Historical letter between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison cited in House Oversight document

bother you most. The war-or-peace dilemmas of foreign policy are an essential case — when they go wrong, they hammer all of us. And we can see in the ripples of global power ideas that are of use in nearly any sphere. How, for instance, to fight a network. The struggle of JIEDDO is, in a sense, similar to something all of us face now: Old vs. new. In any event, in the case of the IEDs, here was the most powerful nation in human history, backed by hypersonic missiles, always-on radars, and endless jet fuel that found itself unable to stop a group of half-educated and promiscuously backwards terrorists. You had to ask: What was wrong? And did the failure suggest something even deeper about the position of the dominant national power of the era? About the nature of our age? 3. A few days before Christmas of December of 1787, Thomas Jefferson sat down in Paris to write a letter to James Madison.*? Madison was on the other side of the Atlantic, in Philadelphia, and struggling with refinements to the new American constitution, which had been drafted in the spring and summer just passed. The two men were frequent correspondents. They wrote to each other with an easy familiarity, revolutionary to revolutionary. Jefferson was then 44, and had settled hungrily into his role as the American minister in France, “violently smitten,” as he wrote, by the charms of The Continent*+. Madison was 36, twenty years removed from the election of 1808 that would elevate him to the Presidency as Jefferson’s successor. Madison would become, in a sense, America’s first “Foreign Policy” President, prosecuting the war of 1812 and negotiating with France for the Louisiana Purchase. He was known already, in 1787, as “The Father of the Constitution.” Jefferson begins his letter with a few of the charming literary asides we expect from him: He asks Madison about some nuns he wants to help teach his children, inquires after about a packet of carefully chosen South Carolina rice that has gone missing in the oceanic post, delaying his plans to impress French palates with an American crop. But then Jefferson turns to what he knows must be on Madison’s mind, the new constitution. “I like much the general idea of framing a government which should go on of itself peaceably,” he says, admiring the elegant balance that emerges so carefully from the pages of the document. The American constitution, Jefferson felt, reflected political arrangements new in the history of human governance, between people and power, between states and the center, between agriculture and commerce. He is, he says, “capitaved” by the details of what he has seen. 43 A few days before Christmas: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776-1826, (New York: Norton, 1995) Vol 1. pp, 457-459 44 Jefferson was then 44: Thomas Jefferson and Douglas L. Wilson. Jefferson Abroad. Modern Library ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1999) letter to Madame de Tesse, 20 March 1787 39 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018271