Author Archives: Dr. Robert Hickson

Dr. Robert Hickson

About Dr. Robert Hickson

Robert Hickson graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, in June 1964, and was assigned to Southeast Asia. After one year, he became a U.S. Army Special Forces Officer and earned his “3-prefix” as a “Green Beret,” after having already completed Parachute School and Ranger School and certain forms of Naval Commando Training.

After tours in Viet Nam and elsewhere in Asia, he taught at the J.F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center as the Head of the East Asian Seminar and Instructor in Military History and Irregular Warfare.

He acquired his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Classics (Greco-Roman) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with an emphasis on Ancient Philosophy and Medieval Literature (to include Theological Literature).

For seven years, he was Professor and Chairman of the Literature and Latin Department at Christendom College, leaving shortly thereafter to return to Military and Strategic-Cultural Studies.

He was a Professor at the Joint Military Intelligence College (former Defense Intelligence College), a graduate school in the U.S. Intelligence Community at the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) in Washington, D.C. Among other things, he taught Foreign Area and National Security Studies, Military History and Strategy, as well as Moral Philosophy.

He was then invited to the Air Force Academy for four years as a Professor in the William Simon Chair of Strategy and Culture, teaching in several academic departments.

He concluded his Federal Service as a Professor of Strategic and Cultural Studies, as well as Military History and National Security Studies, at the Joint Special Operations University in Florida, a part of the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Comparative cultural and strategic-historical studies constituted a unifying theme in these various forms of teaching over the years.

He gave numerous lectures that are available on our online store.

Canterbury Cathedral ca. 1900

Hilaire Belloc’s Canterbury Tale

In 1905, just before he entered the House of Commons for four discouraging years (1906-1910), Hilaire Belloc published a variegated and copious book, entitled The Old Road, about his eight-day journey afoot from Winchester to Canterbury, the latter also being the place where, on the 29th of December in 1170, Saint Thomas à Becket was martyred. Click here to VIEW full size, DOWNLOAD as PDF … More →


Posted in Articles, Arts and Culture, Catholic Living, Great Writers, Holy Places | Leave a comment
house_of_commons_218x175

‘And You Cannot Build Upon a Lie’

In 1920, ten years after Hilaire Belloc had stepped down from his four maturing years of publicly elected service in the House of Commons, he published a lucid book-length essay, entitled, The House of Commons and Monarchy. It is a forthright and equitably proportioned work with a clearly stated thesis; and the development of Belloc’s presented evidence and argumentation will help us still better understand … More →

Tagged |
Posted in Articles, Book Reviews, Great Writers, Politics and Society | Leave a comment
Narbonne Cathedral

Hilaire Belloc and a High Mass

In October of 1927 Hilaire Belloc first published his book, Towns of Destiny, which contains his grateful depiction of a unique and unrepeatable event that so unexpectedly manifested itself to him in southern France on the High Feast of the Holy Ghost: a sacred action in a very special setting. In my view, this book often reveals to the attentive reader some of our beloved … More →


Posted in Articles | Leave a comment
Charlemagne with Alcuin

Restoring a Catholic Memory

On How to Develop a Catholic Sense Without a Catholic Culture To restore to his people a true memory Alexander Solzhenitsyn has accepted almost unspeakable sacrifice and loss, and especially the cross of patience. Solzhenitsyn has attempted to draw his people forth from an asphyxiating rubble of distortion just as he has himself been drawn forth: trusting and contending, marked and transfigured by grace, an … More →


Posted in Articles, Arts and Culture, Catholic Living, Great Writers, Literature and Poetry | Leave a comment
Pilgrim on the Camino Santiago

Hilaire Belloc’s View of a Pilgrimage

When Hilaire Belloc was a rumbustious young man in his mid-thirties, and only a few years after he had completed his journey afoot to Rome, he wrote an essay entitled “The Idea of a Pilgrimage,” which first appeared in his memorable 1906 collection of essays Hills and the Sea. In this essay are some insights — even about “the heart of a child” — which … More →

Tagged , |
Posted in Articles, Catholic Living, Great Writers, Literature and Poetry | Leave a comment
Hilaire Belloc

On Hilaire Belloc and a Great Wind

When Hilaire Belloc was a vigorous forty years of age, and three years before his life was shaken and shattered by the death of his wife Elodie on Candlemas 1914, he wrote an intimately evocative essay, entitled “On a Great Wind.” This brief and vivid piece—characteristically combining concrete intimacy and sacred mystery in his inimitably poetic “sacramental prose”—leads us also to the contemplation of God’s … More →

Tagged |
Posted in Articles, Catholic Living, Great Writers, Literature and Poetry | 1 Comment
Detail from Piero della Francesca's "Resurrection." The painter himself is on the right.

