When Harry Truman was President of the United States, he kept on his desk a little sign which announced: “The Buck Stops Here.” This was his salty way of acknowledging the constitutional provision which makes the President the commander in chief of the country’s armed forces and hence vests in him the terrible responsibility for making the life-or-death decisions that have to be made in time of crisis. Elaborate machinery has been set up to inform and guide the President, but the final answers still have to come from him. He can never pass the buck. It comes to the end of the line on his own blotter.
The founding fathers gave the President this power with some misgivings, sensing that this grant of authority was one of the key sections of the Constitution. The simple fact was that the responsibility had to be lodged somewhere. To divide it between Congress and President seemed clearly impractical, and to vest it in the legislature seemed, in the light of past experience, to risk putting too much power in the hands of a soldier. To give the power to the President seemed safest.
Things have changed since those days. The first “war President,” James Madison, had an Army of a few thousand men, a Navy composed of a handful of cruisers and patrol craft, and a War Department whose entire personnel could have convened in one room. Today, by contrast, there are the immense Pentagon apparatus, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and all the rest—an almost incomprehensibly complex array of planners and doers. But the authority remains undiluted. The President still has to say Yes or No. He can neither ignore nor delegate his power; he can only use it.
To see what American Presidents have done with this authority in times of war, Professor Ernest R. May of Harvard has assembled and edited a most enlightening book, The Ultimate Decision, in which a number of writers trace the growth and explore the significance of this charter of authority from 1812 to the present day, and in which Mr. May examines the profound underlying question: Has the job of commander in chief become too great, too complex, and too terrible a job for any one man?
Different war Presidents made their own contributions to the steady expansion of the scope of the Executive’s war powers. Some, like McKinley, were reluctant to use these powers and proceeded with great caution; others, like Lincoln, reached out unhesitatingly to use all of the authority they could get, setting precedents of far-reaching importance. But in the main all of them simply followed the rule the Constitution itself had laid down. As Marcus Cunliffe remarks in his perceptive chapter on Madison’s experience: “In war, the President’s powers grow almost despite himself.” The game was set up that way, and that was the only way to play it.
The Ultimate Decision: the President as Commander in Chief, edited, with an introduction, by Ernest R. May. George Braziller Inc. 290 pp. $6.00.
Madison made this discovery about presidential powers: James K. Polk carried the discovery a step farther. Leonard D. White shows that in the Mexican War the President was given neither the information nor the legislative equipment to make full use of his authority, but he concludes that in spite of handicaps Polk did achieve a genuine unity of command. He proved, as Mr. White puts it, that “a President could also be a commander in chief. A President could run a war.”
Lincoln is often accused of interfering too much in matters of strategy and tactics. T. Harry Williams points out that in doing this he was merely following the established American tradition which came out of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War: “Lincoln was acting only as the civil authority had acted in every previous war. He was doing what he and most people thought the commander in chief ought to do in war.”
In World War I, Wilson largely supported the decisions of his military men. Earlier, however, he had clearly shown the services who was boss. In 1913, when a quarrel with Japan produced a brief war scare, the Joint Board of the Army and Navy made certain recommendations about fleet movements in the Philippine area. Wilson rejected these recommendations, and the Joint Board protested and asked him to reconsider. Icily, Wilson told the Secretary of the Navy that when the President had finally adopted a policy, the admirals and generals could make no protests, “and I wish you would say to them that if this should occur again, there will be no General or Joint Boards. They will be abolished.”
Perhaps we are still too close to Franklin Roosevelt and to Truman to reach even moderately objective appraisals of the way they exercised their war powers. Roosevelt is often accused of letting the military men run the show with too little direction by the civil power; Truman, whose climactic break with General Douglas MacArthur is a matter of very recent memory, is accused of interfering too much. Whatever the final verdict on these points may be, both men were aware of the extent of their powers and used them. Indeed, tracing the course of events in the Korean War, Wilber W. Hoare, Jr., concludes that “in more respects than most, Truman was the commander in chief envisioned by the writers of the Constitution.”
