Dearest Enemy is a musical with a book by Herbert Fields, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, and music by Richard Rodgers. This was the first of eight book musicals written by the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart and writer Herbert Fields, and the first of more than two dozen Rodgers and Hart Broadway musicals. The musical takes place in 1776, during the American Revolutionary War, when Mary Lindley Murray detained British troops long enough in Manhattan to give George Washington time to move his vulnerable troops.