Presidents of war

THE MOST AGONIZING DECISIONS presidents make are invariably during wartime, especially when battles are lost and body counts pile up. During one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln paced the corridors of the White House, his head bowed, hands behind his back, muttering over and over, "I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety or it will kill me." It practically did. The Korean War was almost equally taxing for Harry Truman, who in a moment of candor admitted that under the strain, "I lost my temper." When the normally unshakable Franklin Roosevelt picked up the phone to get briefed on the start of the North African campaign, his hand was shaking. And as the Vietnam War increasingly went awry, so did Lyndon Johnson, who became a broken man; Richard Nixon called him "unbelievable." How presidents deal with war is the subject of the historian Michael Beschloss's latest work, a sweeping overview of presidents leading the United States through almost two centuries of conflict. "Presidents of War" is a marvelous narrative that opens with James Madison, the father of the Constitution and a reluctant warrior during the War of 1812, desperately fleeing for his life, his table still set for dinner, while British troops torched Washington. From there, Beschloss takes us through the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II and Korea. He ends with America's humiliating loss in Vietnam. Along the way, we see presidents plotting strategy, maneuvering with Congress (which plays a large role in this book) and conferring with confidants, while their families weigh in on critical decisions. We see presidents leading great public debates - or failing to. And we see presidents exhibiting a myriad of emotions, depressed or elated, pugnacious or regretful, wise or foolish. Beschloss has a thesis about all this, and it's an important one. Echoing the sentiments of the founders, he posits that the nation should go to war only when there is an "absolute necessity" and only with overwhelming support from Congress and the public. However, even if the framers of the Constitution saw war as a last resort, and the decision was to be made by Congress rather than presidents, seldom has this been the case. True, Madison abided by the Constitution "he had helped to write" when he insisted that Congress start the War of 1812. But by the time of the Civil War, the picture was very different. Little by little, Congress had ceased to exercise its constitutional mandate to declare war, which became the exclusive purview of presidents. As Daniel Webster memorably put it, "presidential war" took over. It effectively began with James Polk and the Mexican-American War. Unlike the more measured Madison, the ambitious Polk shamelessly "lied and connived," fabricating a pretext for war that, despite his public declarations, was designed to allow the United States to seize large portions of territory from Mexico. Eventually, by Truman's day, America was bogged down in a bitter conflict with North Korea without the president even bothering to ask Congress for a war declaration. Truman established a dangerous precedent for future presidents, one that we live with today. As Beschloss notes, marginalizing Congress, even when legislators were eager to pass the buck, has serious pitfalls. Truman, for instance, worried about spreading "war psychosis," but in the process, unlike Franklin Roosevelt, he failed to adequately prepare the American people for the struggle the nation confronted, and the country paid a price. One of the book's more intriguing contributions is in noting that the founders could not have envisioned war in the nuclear age, when the president would have the ability to eviscerate hundreds of millions in less than an hour - all resting on "the whim" of a single person. However, beyond pointing this out, Beschloss says little more. The issue cries out for a treatment of its own. As Beschloss explains, the greatest wartime presidents successfully leaven military actions with moral concerns - a lesson for future presidents. Like Lincoln, who boldly announced the Emancipation Proclamation, Roosevelt elevated his war aims "to a higher moral plane" with his four freedoms speech (although at the same time, Beschloss correctly laments, Roosevelt failed to bomb the Nazi death camps that were working overtime to exterminate the Jews). And invariably, all wartime presidents suffer personally. There was Lincoln with his headaches and depression; William McKinley with his severe physical and mental strain; Truman with his sleeplessness and nausea; Johnson aging; Wilson having a massive stroke; and Roosevelt visibly dying. It is little wonder that presidents look to other presidents for sustenance and support. Truman, for example, admired Lincoln's humble origins, adulated Wilson and approved of Polk's "undaunted use of presidential power" throughout the Mexican War (as Truman put it, Polk regularly "told Congress to go to hell in foreign policy"). Lincoln looked to the founders and Andrew Jackson. And more recently, President George W Bush, thrust by 9/11 into the role of being a wartime president, sought lessons from Lincoln. And so it goes. Beschloss's writing is clean and concise, and he admirably draws upon new documents. Some of the more titillating tidbits of the book are in the footnotes. Polk had urinary stones requiring removal, which left him "perhaps without sexual function." Theodore Roosevelt regretted that he didn't have a crisis dramatic enough "to fully demonstrate his leadership potential." And Lincoln, of all people, may have contracted syphilis in the mid-1830s, which he then passed on to Mary. The book also has some delicious asides, as when President Wilson met King George at Buckingham Palace; after Wilson departed, the king told an aide: "I could not bear him. An entirely cold academical professor - an odious man." Wilson, Beschloss notes, for all his rhetoric about liberal democracy, seized authority as a war president with the "passion of an autocrat," running roughshod over civil liberties. Moreover, he refused to deal with Congress as a constitutional equal. No wonder his League of Nations foundered. Who is the greatest war president? This is a good question. Beschloss evinces the most admiration for Abraham Lincoln, who "made himself by far, the most powerful president" the United States had ever seen. Beschloss talks of his "sublime abilities" as a thinker and his "persuasive eloquence," which no other American president has ever surpassed. I agree. While pointing out that Lincoln at times looked like a despot, Beschloss says that there is no indication that he had a "hunger for personal power." It is noticeable that Beschloss only modestly touches on 9/11, Afghanistan or Iraq, asserting, I think rightly, that they are too recent to be written about as history. Surely, however, there are lessons historians could draw from some of these modern wars. As Truman once said, "the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." Moreover, Beschloss does not say much about the Cold War, itself a momentous conflict that long held the world hostage to potential nuclear war. But all this is mere quibbling. There are fascinating nuggets on virtually every page of "Presidents of War." It is a superb and important book, superbly rendered. JAY WINIK is the author of "1944" and "April 1865." He was the first historian in residence at the Council on Foreign Relations. The founders could not have imagined nudetu· war, and the deaths of hundreds of millions.

