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When presidential historians periodically take stock of “the greatest” American presidents Herbert Hoover never fares very well. His single term – 1929 to 1933 – was considered at the time and ever since as a prime example of a “failed presidency.”

The great stock market crash helped usher in the Great Depression and historically high unemployment on Hoover’s watch. His response to the resulting economic crisis has generally been considered inadequate, even callous, and Franklin Roosevelt crushed Hoover’s re-election hopes in an historic landslide in 1932. Hoover continues to rank among the most unlucky and unloved American presidents. History is a cruel mistress.

Yet, earlier this week I basked in the desert sunshine at a Herbert Hoover legacy – a truly monumental achievement – that the long-ago president created just days before he left the White House in disgrace. In the rocky, mountainous desert just west of downtown Tucson there exists what may be one of the failed president’s greatest, most visionary accomplishments. Thanks to the 31st president it’s our monument, too.

On March 1, 1933, Hoover, still smarting from his landslide loss to FDR, signed a presidential proclamation declaring thousands of acres of Arizona desert as Saguaro National Monument. The monument Hoover created with a stroke of his pen – he used his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act – eventually became a national park in 1994 and played host to nearly 680,000 visitors in 2013. It is estimated that the park, the largest tourist attraction in southern Arizona, contributes $75 million annually to the local economy. Hoover’s monument protects the towering saguaro cactus, a magnificent creation that is found only in the desert of southern Arizona and across the border in Mexico. When you hike this area you’re struck by both the harshness of the desert environment and its delicate nature. It is the kind of place where the heavy hand of man could easily destroy the majesty that Mother Nature has created. We have a failed president to thank for saving it so that my hiking companions and I could enjoy it 75 years after Hoover put his signature on a presidential proclamation.

Fast forward to this week when House Republicans again voted to gut the 1906 Antiquities Act that has been used by fifteen American presidents to, in effect, create the greatest system of national parks, monuments and wildlife reserves on the planet. What modern conservatives fail to acknowledge is that our great national park and monument legacy would simply not exist as it does without every president since the Act was created having used it to preserve and protect the nation’s special places.

Teddy Roosevelt, a president most modern Republicans embrace only gingerly, clutched the Act to his burly chest and saved the Grand Canyon from commercial exploitation. He preserved Jewel Cave in South Dakota and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, among a raft of other actions. Roosevelt knew he couldn’t get a reluctant Republican Congress to act, so he acted in the national interest and thank God he did.

William Howard Taft saved the Big Hole in Montana. Warren Harding used his authority under the Antiquities Act to preserve Bryce Canyon in Utah. Calvin Coolidge, not a man to fawn over executive power, used his to protect Craters of the Moon in Idaho and the marvelous Chiricahua’s in Arizona. FDR used the Act to protect Jackson Hole in Wyoming and Joshua Tree in California. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and both the Bush’s used the Antiquities Act. Bill Clinton created the Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah and protected the Minidoka Japanese-American internment site in Idaho. LBJ used the act. Barack Obama has, too.

Read the list of national monuments and special places protected by presidential action and you’ll read a list of America’s heritage, a list of the places all of us would love to visit and do by the millions every year.

Utah Republican Rob Bishop sponsored the bill in Congress this week and complained, as Politico reported, “that Obama has designated a half-dozen monuments in the past year without input from Congress, including a significant expansion of a national monument along the Pacific Ocean in California this month. The March 11 action permanently protects about 1,665 acres of federal lands near Point Arena, 130 miles north of San Francisco.”

Obama acted, of course, because Congress no longer – and rarely has in our history – acted to create national parks and monuments. Many now hope, and I count myself in that number, that Obama will use his authority under the 1906 Act to permanently protect the Boulder-White Clouds area in central Idaho. If the president does act it will be because Congress, despite a vast amount of input from Idahoans and Americans in other states, has not acted for a generation to formally protect this area. The late Sen. Jim McClure and then-Gov. Cecil D. Andrus, a Republican and a Democrat, advocated action to protect the Boulder-White Clouds in the 1980’s and Republican Rep. Mike Simpson has pushed protection of the area for a decade and still Congress has not moved.

