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

Reflections on FDR and on When to Fight

NO ONE WOULD ACCUSE FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT OF HAVING BEEN trigger happy. His 1940 campaign, like Woodrow Wilson’s in 1916, assured the American people that he was the candidate to keep the nation out of war. Under many circumstances this is indeed a commendable policy. War is an inefficient way to solve problems. If one could just accurately estimate the outcome and costs of war, then there generally is a compromise that could be struck beforehand that would leave all sides—winners and losers—better off than they were after fighting.40 But compromise is not always a better path forward. When an opponent cannot be trusted to carry out whatever compromise he or she has agreed to, then there is no point to compromise.41 Adolf Hitler certainly proved to anyone paying attention that he was just such an adversary. He made promises to Chamberlain in England, to the government in France, to Stalin in Russia, and to a great many others, and he broke them all. When facing an opponent whose demonstrated intention is to take lots of little bites of the apple until there isn’t any apple left, the wise policy is to knock out his teeth quickly. Roosevelt understood that Hitler was such a foe.

The US electorate seemingly was blind to the facts, either out of ignorance or out of wishful thinking. The job of a democratic leader is to try to convert public opinion to his or her point of view. The job of a democratic politician is to follow the voter and not risk losing reelection. Maybe it is asking too much to expect a politician to be a leader, too. Roosevelt had demonstrated that he could be both in his 1932 and 1936 elections. Perhaps that is because he had a genuine vision regarding the Depression and a bold preparedness to experiment with alternative approaches to achieve his vision. Apparently he had no such vision in 1940, when it came to the looming world war. The Roosevelt of the 1930s was a leader first and a politician second. The Roosevelt from 1940 onward was a politician whose failure to lead made the war longer and costlier than it needed to be.

Chapter 5

LBJ’s Defeat by Debit Card, W’s Victory by Credit Card

It’s damned easy to get in a war but it’s gonna be awful hard ever to extricate yourself if you get in.

—Lyndon Baines Johnson, May 27, 1964

LYNDON JOHNSON AND GEORGE W. BUSH WERE ACCIDENTAL presidents. President Johnson, having been relegated to the vice presidency after John Kennedy defeated him for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1960, achieved his ultimate ambition to be president but only as the consequence of Kennedy’s tragic assassination on November 22, 1963. Having taken the presidential oath of office, Johnson had no intention of forgoing the opportunity that tragedy placed within his grasp. He was hell-bent on achieving greater equality in America. Having never hesitated to fight hard political battles throughout his career, he was prepared as president to sacrifice himself—and his Democratic Party, too—in pursuit of that greater equality to which he was dedicated. The Vietnam War and his policy of equal risk for all draft-age Americans contributed mightily to the fulfillment of the philosophy behind his Great Society agenda, as well as to his own political demise.

George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 amid perhaps the largest constitutional election crisis in American history. Bush1 was far from unique in winning the Electoral College vote without securing a plurality of the popular vote, but he does stand alone in being the only president whose election was ultimately determined not by the voters, not really by the Electoral College, not by the House of Representatives, but by the Supreme Court. With hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and miscast votes, a few hundred Florida voters—with real uncertainty about their intended voting choices—elected Bush over then-Vice President Al Gore, according to a 5–4 Supreme Court judgment. True, the presidency would have been seen by a great many Americans as only slightly less accidental had the outcome gone Gore’s way, but nevertheless George W. Bush took the oath of office amidst controversy, national disunity, resentment, and real doubts about who was actually elected.

When he later sought an unambiguous public mandate for a second term, Bush brandished his Iraq War as an exemplar of the president’s battle against terrorism, containment of weapons of mass destruction, and the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. His sales pitch was a great success. Indeed, shortly before the 2004 presidential election, a majority of Americans had a favorable view of the US decision to invade Iraq and a favorable assessment of the job done by President Bush. Not surprisingly, Bush rode the wave of public enthusiasm to victory in 2004, sealing his ambition to be a two-term president and freeing himself to carry out the policies he believed in when, as a lame duck, he had no need to be concerned with future personal political gains or losses.

It is ironic that of these two presidents, Bush, not Johnson, is the one who pursued reelection. LBJ, the youngest-ever majority leader in the Senate, is sometimes described as the most skillful politician ever to occupy the White House. George W. Bush, colloquially known as “W” or as 43, in contrast, is often thought of as a bumbling, even inept leader. The standard judgments, paradoxically, may be completely consistent with the policy outcomes achieved by each but certainly are inconsistent with the way their respective political careers ended. Johnson surely wanted another term as president, but even more he wanted to do great things. Bush may have wanted to do great things, too, but he assuredly chose a political course in the way he waged war that was designed to ensure his reelection, his uncontested claim on the presidency, whether he did great things or not.

The electoral outcomes for the incumbent presidents in 1968 and in 2004 were as different as can be, but they may be understood as the consequence of each president’s personal ambition. Each may be adjudged a victor despite Johnson’s being driven from the political stage and Bush’s having remained firmly ensconced on it, front and center. We can see a clue to the differences in their personal ambitions and how they used their time in office by probing the latter-day assessment of historians regarding each of them. Reflecting back on LBJ’s prodigious achievements, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and, in that same year, the passage of Medicare, historians have resurrected LBJ’s reputation despite the public’s dislike of the Vietnam War. In August 1968, a few months after Johnson announced he would not seek reelection, his approval rating was only 35 percent. With the benefit of the passage of time, however, historians today rank Johnson fourteenth among the forty-three presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush. Among those who rank ahead of LBJ, only John Adams unsuccessfully sought to win a second term. It seems that Johnson’s reputation has outgrown the quagmire of Vietnam, giving greater weight to his transformative legislative record.

George W. Bush, in contrast, ranks thirty-fouth among presidents, and only one president who ranks below him—Ulysses S. Grant—succeeded in winning a second term. We are still much closer in time to Bush’s presidency than to Johnson’s. Thus far—and it may only be thus far—the war that helped get W reelected now serves to crush his reputation. Of course, Johnson, no less than Bush, pursued his own interests as president, but it seems that Johnson’s interests made him great in hindsight even as they contemporaneously destroyed him politically. Bush’s interests made him a two-term president with the hope—and for now it is only a hope—that history will resurrect him. War played fundamentally different parts in their two presidencies. While their two wars have much in common, they produced radically different political consequences for Johnson and Bush. Here we want to understand how two unpopular wars led to such radically different political outcomes for their protagonists, Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush.