Here are my Ten Commandments for writing a history of America. The first concerns geography. The United States is a big country with a huge variety of terrain. Until the coming of the internal combustion engine, especially the airplane, America had to contend with the tyranny of distance. The first settlers had no idea of what or who lay in the interior, and this ignorance was pretty well complete for the first 200 years. So the First Commandment is: Remember how big America is and how multifarious. You must always study American history with a large-scale atlas open beside you.

Second Commandment: Remember, America is and always has been a religious country. It was founded primarily for religious reasons. Religious belief and conflict was absolutely dominant until the end of the seventeenth century, and even after this point, the Great Awakenings were determining factors in what happened in America. The first Great Awakening, in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, was the spiritual and emotional engine of the American Revolution that brought the United States into being. The second Great Awakening, early in the nineteenth century, made the Civil War inevitable.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights freed America from the political consequences of strong religious belief. To that extent, the United States is a secular state, but in all other respects America is a Godfearing country with all that implies. America is the only major country in the world in which a majority of citizens still voluntarily take part in an active religious life. That is the primary source of American exceptionalism.

Third Commandment: America is about freedom. The British went to America to make themselves freer than they were at home, in a religious as well as a political and economic sense. After arriving, they set up societies which were themselves restrictive, especially in New England, but America was too big for restrictive societies to long survive. Once Roger Williams broke away from Massachusetts and founded Rhode Island as a community where religious freedom prevailed, the pattern had been set. If Americans found themselves unfree in one colony, they moved on and founded another. Vastness, distance, and emptiness were the friends of American freedom. They confirmed it and made it invincible.

Fourth Commandment: America is about representative institutions and democracy. Both developed extraordinarily early. During the first two generations of the existence of the American colonies, the power of the state in England was too distant, weak, and preoccupied with other things to impose itself. So the early colonies were, to great extent, self-governing, and most people participated in the process. By the time the Crown tried to reassert its power, it was too late. Representative institutions had taken root and were part of the ordinary texture of decision-making on the far side of the Atlantic. The American revolution was inevitable: It was only a matter of time.

However much the Founding Fathers sought to devise a government which was in the hands of an educated elite of gentleman farmers, the coming of a popular democracy was already written into the facts and into the documents, and it came swiftly. Despite anything you may read, America continues to be ruled by its people, not by big business or the lobbies or the parties.

Fifth Commandment: America is about law. The Pilgrim fathers signed a contract while they were still at sea, and formal contracts and constitutions made their appearance very early in American history, almost before the settlers learned to feed themselves. They saw themselves as a people under God's law, reflected and enacted in their own homemade laws. They rebelled against George III because they thought his ministers were subverting the law. The same principle applied when the Union fought the South and subdued it.

Sixth Commandment: America is an entrepreneurial country. The American colonies, unlike the Spanish colonies to the south, evaded the restrictions of the European mercantile system and learned to object forcibly to those they could not evade. The 13 colonies had the economic and entrepreneurial resources to defeat Britain. When the Constitution was written, the Founders may have thought they were creating a classic agricultural republic of educated farmers, like Cicero's Roman ideal, but it was too late. The country was industrializing and becoming capitalist.

From the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, both state governments and the federal government did their best to erect legislative fences to contain the natural exuberance of American market capitalism. All they have done is to make it more efficient and occasionally more humanitarian.

Seventh Commandment: Never underestimate the importance of education. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans paid more attention to higher education than we did in Britain, and their colleges were not overshadowed by the obscurantism of the medieval past. By 1800, with only a fraction of our population, America had more and, on the whole, better universities than Britain.

Eighth Commandment: Note the centrality of blending in American life. The melting pot began in the seventeenth century. The earlier ships tended to be from particular localities in England, but the second generation came from all over the country, and from then on Americans became accustomed to overcoming barriers of separateness, which in Europe were still high until the twentieth century.