Complacent Sentries and the Sloth of Roaming Unrest

This essay is an act of thanksgiving, not only a deeply humbling acknowledgment, to two non-Catholics, James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers—both of them long-suffering, wholehearted men —who saw more clear-sightedly and more deeply into the historical reality of the 1950s and early1960s than many professed Catholics of the time, to include many of the leading Ecclesiastics of the day. And they tried to warn us. Click … More →

Tagged , , , , , , |
Posted in Articles, Current Issues in the Church, History, Politics and Society | Leave a comment
Louis Auguste Blanqui

Louis Blanqui and the Leninist Concept of ‘Enlightened Terror’

On 4 June 1960, one month before I was to enter the United States Military Academy as a seventeen-year-old New Cadet, an article was published that was later to illuminate much reality for me as a military officer—especially about the strategic and tactical manipulation of mobs by well-trained, disciplined cadres who sought “command of the streets.” The 1960 article was entitled “Student Riots and Blanqui’s … More →

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Posted in Articles, Culture Wars, Heresies and Errors, Politics and Society | Leave a comment
Honor_in_foreign_policy_218x175

Honor in Foreign Policy

After some recent historical writing on Vietnam and its strategic milieu during the years 1962-1965, I became, perhaps for the first time, much more deeply aware of the presence or absence of Honor in the conduct of modern Foreign Policy. [Buy James Burnham's classic, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism.] Honor in Foreign Policy (on Scribd)

Tagged , , , , , , |
Posted in Articles, History, Morals, Politics and Society | Leave a comment
President Deim

Giving a Free Hand to the Assassins

Robert Hickson’s thoughtful reflections on U.S. complicity in the assassination of Vietnam’s Catholic President, Ngo Dinh Diem. It introduces Marguerite Higgins’ 1965 book on Vietnam, Our Vietnam Nightmare. The photos used came from the Ngo Dinh Diem Webpage. Giving a Free Hand to the Assassins

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Posted in Articles, History | 3 Comments
Mary Stuart in Mourning, by François Clouet

The Isolation of the Soul

Examining the theme of loss and the isolation of the human soul through the thinking of Chesterton, Belloc, and Baring, this paper considers some of the theological, moral, and psychological matters — both the causes and the effects — while always remaining rationally and resolutely convinced of their finally irreducible mysterious nature: mysteries of human free will and divine grace and of the purity and … More →


Posted in Articles, Catholic Living, Great Writers, Literature and Poetry, Spiritual Life | Leave a comment
William Cecil

New Methods of Modern Oligarchs

The inhuman state we humans are living in at this point of history is getting clearer every day. It gets more and more obvious that the ruling elites are detached from the people they are ruling and that even these elites are ruled by other, mostly financial, elites. The citizens often feel powerless in the face of social, moral, financial and even natural disorder. Money … More →


Posted in Articles, Culture Wars, Marriage and Family, Politics and Society | 10 Comments
bastille3

Belloc, Chesterton, and the French Revolution

This is an essay written in 1988 for Aportes, the prestigious Historical Journal in Spain. Professor Miguel Ayuso y Torres asked the author to submit an article for an edition dedicated to the French Revolution 200 Years Later. The essay was translated into Spanish by Professor Miguel Ayuso y Torres. It came out in early 1990 in Spanish, but was never published in English. Professor … More →


Posted in Articles, Great Writers, History | 1 Comment
Billy_Budd_rectangle

The Presentation of Malitia and Guile in Melville’s Billy Budd

Through the kindness of the author, Professor Mitchell Kalpakgian, I was unexpectedly invited to comment on his own recent article in the April 2012 issue of New Oxford Review. What he wrote was a trenchant literary essay concerning Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella, Billy Budd, and its vividly counterpointed depiction of Elemental Invidious Evil, and of a much subtler form of Evil Sophistry that corrupts … More →

Tagged , , |
Posted in Articles, Literature and Poetry | 1 Comment
Yves_Simon

Mandeville, the Frankfurt School, and Yves Simon on Authority and Liberty

A Counterpoint to Bernard Mandeville’s Deceitful Doctrine of Man and to the Frankfurt School’s Irrational Dialectical Anthropology: The Frigid Equivocations, Psycho-Cultural Subversion, Seductive Despair. A Commentary on Two Revolutionary and Neo-Sophist Texts of the Frankfurt School and the British Tavistock Institute, Respectively: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, 1947); and The Dialectics of Liberation (1967, 1968, 1969) – Considered in the Longer Light of Bernard Mandeville’s “Fable … More →


Posted in Articles, Philosophy | Leave a comment