Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime Geoffrey R. Stone From the Introduction …this book is about Americans struggling to fulfill the daunting responsibilities of self-governance in the most perilous of times. More specifically, it is about some of the most interesting characters in American history. It is about presidents who have faced the challenge of balancing liberty and security in times of great national crisis. It is about John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush. It is also about those justices of the Supreme Court who have struggled to define an appropriate role for the judiciary in time of war. It is about Samuel Chase, who was almost impeached for his conduct on the bench in enforcing the Sedition Act of 1798, and Roger Taney, whose judicial order in 1861 President Lincoln flagrantly ignored. It is about Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who first breathed life into the First Amendment after World War I, and Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black, and Earl Warren, who wrestled with the limits of the free speech for Nazis and Communists. …This book is about heroes and villains (as to which is which, we may not always agree), and many people in between. Most fundamentally, though, this book is about Americans, for as we shell see it is "the people themselves", and not only our presidents, judges, and congressmen, who must preserve the spirit of liberty in times of crisis. Geoffrey R. Stone, the Harry Kalven Jr. Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, was dean of the law school from 1987 to 1993. Perilous Tomes, which received the 2005 Robert F.Kennedy Book Award, was named a notable or best book of the year by the Washington Post, at New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.