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Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, Leon Panetta. Penguin Press, 2014, 467 pp., $36.00.
Leon Panetta's autobiography, Worthy Fights, is not a work of strategy or a "tell-all" inside look at the seats of power in the United States. Instead, this is a book about patriotism, idealism, and gratitude-a theme the author returns to throughout. Panetta credits his love of country to his parents, who immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. Like so many other immigrants of their day, they worked hard and took advantage of opportunities offered by their adopted nation to eventually live the American dream. For young Leon, even discrimination and recrimination toward US citizens during World War II could not alter his feelings of gratitude as a first-generation American and his appreciation of the inherited dream. His life story is a mixture of religion, duty, service, colorful language, and, of course, politics. Indeed, one-half of the tome encompassing most of his life is devoted to politics, elections, Congress, and service as a cabinet member and political insider prior to becoming director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then Secretary of Defense. Panetta uses this "political" part of the book to highlight lessons learned along the way. For example, early in his career he most admired those politicians who exhibited a sense of obligation to the nation-those who were worthy of admiration and voted on principle regardless of the consequences. He insisted that integrity mattered more than political survival, while cultivating relations with power brokers without...