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

The art of telling American war history all too often has a way of turning presidents into nearly passive observers and even into victims of events beyond their control. In so much of the common telling, our leaders awaken to a world at war, find themselves thrust into it, and then become heroic giants if they rise successfully to the occasion. Such, as we have intimated, might be the story of Franklin Roosevelt as he confronted the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor or of Abraham Lincoln as he addressed the attack on Fort Sumter. Other presidents, finding themselves ensnared in wars they did not want, become upon retelling the hapless victims of bad luck or bad timing. Such might be the story of William McKinley. He found himself facing irresistible pressure from the yellow press to declare war on Spain. That pressure was reinforced and encouraged by his ambitious assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt. This may even be the war story of Lyndon Johnson who found himself president upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy and forced to make decisions about Vietnam. He perpetuated America’s postwar policy of preventing communism’s advance. Kennedy had drawn the line in the sand in Vietnam by placing American military advisers in South Vietnam. The time to fulfill Kennedy’s anti-communist commitment in Asia came on Johnson’s watch. His presidency was tragically consumed by the ultimately futile effort to push back the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, as too was the presidency of his successor, Richard Nixon. Yet these accounts of peace-loving presidents plunged into war against their will are inadequate. They attribute too much power to the flow of history and not enough to the individual choices of men who, after all, were so skilled in political competition that they succeeded in defeating one political rival after another, placing themselves in a position to become president of the United States.

Indeed, this somewhat passive account is, of late, too often used to attribute to the uncontrolled flow of history the apparent growth in presidential authority over war and peace choices. The tragedy of 9/11 or, for an earlier generation, the advent of nuclear weapons at World War II’s end are identified as circumstances that thrust modern US presidents to center stage in war making. By now there appears to be an emergent consensus that presidential authority over war and peace has grown since 9/11, much as there was a growing consensus that this was true after many earlier American wars, especially the world wars. Some have argued that this alleged growth in presidential war-making power is a good thing.16 Others, at least as fervently, fear the growth of executive authority and its perceived inconsistency with the intentions of the nation’s founders.17 Either way, whether growth in presidential war-making authority is for the good or bad or whether it is real at all, it is a belief widely shared. We believe that Madison framed the problem of war powers exactly right. Its use and potential abuse was and is dictated by the sometimes sharp divide between “the desire and duty of peace” and “[t]he strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast.” These passions and weaknesses are, we contend, human constants, invariant in time or space. They are neither new nor unique to our own time.

Politics, even war politics, is a nasty, personal business that is little informed by high principles. Today we bemoan the lack of integrity in political campaigns and the slanderous charges hurled against opponents. We seem to believe that our contemporary politics have fallen prey to the “most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast” and we wish to harken back to a more civilized time of selfless politicians competing over different ideas about how best to improve the lives of the American people. Yet there is nothing new in today’s base campaign tactics. Surrogates for then vice president Thomas Jefferson, campaigning against the sitting president, John Adams, in 1800, described Adams as a “blind, bald, crippled, toothless man,” who “is a hideous hermaphroditical character with neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Not to be outdone, Adams’s backers described Jefferson as “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” What did the Adams’s team say would happen if Jefferson were elected? That “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.”18

And how about the high-minded presidential struggle of 1860 between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, two fine men with different ideas about how best to see the country through its sectional divisions? Here is what Douglas had to say of his opponent: that Lincoln could “ ruin more liquor than all the boys in town together .”19 Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. Even these long-ago campaigners were merely following a much older tradition. We forget that even in the time of ancient Rome’s Cicero, his brother Quintus Tullius urged him to slander his foes and lie to the people: “Slander your opponents as often as possible, reckon their crimes, their sexual depravity, or their attempts to bribe other candidates—all according to the character of the individual opponent.”20 Just as dirty campaigns remain a constant of political competition over millennia, so, too, does the quest for political advantage through the power to make choices between war and peace.

If presidential power over war has grown, as so many assert, that growth is as likely to be caused by the many members of Congress who do not wish to risk blame for failed foreign adventures as it is due to presidents’ seizing that power. It is sometimes expedient for members of Congress, fearing the ever-near-at-hand next election, to surrender the power of war to the president.21 In contrast, presidents, with four years between elections instead of two, have time to recover electorally from such misadventures as a failed war and so are more willing to exercise war powers, especially early in their term.22 That, we believe, is a tragic flaw that throws open the door to war in pursuit of all the personal depredations and desires for power that Madison noted all executives were subject to. The president’s urge for these powers has not particularly changed with time. The president’s urge for laurels, riches, or electoral victory, more than a passion for national security or citizen welfare, has directed the pursuit—or avoidance—of war in America at all times.

Of course, we must recognize a difference between those who found war foisted upon them and those who elected to take the country on foreign military adventures. From the beginning, the founders were mindful of the importance of limiting any individual from propelling the country away from peace and into war. As early as 1787, for instance, James Wilson, one of the nation’s earliest legal theorists and an original member of the Supreme Court under President Washington, explained to his fellow Pennsylvanians at their ratifying convention, that “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large. . . . “23 To this notion of distributed authority, George Washington added further to the meaning of the power to declare war.

President Washington stated plainly in 1793 what it had meant to him for the nation to declare itself at war: “The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”24 For Washington, then, a congressional declaration was not required to fight in defense of the nation, but was necessary when the United States was acting offensively (with the vague caveat regarding expeditions “of importance”). In that sense, a declaration of war against Japan in December 1941, or a congressional authorization—short of a declaration of war—against al-Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001, was not so much a necessity as a natural reply to the offense of Pearl Harbor and the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers. In these cases the United States plainly took defensive actions and did not engage in Washington’s idea of an offensive expedition. The country was attacked and attack called for the president as commander in chief to defend the nation’s security.