Have Our Presidents Made Good Warriors?

In my book, Command of Office: How War, Secrecy and Deception Transformed the Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush, I opened with a chapter entitled “Of a Republic Transformed by Kings, Courtiers, and Warriors.”  Some who read the book resisted the idea that the American presidency had become a monarchy. It was one thing to laugh at Theodore Roosevelt, characterized by some in his day as Theodore Rex, but it was more tendentious to suggest that George W. Bush, in no way resembling Roosevelt in intellect or courage, was also a monarch, who gloried in the powers that adhered to his office.  Needless to say, many who have served recent Presidents cared very little for being represented as courtiers, though that term described their relations with the President perfectly..  Finally, it was hard for some to accept that the decades since the start of the twentieth century have been overwhelmingly years of war for the United States, and that the President, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief has been a warrior, more or less competent and imaginative in his role as such.

The story of the presidency since 1901 is filled with ironies and ambiguities, especially as they relate to the President’s war-making capabilities.  Theodore Roosevelt, seen by many as truculent and aggressive, almost childish in his perpetual adoration of what he and the other “Rough Riders” had done to defeat Spain, ousting them from Cuba, rarely doubted the importance of martial and naval skills.  It is significant that Roosevelt, as President, never engaged in a major war, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for helping negotiate a peace treaty between Russia and Japan.  Woodrow Wilson, who came to the White House in 1913, was even more committed to peace, and wished to transcend the success that Roosevelt, a Republican, had achieved. Defeated in his efforts to bring about peace between the Allies and the Central Powers, after the Kaiser in 1917 resumed Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson felt the only reasonable response was to ask Congress to declare a state of war.

 Wilson proved to be a very effective war president, a warrior who shunned the title but acted the role. Very rarely interfering with his generals, he saw the need to mobilize American industry to create and arm a large American expeditionary force, giving substantial material and monetary aid to his hard-pressed European allies.  Inspiring patriotism, Wilson accepted severe restrictions on American civil liberties, seeing these as necessary for the security of the country. Persuaded that he could be  effective as a peacemaker, fundamentally altering the conditions that had so often obtained between the leading European powers, he imagined that his League of Nations would secure permanent peace. Repudiated by an effective Republican opposition, he witnessed the Democratic expulsion from the White House in 1921 by Warren Harding, an Ohio politician who promised a restoration of “normalcy,” the conditions that had obtained before Wilson entered the White House. He left the office a broken man, having failed as a peacemaker and putting no great store on what he had accomplished as a warrior.  

Franklin Roosevelt, who had served Wilson as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, came to office in 1933 in the midst of the most terrible economic depression the nation had ever known.  Determined to restore confidence, his first term was not one in which he gave great attention to the deteriorating international situation in Europe. Neither Hitler’s policies, violating the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the war launched by Mussolini in Ethiopia, or Japan’s aggressions in China greatly preoccupied the American public.  Following 1937, with the start of his second term, Roosevelt sought to warn the nation of the dangers that lurked abroad, but the Congressional unconditional commitment to neutrality required that Roosevelt be circumspect , insisting that his only interest was to preserve the peace.  After the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, with the country divided between those who saw America’s liberties threatened by Germany’s victories and others who insisted that the United States must not again become involved in Europe’s quarrels, Roosevelt faced major dilemmas.  Only the defeat of France in June 1940, leaving Britain alone to struggle with Nazi Germany’s aerial onslaught, together with his third-term presidential victory – unique in American history – liberated Roosevelt to become bolder, helping Britain more openly.  After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1941, the President recognized the need to help that country with material aid, transmitted through the new Lend-Lease legislation. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States into the war, and Roosevelt faced many of the same problems confronted by Wilson in April 1917.

Roosevelt proved to be immensely imaginative, maintaining the nation’s morale even in the terrible days when the country learned the extent of the damage inflicted by the Japanese in Hawaii, and watched helplessly as Japanese armies overran Southeast Asia, ousting the French, Dutch and British from their colonies, and occupying America's Philippine territory.  With Churchill as his most intimate foreign adviser, the two planned the military operations that began in North Africa, obliging them to resist the Soviet demands for an early invasion of continental Europe. Roosevelt chose a previously unknown military officer, Dwight Eisenhower, to lead the Allied forces in attacking Western Europe in the spring of 1944, the greatest seaborne invasion in history.  Roosevelt recognized how much the home front mattered, and why the expansion of the nation’s economic capabilities was scarcely less critical than the development of its military strength.  At conferences in Casablanca, Teheran, and Yalta, Roosevelt planned what he hoped would be an early victory over the Axis, leading to the establishment of an institution that would do what the League of Nations had failed to do – maintain the peace. Believing that good relations with the Soviet Union after the war was essential, he may have made more concessions to achieve that goal than was either desirable or necessary.