Prologue The Fugitive And so it had come to this. Horrified as he stood on a height above the Potomac, James Madison, the fourth President of the United States--and now, some wondered, the last?--watched his beloved Washington City as it seemed to vanish into a crimson-orange swirl of fire. It was after midnight on Wednesday, August 24, 1814, and Madison was a fugitive, escaping the Capital--first by ferry, then by galloping horse--for the dark wilderness of Virginia. Still wearing formal knee breeches and buckled shoes, the sixty- three-year-old Madison knew that the invader-incendiaries from Great Britain were out for his capture and arrest, which might force him to be hanged. But he kept dismounting his horse to stare, with those intelligent blue eyes that "sparkled like stars," at the inferno across the Potomac. He could not help himself. As a student of the Bible since col- lege, Madison knew that God had warned Lot's wife not to look back at burning Sodom or else become a pillar of salt. Nevertheless the beleaguered President--who stood about five feet, four inches, and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds--kept gazing at the flaming, otherworldly spectacle, the nadir of the War of 1812, which many Americans bitterly called "Mr. Madison's War." Earlier that day, Madison's popular, shrewd, vivacious wife, Dolley, had stayed behind at the Executive Mansion while James was out reviewing the forces charged with Washington's defense. She asked her husband's enslaved body servant Paul Jennings (who once lauded the President as a man who would not "strike a slave") to bring out ale and cider in anticipation of a three o'clock White House dinner they were planning for Cabinet secretaries, "military gentlemen," and their wives.[1] Dolley hoped that if Washingtonians learned that the President's lady was keeping a normal schedule, they would feel more sanguine about the danger of the approaching British marauders. But she received a worried, scribbled plea from her nearby sister Anna: "Tell me for gods sake where you are. . . . We can hear nothing but what is horrible here." From the Mansion, Dolley peered anxiously through a spyglass with "unwearied anxiety." As she wrote her other sister, Lucy, she was thinking, "Mr. Madison comes not; may God protect him!" Recoiling from the distant booms of British cannon, Dolley refused to flee until "my dear husband" was safe in her arms. But in preparation, she quickly packed letters, books, valuables, a demijohn of wine, and clothes. Determined to prevent the British from grabbing the life-sized portrait of George Washington, an irresistible battle trophy, she called out, "Save that picture! . . . If not possible, destroy it!" She ordered the painting removed from its gilded frame and taken by wagon to a "humble but safe roof," thus ensuring her place in American history. (The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and other treasures had already been slipped into plain linen sacks and taken to a Virginia gristmill.) Then the Madisons' freedman servant James Smith, waving his hat, cantered up with a message from the President: "Clear out! General Armstrong has ordered a retreat!"[2] Stuffing flatware into her handbag, Dolley and Sukey, her enslaved personal maid, were helped into carriages, which rushed them and their traveling companions across the Potomac to the wilds of northern Virginia, where she and James had agreed to meet. But Dolley was told that the President could not be found, and she cowered in agony and tears. Part of her fear stemmed from the fact that the British invaders were not her husband's only en- emies. Furious at the invasion of their Capital and, in fact, at Madison's whole war, some of his own countrymen had vowed to commit violence against the President if he tried to flee the city. "I hear of much hostility towards him," Dolley had warned her sister Lucy. "Disaffection stalks around us." One American had threatened the President with "dagger or poison." According to Paul Jennings, when Dolley was desperately seeking safe haven that night in Virginia, one would-be hostess raged at her, "If that's you, come down and go out! Your husband has got mine out fighting and, damn you, you shan't stay in my house!" Back across the Potomac, about 150 British soldiers--"the most hellish looking fellows that ever trod God's earth," recalled one bystander-- torched the Capitol of the United States. At nine o'clock, spurred on by the British Rear Admiral George Cockburn, soon called "the harlequin of havoc," with "sun-burnt visage and his rusty gold-laced hat," the arsonists had laid siege to the limestone building--two still-unconnected wings shut down in midconstruction by the war. In the chambers of the House, Senate, and Supreme Court, the enemy soldiers piled up mahogany desks, red morocco chairs, green curtains, and books. Before they lit this tinder with rocket powder, Cockburn sat in the House Speaker's chair and mocked the democratic pretensions of Britain's ex-colonies, demanding of his brother redcoats, "Shall this harbor of Yankee 'democracy' be burned? All for it will say, 'Aye!' " Soon the Capitol was enveloped by