Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Chapter 4 jumps ahead in time, skipping some important wars, to focus on Franklin Roosevelt. We contend that there were two FDRs. One, a visionary leader, persuaded the American public to follow him, embracing his vision from 1933 through 1939. The other FDR, the one who chose to seek a third term in 1940, was strictly a follower. Despite believing in the importance of defending democracy and freedom from the dangers of Nazi Germany, he refused to join the war until American public opinion favored doing so following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By delaying the United States’ entry into the war, it is likely that he allowed millions more people to die than otherwise would have. But FDR was not willing to lead public opinion to favor defending Europe if doing so added the slightest risk—and the evidence shows the risk would have been very small—that he would not win reelection in 1940. So fearful of electoral losses was he that he even refused to integrate the US armed forces, despite evidence that it would have made for a more efficient military and despite political pressure from his wife and from civil rights leaders—whose constituents had swung politically to the Democrats, thanks to the New Deal.

Chapter 5 provides a comparison between LBJ’s Vietnam War and George W. Bush’s Iraq War. We see that Johnson, a ruthless pursuer of office for much of his life, determined to use the presidency to advance his belief in equality even as it meant sacrificing electoral strongholds of the Democrats and, more critically for him, sacrificing his own prospects for reelection as his Selective Service reforms, aimed at making Vietnam a more equitable war effort, alienated many of his core liberal Democratic voters. In contrast, George W. Bush mirrored the partisanship of James Madison and his War Hawk Democrat-Republican colleagues. Bush shifted the tax burden onto Democrats while he reduced the cost of his war for fellow Republicans, much as Madison had made Federalists pay for the War of 1812 to benefit such Democrat-Republican frontier leaders as Henry Clay. LBJ, an exception to the cynical perspective we bring to American presidents at war, emerges as the tragic hero, a president who sacrificed his own political well-being for what he believed was best for the rest of us.

Chapter 6 contrasts the crisis foreign policies of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. In each case we see that partisan political concerns were at the forefront of their decision making, in Kennedy’s case during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and in Obama’s during the pivotal confrontation with Syria over chemical weapons and the interrelated Russian expansion into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2013–2014. These crises clearly illustrate the logic of when to make serious international threats and when not to. The evidence, as with the earlier chapters, helps us to see that short-term electoral and political considerations drive even the most major national security decisions today as they have done since before the nation was born and, in fact, as they do in all places and in all times in history.

In our conclusion, building on the insights of the connected dots from history and our “What If?” discussions, we propose procedural changes that could alter the profile of militarism in American foreign affairs and, indeed, in global foreign affairs. Being neither pacifists nor war advocates, we highlight when it is best to avoid the costs of war, instead pursuing peaceful dispute resolution, and when the pursuit of negotiated settlements is futile and the use of force or the decision just to wait things out is appropriate. We do so from the perspective of what is good for a broad swath of the nation’s population while being mindful that improved policy must be compatible with the interests of the politicians who are asked to make it. In doing so, we recognize that rare is the politician who would make choices that harm their interests, however good those choices would be for the rest of us. Hence, we try to offer concrete proposals that our presidents and members of Congress should be able to live with and that “We, the people” will want as well. The big changes that are needed involve making sure that we citizens are in a position to make informed decisions, relying not on polemics and rhetoric but on logic and the evidence at hand.

We might as readily have selected other American wars to make our arguments, but chose to omit them in the interest of brevity. There is no powerful reason for discussing some wars and ignoring others—they all fit the account rather well. Perhaps someone else will reprise our argument and apply its logic to the Spanish-American War or World War I or the Korean War or the Indian Wars or the many other conflicts in which the United States has been involved. In any case, we hope that our message is laid out with the same clarity and evidence we should all demand from our leaders.

Acknowledgments

We have benefited from the guidance and feedback of colleagues and friends. Portions of the chapter on George Washington were inspired by earlier research and discussions with Professor Norman Schofield. Our analysis of Abraham Lincoln likewise benefited from long-ago discussions with Professors William Riker and Barry Weingast. They, of course, are not responsible for the directions we have taken in our analyses.

Professors Nathaniel Beck, Patrick Egan, Sanford Gordon, Alexander Rosenberg, Bruce Russett, Shanker Satyanath, Dustin Tingley, and Tyll Van Geel offered us a great deal of help in steering us toward important sources of information, in listening to our endless tales about American presidents, and in helping us to see how to provide a positive as well as a probing outlook on American presidents at war. Family members likewise listened to our endless storytelling and pushed us to defend, modify, or clarify our arguments. We especially benefited from suggestions made by Judy Berton, Steven Steiner, and Jason Wright after each read earlier versions of the manuscript.

Our agent, Eric Lupfer, from WME is a great delight to work with as he is smart, insightful, and routinely saves us from egregious errors. We thank him profusely! The publication team at PublicAffairs, especially Ben Adams, Sandra Beris, as well as copyeditor Iris Bass and proofreader Bill Warhop, saved us from errors and from lack of clarity. The NYU Department of Politics and the NYU Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy and its principle benefactor, Roger Hertog, made it possible for us to write this book in a most congenial environment. Additionally, we are grateful to Google Books, Amazon Books, Wikipedia, and the NYU Bobst Library, each of which helped us assemble information, data, and primary and secondary sources.

Any book project is a burden on those closest to the authors. That is certainly true in our case. Bruce’s wife, Arlene, his three children and their spouses, Erin and Jason, Ethan and Rebecca, and Gwen and Adam, listened endlessly—if not tirelessly—to trial efforts at telling the story of American presidents at war, a burden even imposed on Bruce’s grandchildren Nathan, Clara, Abraham, Hannah, Izzie, and Otis. Alastair likewise put his family through the miseries and excitement that comes with listening to a book unfold. He is particularly grateful to Susan Yun and his four wonderful children: Angus, Duncan, Molly, and Penelope.

In the end, of course, none of the above people are responsible for our errors or our point of view. As always, remaining errors and failings are the responsibility of the other author.

Introduction

E Pluribus Unum

MYTHOLOGY—THAT IS WHAT THE STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF America’s most beloved presidents really are. Over the years, the imperfections and blemishes of our great leaders have been slowly erased, lovingly rubbed away by our reconstructions of history, or simply forgotten by our selective memories. We have turned Shakespeare’s view of death and memory on its head. When eulogizing Julius Caesar, his Mark Antony observed, “The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones.” Right for Caesar and exactly backward for America’s most revered wartime presidents!1 The great good that Caesar did for the commoners of Rome is, indeed, interred with his bones.2 But when we remember Abraham Lincoln, his unbridled ambition and its painful consequences are the memories that have been interred with his bones, all but forgotten beneath the historical reconstruction of his life and presidency. We know the mythological, larger-than-life Lincoln whose historical legacy, devoid of warts, was constructed by his personal secretaries and close advisers, John Hay and John Nicolay, and by a legion of subsequent historians. We do not much reflect on the Lincoln known to his contemporaries, such as the prominent African American abolitionist, H. Ford Douglas, who on July 4, 1860, speaking to an audience of two thousand in Framingham, Massachusetts, said of Abraham Lincoln: