Presidents of War

Michael Beschloss, “Presidents of War, Crown, 2018, 586 pp.

I read and follow many of Bill Gates' recommendations on what to read:  Presidents of War is one of those.  It  has extensive coverage of the Vietnam conflict, but also covers the eight other major conflicts the U.S. entered between the turn of the 19th century and the 1990s.

Since the start of the Republic, eight Presidents of the US have taken the American people into major wars roughly once in a generation and one, Jefferson, refused.  Above all the book shows how President’s dealt with political power under the Constitution when leading the country into conflict. 

The framers knew that European monarchs had abused their absolute authority to make war: if a regime was growing unpopular they sometimes cited or invented a foreign danger in order to launch a war that would unite their people and expand their own power and popular esteem.  To reduce this risk the Constitution gave Congress the sole power to declare war, and divided the responsibility to wage war between the executive and legislative branches (see addenda).  This hasn’t worked out too well; the last time a President asked Congress to declare war was 1942. (Viif).

This book chronicles the notion of presidential war and how it took hold step by step through eight conflicts beginning with James Madison allowing himself to become the champion of a war against England—despite the absence of an immediate, overwhelming danger, uneven support from Congress and the American people, and an over-reaching mission that included a grab for Canada.  Madison was satisfied that his ends would justify his means; James Polk lied and connived, creating a pretext for a war that, despite his public claims, he designed to allow the US to seize vast territory from Mexico.  With the sinking of the Maine, McKinley showed how an outrageous offense that took American lives could be employed to almost instantly unite the country for war.  So did FDR after Pearl Harbor.  The experiences of Woodrow Wilson and FDR demonstrated how a major war could enhance a president’s contemporary standing and expand the power of his branch of government.  Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and later Presidents proved that the Constitution’s demand for congressional war declarations could be ignored without serious penalty.  Nowadays with no military draft Presidents who consider taking the nation into major conflict may not feel as constrained as earlier leaders by a fear that a widespread antiwar movement might erupt.

Of course the founders could not foresee nuclear weapons that could be delivered leaving a President with little more than a moment to respond.  Nor could they have foreseen a major war initiated by a cyberattack which would compel a quick response from a President working secretly with the intelligence community.

My Notes:

War of 1812:

Pg. 5:  The 1812 conflict proved to be the first major test of the constitutional system for waging war.  By leading his country into a major war that had no absolute necessity or overwhelming support from Congress and the public, Madison had opened the door for later Presidents to seek involvement in future conflicts that suffered from such shortcomings.  Jefferson had avoided this confrontation in 1807, called the Chesapeake–Leopard affair: a naval engagement that occurred on June 22, 1807, between the British warship HMS Leopard and the American frigate USS Chesapeake. The crew of Leopard pursued, attacked, and boarded the American frigate, looking for deserters from the Royal Navy.

On June 1, 1812, President James Madison sent a message to Congress recounting American grievances against Great Britain, though not specifically calling for a declaration of war. The House of Representatives then deliberated for four days behind closed doors before voting 79 to 49 (61%) in favor of the first declaration of war. The Senate concurred in the declaration by a 19 to 13 (59%) vote in favor. The conflict began formally on June 18, 1812, when Madison signed the measure into law and proclaimed it the next day. This was the first time that the United States had declared war on another nation, and the Congressional vote was the closest vote in American history to formally declare war. The United States was not prepared to prosecute a war; inexperienced in military affairs, Madison deluded himself into thinking that this war would be predicable and brief, with a few quick battles against a British force distracted by their current struggle against Napoleon, after which Canada would tumble into American hands and London would plead for peace. In 1812, the American regular army consisted of fewer than 12,000 men.

Pg. 64:  In July 1812, General William Hull (Governor of the Michigan Territory) led about 2,500 troops into Canada.  Hull was soon defeated and gave up almost two thousand troops as prisoners.  In 1815 in the battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson defeated the British not knowing the war had already ended.  The Treaty of Ghent essentially restored the state of affairs that prevailed before the War of 1812. The war had cost the nation perhaps 2,260 combat deaths and 4,505 wounded.

War against Mexico:

Pg. 97f:  James Polk’s war against Mexico was spurred in the spring of 1846 by the ambush, near the Rio Grande of Captain Seth Thornton.  It was a setup job by the administration to provoke a response.  This provocation failed but sending General Taylor to the Rio Grande allowed the President to persuade the American people to back a war that was supposed to be largely in retaliation for Seth Thornton’s border skirmish but, in fact, was a device for Polk to secure Texas, New Mexico, and California.  In the absence of the Thornton affair Polk would have had been forced to ask Congress for a war declaration.  (Texas became the twenty-eighth state of the Union on December 29, 1845.) 

Pg. 149f:   The Mexican War saw 1,733 Americans killed in combat, 11,550 who died—mainly of disease—and 4,152 wounded.  The Mexicans suffered perhaps 5,000 battle deaths.  The treaty was signed on July 4, 1849.

Civil War:

Pg. 159ff:  Lincoln was elected President without a single electoral vote from a Southern or border state.  As Lincoln would not take office until the next March, it fell to President Buchanan to determine whether or not to hold onto Fort Sumter.  Robert Anderson had moved his garrison from the vulnerable Moultrie to Fort Sumter.  Lincoln was convinced that he must let the Confederates be the aggressor in order to unite Americans of the North to preserve the Union.  On April 12, 1861 Fort Sumter came under attack.  However, at no time would Lincoln ask the House and Senate for a declaration of war against war, to do so would accept the proposition that secession by the states was legal, which would mean that the Union was fighting a foreign power.  From Lincoln’s perspective the Constitution forbade a state from departing the Union.  Lincoln felt that this rebellion was much like the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and should so be treated.

Pg. 204:  In August 1961 Lincoln invited African American leaders to the White House where he made the case for colonization, advising them that ‘we have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races and it is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.  This proposal would only affect slaves in enemy areas because Lincoln could not change the law against slavery without consent from Congress.

Pg. 214:  Voluntary enlistments to fight with the Union seemed in danger of drying up, so Lincoln persuaded Congress to impose the first wartime draft in American history.  The rich could avoid going to war by hiring a substitute or paying a fee of $300 (about $5,600 today).

Pg. 225:  On September 1, 1864 Sherman took Atlanta. This effectively ended McClellan’s run for President and the possibility he would shut down the war.

Pg. 236:  Unlike Polk, Lincoln did not trick or lie to Congress.  Also, unlike Polk he did not deliberately provoke a counterfeit incident to launch his war.

War with Spain:

On February 15, 1898 the United States battleship Maine, riding quietly at anchor in Havana harbor, was suddenly blown up, apparently by a mine, in an explosion which tore her bottom out and sank her, killing 264 officers and men on board, 94 survived.  The sinking turned out later to have been an accident, not a mine.  It appears that the Maine blew up because its coal bunker blew up, igniting its magazines. (P. 259).

Pg. 265f:  McKinley was anxious that Germany or Japan might try to seize the Philippines, so he decided that at least part of the archipelago should be acquired for the US—although not as a state of the Union.  On similar terms, he was also eager to annex Guam and the Hawaiian Islands.  Sounding almost like Polk during the Mexican ‘war, McKinley told his personal secretary “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California.  It is manifest destiny.”  However, McKinley avowed no ambition to annex Cuba, only to liberate it from its Spanish rulers.  After voting to declare this war, Congress had gone on to pass an amendment stipulating that any American military action in Cuba must culminate in handing control of the island to its people.