jagged tongues of orange flame, so searing that glass lamp shades melted. Cockburn decreed the raising of his own country's Union Jack, then, riding on a mule, ordered his redcoats to march double file down Pennsylvania Avenue. Demanding their silence, to avoid arousing Washingtonians to fight back, Cock- burn shouted, "If any man speaks in the ranks, I'll put him to death!" One American yelled at Cockburn that if George Washington were still alive, "you could not have done this." The Admiral replied that George Washington, unlike Madison, would never have "left his capital defenseless, for the purpose of making conquest abroad." Bursting into the White House, Cockburn's soldiers sat down at the dining table--still set with crystal, gold, and silver--and feasted on the Madisons' uneaten Virginia hams and "super-excellent Madeira." Marching upstairs into the President's private dressing room, whose opened drawers betrayed a hasty departure, Cockburn seized the black bicorne military hat owned by the man he derided as "Little Jemmy Madison" and merrily stuck it on the tip of his bayonet. Stealing a seat cushion from Dolley's boudoir, Cockburn made ribald jokes about her voluptuous derriere and breasts. Other redcoats donned the President's starchy shirt and waved his ceremonial sword. Madison's guitar and pianoforte, a half-packed portmanteau, and French sofas and commodes purchased by Thomas Jefferson were all gathered and shoved into a pile in the Mansion's grand oval reception room. These and other spoils of war were lit by perhaps fifty torches, each charged with glowing coals from a nearby tavern. Soon, it was said, the Mansion was "wrapt in one entire flame." Cockburn reputedly finished his night of destruction at a nearby brothel, reveling in "the coarse luxury of lust." James Madison, who had done so much to conceive the political institutions of Washington, DC, was reviled by many of his fellow citizens as the destroyer of their capital city. Vicious handbills appeared, demanding that the President receive a "black and bitter day of retribution" for "this foul stain on our national character." They called him a "coward" who had fled his White House command post for Virginia, "begging" shelter and bread "from door to door"--and a cad, leaving poor Dolley "to shift for herself." Such attacks stung the proud Madison. But his ordeal was more profound. The War of 1812 was the first major conflict conducted by a President of the United States under the document of which Madison was justly revered as the "Father." During the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, Madison and the other Founders had debated the quandaries of war. They sought to ensure that, unlike in the Old World societies governed by sovereigns, Americans would go to war only when it was absolutely necessary--and that the decision would be made not by the President but by the legislature. Virginia's George Mason had written that he was "ag[ainst] giving the power of war to the Executive, because [that branch was] not safely to be trusted with it." James Wilson of Pennsylvania insisted that the Constitution "will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it." Madison himself considered war "the true nurse of executive aggrandizement." As he reminded Jefferson in 1798, "The constitution supposes, what the History of all Gov[ernmen]ts demonstrates, that the Ex[ecutive] Is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legisl[ative]."[3] The 1812 conflict proved to be the first major test of the constitutional system for waging war. In Philadelphia, Madison the Founder had worried that American Presidents, like the European monarchs they execrated, might be tempted to take the nation into military confrontation without a national consensus and an immediate, overwhelming foreign danger. But with the War of 1812, Madison had, however reluctantly, succumbed to exactly that temptation. Much of the country and Congress had opposed waging war with Great Britain, and two years into this struggle, many Americans still did not fully understand why they were fighting. By leading his country into a major war that had no absolute necessity or overwhelming support from Congress and the public, Madison, of all people, had opened the door for later Presidents to seek involvement in future conflicts that suffered from such shortcomings. Madison's fateful decision to seek this war had brought him, after midnight, to this dark Virginia forest, searching for Dolley and running for his life.   [1] The President's residence was not officially called the White House until President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order to this effect in 1901, but the term was occasionally used during Madison's time. [2] General John Armstrong Jr. was Secretary of War. [3] Early in the process, Congress was to be given authority to "make" war, but Madison and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts successfully changed that word to the more specific "declare," so the record shows, "leaving to the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks." Excerpted from Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.