The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze,
The Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 22, 2014

In March 1919, Thomas Lamont, a banker at J.P. Morgan, drafted a letter to Russell Leffingwell, the U.S. secretary of the treasury. “America holds the key” to a “real and lasting peace,” Lamont claimed; if it failed to “exercise that power, no one can foresee the consequences — consequences with almost as terrible results for America as for the rest of the world.”