WWI:

The January 17, 1917, Zimmerman cable from the German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, told his Ambassador to the US and Mexico that Germany would start unrestricted submarine warfare on the Atlantic.  The telegram had been sent on an American transatlantic circuit and London had been illicitly reading their messages.  So before revealing the message to the US the Brits had to find a version of the message sent by some other channel so the US would not know how aggressively England was spying on the Americans.  They succeeded in getting a copy from the Mexican telegraph office.  This version contained alarming new details proposing that Germany and Mexico should make war together.  Mexico could reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. (Pg. 295f)

Pg. 303:  On May 7, 1915, off the Irish coast, a German submarine sank the British transatlantic ship Lusitania.  Of the 1,198 passengers killed, 128 were Americans.  Knowing from the Maine incident how the sinking of one ship could move Americans to cry war, Wilson refused to incite the war.  He made the statement that “there was such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.” 

Pg. 307:  Wilson barely edged out Hughes in his run for a second term in 1916, only defeating Hughes 277 to 254 electoral votes and 49.2 percent to 46.1 of the popular vote.  Wilson would have been defeated but for the 3,806-vote lead he won in California.

Pg. 321:  When the US entered WWI, the US Army numbered little more than a hundred thousand soldiers.  When asking for volunteers did not work, Wilson asked the House and Senate to endorse military conscription. 

Pg. 355:  For all his high-flown scholarly rhetoric about liberal democracy, the moment Wilson became a war President, he grabbed for authority with some of the passion of an autocrat.  (To the best of my knowledge, so did all the other ‘war’ presidents).

WWII:

Pg. 381:  FDR did little in 1937 when Japan attacked China, then in July 1940, when Japan threatened Dutch, French, and British colonial possessions, Roosevelt imposed an embargo against Japan, forbidding many exports of oil, gasoline, steel, and iron.  At the time, Japan relied on the US for 80 percent of its petroleum.  That fall, Japan made an alliance with Hitler and Mussolini.  Roosevelt discovered Acheson’s caprice he feared that publicly reversing it would allow critics to charge him with appeasing Japan.  This vicious circle of reprisals and counter reprisals would bring eventual war with Japan.  (At the time, inside Japan, there was a feud over what to do—Acheson settled the matter in the favor of the militants.)

Pg. 443:  After Japan’s defeat and its eviction from Korea, the US and the Soviet Union divided the Korean peninsula at the thirty-eighth parallel.  By 1948, the Soviet and American zones had evolved into national entities of their own, with the Communist North under Kim II-sung and the South’s Republic of Korea under President Syngman Rhee, US and Soviet troops withdrew from the peninsula. 

Pg. 444:  In January 1950, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson (the same one that had unauthorized provoked Japan in WWII) now accidentally signaled Kim II-sung that America might not respond with military action should his armies invade the South.  In his speech, Acheson described the American defense perimeter in East Asia but did not include Taiwan or South Korea, which, he said, would be protected by the United Nations.

Pg. 445:  On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, Truman was enraged and knew not responding through the UN would severely jeopardize the legitimacy of the UN.  The UN Security Council met at the behest of the US.  The Soviet envoy was absent in protest to the council’s failure to unseat a delegate from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese regime after Mao’s revolution and hence unable to veto a US-proposed resolution to condemn the unprovoked attack on South Korea and demand an immediate halt to hostilities and removal of the North’s troops.  So the US was able to react under the guise of aid to the United Nations. But the United Nations Participation Act of 1945 required that a President ask permission from Congress before providing armed forces to the United Nations; nevertheless, in the summer of 1950, a Senate and House that were both dominated by Truman’s own party made no serious effort to hold the President to the letter of this law on Korea. (P. 459). Thus Truman became the first President to engage the country in a major foreign conflict—this one potentially risking war with China—without bothering to ask Congress for a war declaration.  This established a dangerous example for future American Presidents.  (Note: in 1948, with the start of the Cold War, Congress had launched the second peacetime draft in American history).

Pg. 478:  The talks ending the Korean War were stalemated when the North demanded that roughly 132,000 North Korean prisoners of war be returned to its un-tender mercies.  Truman refused.

