’t end in 1876. Jeff and I touch on where it shows up again in the twentieth century, and he gives a preview of what’s coming in Part IV.

Give it an hour. Then let us know what struck you most.

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