By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, an able-bodied man could travel to New York for as little as five pounds in English currency, often for nothing at all, bringing his own food with him. He could disembark without papers or examination, qualify for citizenship in some states in as little as a year, and in five years acquire a 100-acre farm--enormous by European standards--simply by saving a laborer's wages. Nothing like that had ever happened before in world history.

Despite periodic restrictions on immigration, America continues to admit and absorb people from Asia, Latin America, a good many from Europe, on a staggering scale. The melting pot still works, despite the efforts of the ethnic lobbies and the federal government to inhibit it.

Ninth Commandment: Never underestimate the self-critical and self-correcting process continually at work in American governments and society. This springs partly from democracy, which by its nature is outspokenly critical of society as it exists; partly from capitalism, whose conditions of intense competitiveness make it self-corrective; and partly from the existence of an all-pervasive media.

America is a great problem-creating country but also a great problem-solving country. It created chattel slavery on a scale never before experienced in the world, but it solved it after much time, blood, sweat, and tears. It created a problem of state's rights and solved that, too. It created the problem of big government for itself and is in, I hope, the process of solving that now.

America moves at extraordinary speed. In the 40 years since I started to go to America regularly, I've seen damaged cities, like Baltimore and Denver and Boston, transformed. I've seen Washington deteriorate. I've seen the once beautiful coast of Southern California built over and suburbanized.

Tenth Commandment: Always remember America is about people. It is a land, of course--and what a land--but it is, above all, a people, the most varied amalgam of people of all races and cultures the world has ever seen.

In my book, I inevitably focus on the outstanding Americans, the leaders and innovators. You cannot weld together a people without leading them. America has been fortunate in its leades. The Founders and their immediate predecessors constitute perhaps the most gifted group of statesmen in the history of the world, and to them is due much of the success of the great republican experiment. Over the past half century, the office has been well served, on balance, by men like Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan, and even some of its flawed incumbents, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, displayed powerful flashes of greatness.

It has been my good fortune as a journalist to cover events in which the United States presidency was closely involved, and thus to get glimpses of the chief executives at work. There was General Eisenhower, beautifully dressed in perfect uniforms and suits, sometimes a little snappy, but other times beatifically calm--a man who liked a very dry martini and who was once described to me by his Vice President, Richard Nixon, as "the most devious man I ever came across" (and who would be better judge of that than Mr. Nixon?).

John F. Kennedy I leave to the encapsulation of Harold Macmillan, who rushed over as British Prime Minister to see for himself soon after the new President and his brother, Robert, had moved into Washington. On his return, I asked Macmillan, as he settled in his accustomed place at the head of the table in the Beefsteak Club, "What was it like?" He whispered, "Rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable Northern Italian town.".

LBJ seemed to me like an African elephant with huge flapping ears and uncertain temper who would propel himself towards you in his chair until his nose was only inches from your face. He hoped to inspire fear until, suddenly becoming human, he started to turn out his pockets, in which he kept an amazing collection of documents, including what seemed to be the records of his entire medical history, from which he sought to prove to you that his health was tiptop.

There was Mr. Nixon, whom I got to know well after his fall, who had a thirst for knowledge, especially history, I've never seen anywhere.

Then there was Mr. Reagan, a great and simple man, who demonstrated the huge power that the possession of a few clear ideas, which happen to be right, give to a statesman. The first time I met him he said to me, "Good to see you again, Paul." I liked his jokes, especially one which said, "I'm not too worried about the deficit. It's big enough to take care of itself." Well, it did, didn't it? Reagan's humor often enshrined truth.

Nor must I forget George Bush, whom I heard deliver a speech from notes when he was Vice President, and I ventured to tell him, "Mr. Bush, I think you ought always to have a speech scripted in full, but if you must extemporize, please never begin a sentence without knowing what your main verb is to be." He took this well, being a modest man, but then as Churchill said of Mr. Attlee, "He has a lot to be modest about.".

I have not yet had the pleasure of getting to know Mr. Clinton. Well, after all, I'm male.