Teddy Roosevelt realized when he acted to protect the Grand Canyon that local pressure from politically influential economic interests would never permit Congressional action, so Roosevelt acted for the public interest. Once the canyon was protected, Congress got serious about it’s responsibility. Jimmy Carter famously used the Antiquities Act at the behest of his Interior Secretary – Idaho’s Andrus – to create his and the nation’s great Alaska lands legacy. The Alaska Congressional delegation only came to the table when presidential action finally forced serious action. Carter’s conservation legacy will one day be seen to rival Teddy Roosevelt’s and all thanks to the Antiquities Act.

The House vote this week is mostly for show, another poke in the eye of Obama, and is unlikely to spur action by the Senate. For more than 100 years the Antiquities Act has allowed American presidents of both parties to protect the national crown jewels. In an ideal world, Congress would regularly and seriously consider conservation measures like protection for Idaho’s Boulder-White Clouds, but in fact it rarely even holds hearings on such things.

As the Salt Lake Tribune in Rep. Bishop’s home state editorialized this week: “Turning a piece of federally owned land — land held in trust for all the people of the United States, present and future — into a national monument is an innately forward-thinking act. But it is one that could, should sentiments and circumstances change, be reversed.

“It’s at least possible that a majority of the American people, speaking through their elected representatives in Congress, could decide that the temporary benefit of burning another 100 million tons of coal or another 100 million barrels of oil outweighs the benefit of preserving beautiful, unique or environmentally fragile lands. If that happens, they can move to sell the parks, cancel presidential declarations of national monuments and rub their hands together over all the lovely money that their friends will make.”

The next time you visit a national park or monument remember Teddy Roosevelt’s words in 1908 when he protected the awesome canyon of the Colorado River. “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve upon it; not a bit,” TR said. “What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.” Exactly.

There is nothing wrong with the Antiquities Act that a more conservation-minded, forward-looking Congress couldn’t fix.

I have been devouring a provocative and highly readable new book – Invisible Armies – by military historian and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot. The hefty tome presents a sweeping history of “irregular warfare” from the time of the Romans to al Qaeda, with brilliant profiles of some of history’s great guerrilla fighters like Che Guevara, the man whose swaggering presence once graced a thousand college dorm room walls.

Think of the one name men of recent history who have defined so much of modern geo-politics and insurgency: Che, Mao, Ho, Tito, Fidel, Osama. This is the modern history of war.

The real benefit of Boot’s heavily researched book is to provide that great sweep and to argue forcefully that small wars fought by unconventional means have been a feature of military history, well, forever and have been particularly important to the United States since the last half of the 20th Century. We’re reminded, since our own founding myths often get in the way, that our own revolution was won less on the battlefield than in the halls of the British Parliament.

As Justin Green wrote recently at The Daily Beast as he analyzed Invisible Armies our revolution proved the “limitations of liberal nation states to suppress popular insurgencies. After all, Cornwallis’ surrender only deprived Britain of 8,000 of its 42,000 troops in North America. You’d think that this would be a mere minor set back prior to finishing off the colonists.

“What brought about peace and independence for the United States was the shift in public opinion in Britain,” Green wrote. “Prime Minister Lord North even lost his job over the war, resigning in 1782 after Parliament voted to end offensive operations in the colonies. (Remind anyone of a certain President opting not to run for re-election in 1968?)”

This history of irregular warfare fought by often invisible armies has never been more relevant. As thousands of American troops begin to wind down the country’s longest war in Afghanistan, a place we’ll leave having done about as much to create stability as the British did in the 1800’s and the Russians did in the 1980’s, the U.S. military seems certain to confront the next and the next small war. As much as some political leaders bluster about Iran’s or North Korea’s nuclear program the American military is better equipped to deal with such conventional challenges than it is to defeat the kind of brazen guerrilla force that recently stormed oil and natural gas facilities in Algeria or assaulted the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Max Boot makes the case that we – as well as the Brits, the French and the Russians – have had to learn the lessons of war against an insurgent or a terrorist enemy over and over again. The French disaster in Indochina in the 1940’s and 1950’s is a telling example of doing almost everything wrong. Here’s a paragraph from Invisible Armies:

“Rape, beating, burning, torturing, of entirely harmless peasants and villages were of common occurrence,” wrote an English Foreign Legionnaire. His fellow soldiers, many of them Germans too young to have fought in World War II, often boasted “of the number of murders or rapes they had committed or the means of torture they had applied or the cash jewels, or possessions they had stolen.” Locally recruited auxiliaries, often thugs or Vietminh deserters who had “stiff prices on their heads,” were even worse, they were “feared and hated by the local population on account of their thieving, blackmailing, racketeering propensities.”

