Robert Siegel talks with Warren Zimmerman, author of First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. Warren Zimmerman was the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1989-1992. He talks about how five friends -- President Theodore Roosevelt, naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Secretary of State John Hay and corporate lawyer-turned-colonial administrator Elihu Root -- created a new U.S. foreign policy of political expansionism overseas. (7:30) The book is published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, September 2002.
Copyright 2002 NPR