The Grim Lesson of History President Bush Overlooked

What I am proposing tonight is the most extensive reorganization of the federal government since the 1940s. During his presidency, Harry Truman recognized that our nation's fragmented defenses had to be reorganized to win the Cold War. He proposed uniting our military forces under a single Department of Defense, and creating the National Security Council to bring together defense, intelligence, and diplomacy. Truman's reforms are still helping us to fight terror abroad, and now we need similar dramatic reforms to secure our people at home. President Bush, Address to the Nation, June 6, 2002

The analogy the White House is using, comparing President Bush's decision to restructure the government with Harry Truman's reform of the military in 1945, is good politics. What president wouldn't want to be compared with Truman? Surprisingly, it is also appropriate. The restructuring President Bush has proposed is every bit as complicated and extensive as Truman's. But that's as far as the White House goes in drawing parallels between 1945 and 2002 and that's a problem. There are other parallels. These should also be kept in mind.

By 1945 it was apparent to most observers outside the defense establishment that the army and navy needed to be unified under a single civilian authority. Since World War I there had been fifty attempts in Congress to unify the services. All had failed. In 1945 President Truman tried again. In a message to Congress he declared that reform was needed"for our future safety and for the peace and security of the world." Despite the importance Truman assigned to reform, Congress resisted. Not until the summer of 1947 did Congress finally send the president a bill.

President Bush expects to get in six months what took Truman nearly three years. Perhaps he can, but no one should be shocked if he fails to succeed. Speediness, while a virtue in many matters, is perhaps an obstacle to sound reform. Already the debate is shaping up to be more about whether Congress can move as quickly as Bush wants rather than the wisdom of restructuring the government in the way he suggests.

Mr. Bush acknowledges that entrenched bureaucracies will fight the change . He should post a reminder in the Oval Office so he doesn't forget and get blindsided. He doesn't want to wake up to the headline Harry Truman saw in the New York Times the day after he submitted his message to Congress calling for military reform:

'Smacks of Hitler,' Declares Vinson

Carl Vinson was the chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee. The Truman plan included the unification of the navy and the army in a National Military Establishment. Vinson knew that if the plan went through he'd be out of a chairmanship. There are a lot of Carl Vinsons in the present Congress and they'll be gunning for the plan, whether their sound bites end up on the front page of the Times or not. (Vinson need not have worried; he ended up as the chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee, the committee created to oversee the unified military.)

Even if President Bush gets his plan through Congress by the end of the year, history suggests the goal of unifying the bureaucracies he is combining will not be met for years. Few challenges in government are as difficult as combining groups that have traditionally competed for power and attention. Just because logic dictates that they should cooperate doesn't mean that they will.

During the three-year fight to create a unified military establishment the bureaucracies famously battled against the plan through a war of leaks. The navy's prize strategy of the future was to build super carriers capable of straddling the globe. The army jeered that the carriers were sitting targets in aerial attacks. Meanwhile, the navy went after the air force, which was then still a part of the army. Strategic bombing in World War II, navy officials declared in leaks to Congress and the media, had been useless and wasteful.

After the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 the services were forced to combine, but they continued fighting. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal complained repeatedly that he couldn't get them to cooperate. Forrestal's problem was that the secretary of defense had not been given the power needed to force the services to agree on a unified strategy. And that points to another hard lesson of history. Passing reform legislation, as difficult as that task is, is the easy part. The hard part is putting the legislation into practice.

If the history of the Truman reforms is a guide, it will take years to get the bureaucratic machinery to run smoothly. The Truman plan had to be constantly amended. Just a year into his term as secretary of defense, Forrestal realized that the Congress had made a serious mistake limiting his power over the services. The members had done so deliberately to head-off the dreaded creation of a mythical all-powerful Prussian-style military dictator. Forrestal had gone along with the plan in the belief that his role would mainly be confined to policymaking. Indeed, as the former secretary of the navy, he wanted power to remain with the services. For years he had opposed creation of the office of secretary of defense. Like most navy men, he worried that his sacred service would be dominated in a unified department by the much larger department of the army. But once he became secretary of defense, his perspective changed. He quickly concluded that in fact he would have to be a full-time administrator to be effective. Otherwise the services would pay him little heed. Over his short term in office--just eighteen months--his staff grew dramatically from 45 employees to over 350.

In 1949, just two years after the passage of the defense reorganization plan, it was amended to give the secretary more power. And yet even then the defense establishment--newly renamed the Department of Defense--was grossly inefficient. Campaigning for president in 1952 Dwight Eisenhower charged that the department needed to be overhauled. Because of the hostility of the services, Ike was unable for years to fulfill his promise to reform the military. Finally he was able to do so in 1958 after the Soviets launched Sputnik. The Soviet advance in space so jolted the country that a crisis atmosphere was created, giving Ike the opportunity to implement the kind of changes he had realized as supreme commander in World War II needed to be made. Fully reforming the defense establishment had taken nearly 15 years.

President Bush has an advantage over both Truman and Ike. He is able to justify the changes he wants to make as a war-time necessity. But he should not be fooled into thinking that the job will be done when he puts his signature to a bill. Restructuring government is so complicated that constant adjustments will have to be made.

Damaging to the the effort is the speed with which this reform is being rushed through Congress. In the hothouse atmosphere of Capitol Hill good ideas will grow but only if they are given a chance. Some ideas which sound good may in fact not actually be effective. As John Dickinson remarked with wisdom at the constitutional convention in 1787,"Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us."