Which brings us to the on-going debate in the United States Senate over the president’s nomination of former Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense. While the odds still favor Hagel’s confirmation next week, 15 of the GOP’s most conservative senators, including Jim Risch of Idaho, John Barrasso of Wyoming and Mike Lee of Utah, have written to President Obama demanding that he withdraw the Hagel nomination. The White House immediately said that won’t happen.

Hagel’s real offense, once you set aside the silly made up stuff about him being a favorite of Hamas, is that he’ll be the point man in what I suspect will be Obama’s second term agenda to re-think the size, mission and capabilities of the U.S. military. Hagel had the audacity to go against the grain of Republican orthodoxy and question the Bush Administration’s policy in Iraq even after he voted to authorize the invasion. Hagel’s distinguished and honored service in Vietnam should equip him perfectly to know a few things about the current and future threats the U.S. will face from irregular armies. Rather than embrace a guy who has fought and bled as a grunt in Vietnam, a Vietnam-era chicken hawk like Dick Cheney, who has yet to receive his historical due for the mistakes and misjudgments that lead to Iraq and was deferred out of Vietnam service, calls Hagel – and new Secretary of State John Kerry, another decorated Vietnam vet – “second rate” appointees. Cheney will eventually find his place in history as one of the most powerful and most consistently wrong vice presidents. And it’s worth noting that most of the Senators who sit  in judgment of former Army combat Sergeant Chuck Hagel did not themselves serve.

Everyone in Washington, even the 15 Senators who wrote to the president about Hagel, would privately tell you that the U.S. military budget, considering the vast deployments of personnel and equipment around the world, not to mention the generations of health care spending that will be required to care for the physically and mentally wounded of our last two wars, must be brought under control. The Washington budget debate begins and ends with taxes and entitlements, but must ultimately include sober judgments about spending on the military. We can’t afford what we have and too much of what we have isn’t designed to fight the enemies we face.

Fifty some years ago, the great Montana Sen. Mike Mansfield, in his own way as much of a maverick as Hagel, proposed a series of amendments – the Mansfield Amendments – to reduce the American military presence in Europe. Mansfield, the history professor, argued “with changes and improvements in the techniques of modern warfare and because of the vast increase in capacity of the United States to wage war and to move military forces and equipment by air, a substantial reduction of the United States forces permanently stationed in Europe can be made without adversely affecting either our resolve or ability to meet our commitment under the North Atlantic Treaty.”

Mansfield, who incidentally served in the Army, Navy and the Marine Corps, was a visionary. Republicans and Democrats ought to embrace his kind of thinking again, provide a laser-like focus on the still evolving mission of our military, and work with a Secretary Hagel and the Obama Administration to re-size and re-purpose a splendid military that needs fresh thinking. Max Boot’s Invisible Armies is a good place to start the re-thinking and his book will soon be required reading in military schools and the Pentagon. It ought to be required reading in the Senate Arms Service Committee, as well.

I have spent a lot of years getting on and off airplanes. I’m not in the million mile category to be sure, but the airlines – generally – like my business because I have a few hundred thousand miles of air travel under my seat. I’m what the guidebooks call “a seasoned traveler.” And as a seasoned traveler, I’m growing more and more nostalgic for the days when boarding an airplane was an adventure in upscale travel as opposed to a claustrophobic endurance match. My several hundred thousand miles have taught me a few things.

