From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fiasco and The Gamble comes an epic history of the decline of American military leadership from World War II to Iraq. History has been kinder to the American generals of World War II – Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley – than to the generals of the wars that followed. Is this merely nostalgia? In The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks answers the question definitively: No, it is not – in no small part because of a widening gulf between performance and accountability.