Gore Vidal has written an impressive fictional history of our Great American Experiment that covers several volumes. Here is an excerpt describing one of Franklin Roosevelt's Cabinet meetings taken from The Golden Age, the last book in Vidal's series.

"Those rich boys daydream about vast armies and navies conquering all the seas and lands while we humble folk think of boys that we know-sons even-dying in a process that benefits no one but the international banks and their lawyer-lobbyists. The real political struggle in the United States, since the Civil War, has been between the peaceful inhabitants of the nation with their generally representative Congresses and a small professional elite totally split off from the nation, pursuing wealth through wars that they invent and justify and resonate for others to die in."