I learned long ago, for example, to never check a piece of luggage. Why risk it? And, with reductions in staffing for airlines and at most airports, it takes for ever to retrieve an article from the gentle apparatus that carries your roller bag from plane to passenger. Like I said, why risk it? If you want to only carry on, however, you have to be on your toes. Overhead bin space goes fast in the era of airlines charging for checked luggage. You had best find a way to get into an early boarding group or face trying to stuff you bag into an overhead that is already filed with shopping bags, fly rods, coats, car seats and the occasional violin or frighteningly large stuffed animal owned by the little girl crying uncontrollably across the aisle from where you were hoping to read a good book and take a nap.

As for seats, I’m an aisle guy. You do have to get up a few times during a long flight to allow the passenger(s) sitting next to you get out for the bathroom, but the aisle is still the way to go. (Do be careful of the person – at least one on every flight – who slings a backpack over his shoulder that is large enough to outfit an entire Everett expedition. These folks are typically oblivious of that fact that their backpack is swinging wildly from side to side as they struggle to the back of the plane, bringing concussion-inducing blows to aisle seat sitters. You’ve been warned.)

Security lines increasingly demand a strategy, as well. Avoid at all cost the person who obviously has not flown in the post-9-11 era. You can spot them. They’re drinking out of a Big Gulp cup and cleaning their nails with a pocket knife. “What,” they’ll say, “I can’t take this through security? When did that happen?”

I particularly love the members of the traveling public who wait for 15 minutes in a long line without any preparation for what happens when it’s their turn to enter the metal detector. These are the folks who suddenly realize as they approach the check point with 80 people behind them that they have their entire coin collection in their inside coat pocket.  Or they belatedly discover that those pesky “liquids, not to exceed three ounces” are carefully and securely packed in the bottom of a bag filled with enough corn chips to put Tostido’s out of business. “They must be in here somewhere? When did this happen?” I recently observed a woman with the largest bottle of hair conditioner I have ever seen arguing about whether “this tiny little thing” violated the three ounce rule. That bottle not only violated the rule, it was enough conditioner to supply perfectly conditioned hair to most of the western hemisphere for a year.

In the old days air travel had a certain glamour. The plates were china and the little tablecloths were, well there were little tablecloths in the ancient and glamorous days of air travel. People actually dressed well to board an airplane. Those days are gone. Flip flops and tank tops are the norm these days. If you are lucky you might spot a guy in a jacket and tie or a woman in a nice pant suit on your flight, but more likely you’ll see ball caps turned backward, baggy cargo shorts and tee shirts that were new when Jimmy Carter was in the White House. As David Sedaris once wrote in a side-splittingly funny New Yorker piece, many air travelers today look like they came directly to the boarding gate after washing shoe polish off a pig.

Not completely sure that the United States faces an obesity crisis – you obviously haven’t been in an airplane recently. As more and more airlines utilize smaller, regional jets – CJ’s they’re called in the business for the Canadian origin of their birth – the seats get smaller and smaller and the aisles narrower and narrower. At the same time the passengers get bigger and bigger. It used to be a rare event to see a particularly large person request a “seat belt extender,” but such requests, in my informal surveys, are more and more common. The CJ’s present problems for normal sized passengers, too. I sat next to a fellow on a recent flight who, while not out of shape or overweight was just a big guy. I lost the quiet, but intense 90 minute fight for a small piece of the arm rest. The bruises are healing nicely.

Some political commentators claim that the real economic and social divide in our society is between those Americans in the “top 1%” who control such a significant portion of the nation’s wealth and, well, the rest of us. I’m in sympathy with the argument, but I’m here to tell you the economic and social divide is even greater between business class and coach. Once in a while my miles get me “up front” in the rarefied air of First Class. It’s the difference between a Lexus and Yugo. Hot and cold running drinks, real and mostly edible food, leg room and a flight attendant who isn’t just moonlighting from her regular job as a private prison guard.

The glamour of business travel, the glamour of any travel other than riding “up front” on an international flight, is lamentably a thing of the past. As gone as when Rick puts Ilsa on that plane leaving Casablanca for Lisbon. Remember how glamorous Ingrid Bergman looked in those closing scenes from the great movie? Paul Henreid was dashing in suit, tie and fedora. Those folks were dressed for serious travel. They were going someplace.

But come to think of it in Casablanca Ilsa Lund and Victor Laszio were just fleeing the Nazis, not doing something really stressful like washing shoe polish off of a pig.