Pg. 487:  Eisenhower sought to break the deadlock of the talks by sending secret messages to the Chinese that if the Korean War did not end soon, the US might turn to the ultimate weapon.  Stalin died and by June 1953 China relaxed its position on POWs, which opened the way to a settlement.  The peninsula was divided at the thirty-eighth parallel, amid a formal state of war that remains to this day.  Eisenhower was convinced that his secret nuclear threat had made the difference. 

Vietnam War:

Pg. 517:  On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, House: 414-0; Senate: 88-2, authorized President Johnson to take any measures he believed were necessary to retaliate and to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia.

Pg. 521:  The Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, grew suspicious about the Gulf of Tonkin incident earlier than most of his colleagues.  In January 1968, with more than a half million Americans fighting in Vietnam and Johnson’s war by then a catastrophe Fulbright ordered a secret study by his committee of whether the Tonkin episode had been a charade engineered by the President to push an unwitting country into conflict. (Fulbright’s findings were kept from the American public until 2010)...It was fortunate for Johnson that Americans did not learn that soon after Congress passed the Resolution, Johnson was secretly informed that there was probably never any August 4 attack by the North Vietnamese.  In any event, Johnson refused to take the political risk of informing Congress and retract the resolution that was based on the ‘attack.’  (The navy had reported an attack but they may have been shooting a flying fish, not Vietnamese).  (Also important to remember that Johnson was running for election against Goldwater that summer).

Pg.535f:  Johnson decided in early 1965 to accommodate Westmoreland’s request to call up 600,000 reinforcements for Vietnam.  Johnson was counseled by some to declare a state of national emergency asking Americans for higher taxes and other forms of sacrifice.  But, recalling how Truman’s proclamation had damaged his popularity, Johnson refused, especially while he was still imploring Congress to enact the Great Society program.  Then in November of 1965, the Joint Chiefs asked for 113,000 more troops, a naval blockade of the North, isolation of its vital port of Haiphong, and a B-52 bombing assault against Hanoi.  Johnson refused, calling them all shitheads and told them to get out of the room.  In 1966, with campus revolts exploding, Johnson did acquiesce in the Chiefs requests.

Pg. 555:  In Johnson’s 1968 State of the Union he stated that Vietnam had been defeated ‘in battle after battle.’  Westmoreland formed a secret group to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons, should the ‘highest national authority’ find it necessary to save US troops at Khe Sanh.  However, Johnson, unlike Eisenhower, had decided that nuclear weapons should only be considered in the event of a showdown with the Soviet Union.

Pg. 570:  Johnson was informed of evidence that Nixon was indirectly trying to convince South Vietnam that they would get a better deal if they sat out the peace talks in 1968 that Johnson was arranging.  (Nixon’s aides may have been responsible—no direct link to Nixon has been revealed.).

Iraq War:

Pg. 579:  In August 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, Bush saw the assault as a test of the post-Cold War world, showing whether UN members would be allowed to oppress one another, as well as a danger to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Middle East states.  Bush dispatched more than half a million Americans to the region and built an international coalition.  Bush asked Congress for a resolution enabling him to unleash war against the Iraqis.  Although the Democrats were in control, the House acceded by 250 to 183, and the Senate by 52 to 47.

Pg. 584ff:  The framers of the Constitution had dreamt that war would be a last resort under the political system they had invented and war would be declared by Congress, not by the chief of state.  But only sixty years later Daniel Webster, viewing the conflict with Mexico as unnecessary, warned against what he decried as ‘a Presidential war.’  After WWII, although Presidents requested more modest forms of authorization, they stopped bothering to ask Congress to fulfill its constitutional mandate to declare war before major foreign conflicts, and the House and the Senate did not seriously object. 

Addenda:

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution vests in the Congress the power to declare war, in the following wording:

[The Congress shall have Power...] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water…To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;