Waging war from the Oval Office

PRESIDENTS OF WAR  
Michael Beschloss
Crown
739 pages; $35
 
The most agonising 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 candour 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 marvellous 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, Mr 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.

 
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. Mr 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.

 
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.
 
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, Mr Beschloss says little more. The issue cries out for a treatment of its own.

 
As Mr 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. 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.
 
Mr 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.”
 
Who is the greatest war president? This is a good question. Mr Beschloss evinces the most admiration for Abraham Lincoln, who “made himself by far, the most powerful president” the United States had ever seen. Mr 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, Mr Beschloss says that there is no indication that he had a “hunger for personal power.”

 
It is noticeable that Mr 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.”
 
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.
 ©2018The New York Times News Service