David Davenport, a counselor to the director and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, discusses the genesis of modern conservatism. Modern American conservatism, Davenport avers, was born in the 1930s, when Herbert Hoover took on the excesses of the New Deal. The New Deal overturned the way in which the United States worked and was governed. Eighty years later the New Deal is still the paradigm for US domestic policy. Obama is adding to the New Deal ideology with many of his policies, which are undermining US liberty and its rugged individualism. In his recent book, The New Deal and Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry, Davenport goes back to the 1930s to illustrate how the twenty-first-century discourse between progressives and conservatives grew out of the Roosevelt-Hoover debate of the 1930s.

This week Uncommon Knowledge brings us interview excerpts from two former secretaries of state and Hoover fellows Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, and former secretary of defense Robert McNamara. All three have influenced American foreign policy through the years and through different crises, and all three believe that the United States possesses a particular responsibility in the world. (25:47)