Given all that Roosevelt accomplished in the war, an exemplary warrior in every sense of the term, his death in April 1945 was considered a tragedy for the country and its allies. Harry Truman, his successor, lacked both his charisma and experience but proved to be more competent than many had prophesied.  With the Soviet Union showing itself aggressive in Europe, Truman pressed Congress to accept novel policies – the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan – that secured the freedom of those parts of Europe still not under the control of the Soviet Union.  When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Truman called for the United Nations to act, and was successful in achieving that objective. General MacArthur, carrying the war into North Korea, led Communist China to enter the conflict, and the President, showing exemplary political courage, felt obliged to remove the famous General from his command.  The war was soon stalemated, however, and Truman left office in 1953 without achieving a clear victory, leaving it to his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, to make the peace.

Dwight Eisenhower, knowing the horrors of war, and recognizing all that the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb had done to alter the nature of war, was a man who spoke softly, only occasionally using words that reflected what many interpreted as the influence of his more belligerent Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.  For Eisenhower, the maintenance of peace was essential, and the “Cold War,” in his view, required him to be circumspect in his relations with the Soviet Union even to the extent of chastising his allies, Great Britain and France, when they joined Israel in their ill-fated invasion of Suez in 1956.  John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower’s successor, also imagined he might secure peace with the Soviet Union through diplomacy, but his early ill-fated invasion of Cuba, intended to oust Castro, created a serious crisis very early in his administration.  Khrushchev underestimated the young and seemingly callow President, and the later Soviet attempt to arm Cuba with missiles led to the greatest war scare in the post-war period.  While Kennedy’s courtiers made a great deal of how much only presidential courage and sagacity prevented war, more recent revelations have somewhat tarnished that exaggerated image.  So, also, the involvement of Kennedy in Vietnam – the modest beginnings of what came to be America’s most unsuccessful war in its long history – has been represented as an operation he would never have continued in the way his successor, Lyndon Johnson, did following his assassination in 1963.  One can only guess whether such apologias have any merit.

Lyndon Johnson, vastly exaggerating the dangers of a Communist takeover in Vietnam, determined that he would not “lose” Vietnam and Southeast Asia as Republicans insisted the Democrats had “lost” China.  He vastly increased the country’s commitment to the defense of South Vietnam, and whatever his abilities as a domestic reformer, he showed no skill as a war leader.  Despite his bombastic rhetoric, he knew neither how to defeat the South Vietnamese forces nor how to bring the war to an end. Failing to retain the public's confidence, he left office in 1969 a defeated and disenchanted warrior. His successor, Richard Nixon, helped by Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, and later Secretary of State, greatly reduced the size of the American military forces in Vietnam, but even his decision to extend the war to Cambodia, a clear violation of that country’s neutrality, did nothing to end the conflict. Hostility in many quarters at home and abroad increased, and during the early days of his second term, before the Watergate scandal destroyed him,  Kissinger’s diplomatic efforts issued in a cease-fire and a belated end to the Vietnam operation, where no President had demonstrated exceptional qualities as an accomplished warrior.

Ronald Reagan, the most crafty Republican President in more than seventy years, spoke loudly, greatly expanded the country’s military capabilities, but carefully avoided war, preferring fail-safe operations against insubstantial enemies in Grenada and Libya.  The collapse of the Soviet Union reinforced the idea that he had brought about that cosmic development. West Europeans knew this to be a myth, though Reagan’s courtiers worked incessantly to demonstrate its truth.  His lacklustre successor, George Bush, his acolyte, sought a comparable victory against Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi Hitler in his limited imagination.  Wildly exaggerating the American military accomplishment, he appeared for a moment a spirited war leader who had asked nothing of the country, but had defeated a wicked and dangerous dictator in a few days of combat, preserving the West’s access to precious oil.

 His son, George W. Bush, claimed a comparable triumph, equally insubstantial.  Surrounded by men like himself, who with some noted exceptions had no experience of war or combat, Bush was a comic replica of Theodore Roosevelt, lacking both his knowledge and charisma.  Wildly exaggerating what his highly-paid and well-trained armies could do – with the rest of the nation obliged to do nothing – he made the kinds of fundamental errors that made him seem a strutting figure of fun for his enemies at home and abroad, a loose cannon to others who feared what he might do next, grossly ignorant of the radical Islamic world he was confronting.