A 2008 letter from America: Rita Ricketts records impressions of American attitudes to the advent of President Obama and considers their perceptions in light of the new president's first weeks in office.

'If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done, if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves.' (1)

This warning, issued by Alistair Cooke in 1946, in one of his legendary broadcasts, is as valuable a piece of advice now as it was then. He repeated it in 1961, telling his worldwide audience that JFK's invocation of Pax Americana on the day of his inauguration in 1961 was 'magnificent as rhetoric, appalling as policy.' (2) Within a few months of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy was ...