Which brings us down to the present day—in which things are vastly different. Such Presidents as Lincoln, Wilson, and even Roosevelt could do without a great mass of technical and scientific knowledge; today’s President cannot. He must distinguish, for instance, between kiloton and megaton weapons—the difference between which, as Mr. May remarks, “is roughly that between Bronx Park and Bronx County.” He must know a good deal about rocketry. He must have broad knowledge about the intricate military organizations that have been built up around these awesome weapons. He must know so much, indeed, that the question is often raised: Is the joint burden of the Presidency and the command-in-chief so great that it must be divided? If so, just how can the division be made? Do we go back to the system of the Roman republic and have, in effect, two consuls, a President and an almost equal deputy? Must our President, in future, be commander in chief in name only?
Mr. May thinks not. The basic decisions still have to be made by someone, and strategy must continue to remain the servant of policy. Whether they were right or wrong, wise or stupid, all of our Presidents who have waged war have done so as politicians, with a final sense of responsibility to public opinion. To Mr. May, it finally comes down to this: “The issue is not only whether one man can stand the double strain of the Presidency and the command-in-chief, but also whether the nation can stand to have any man except one, the President and commander in chief, determine what its fate shall be.”
Failure of a President
By BRUCE CATTON
One American President usually gets omitted from the list of chief executives who have led their countrymen in time of war. Jefferson Davis was also a war President; and if he was not President of the United States, he was at least President of an American nation whose constitution, as far as war powers were concerned, was almost identical with that of the United States. Is it possible to shed any light on the general question of how a President must act in time of war by examining his experience?
Davis was no man to let any scrap of presidential authority go unused. He was commander in chief, and he worked at it day and night, in season and out of season; his trouble, as a matter of fact, may have been that he worked at it too much, concerning himself with masses of detail that clerks might have handled and reducing his Secretary of War to a limited and subordinate position. But in any event, no one in the Confederacy was ever in the least doubt about who was running things.
The question, then, is how all of this worked out; and a sharply critical answer is returned by Clifford Dowdey in Lee’s Last Campaign, which is of course principally a study of Robert E. Lee’s actions during the final year of the Civil War but which also, of necessity, is an examination of Davis’ actions as commander in chief.
Mr. Dowdey, studying the 1864 campaign in Virginia in great detail and with expert knowledge, concludes that General Lee was ruinously handicapped by President Davis’ supervision. The chief trouble was not that the President told Lee when, where, and how to fight; Davis was much too intelligent to try anything like that, and Lee would not have stood for it if he had tried it. But Davis had set up a rigid, compartmentalized system for the control of the Confederacy’s separate armies, and this system he refused to modify even when the enemy was at the gates. Not until it was too late was Lee able to exercise control over all of the forces that were resisting the Federal drive on Richmond. In effect, the Confederacy in its hour of supreme peril opposed a badly divided command to a command that had been grimly unified. The result was disaster.
General Ulysses S. Grant, supreme commander of the Federal forces, set out in May of 1864 to crush the Confederate armies in Virginia and take Richmond. His principal weapon was the powerful Army of the Potomac, which Grant led directly against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In addition, Grant had two other armies: one led by General Benjamin Butler, which came up the James River prepared to capture Petersburg, the railroad junction whose loss would involve the loss of Richmond; the other, General Franz Sigel’s Army of the Shenandoah, which was to move up the great valley of Virginia, cut off the principal source of Lee’s supplies, and eventually move east and come in on Richmond from the rear.
Against these, Lee could control only his own Army of Northern Virginia. The defense against Butler was out of his department, and he had nothing to do with it; similarly with the defense against Sigel. Luckily for Lee, both Butler and Sigel were generals of surpassing incompetence, who managed to fumble their assignments with an all-embracing woolliness of mind; the Federals failed to win an easy victory which two moderately skilled soldiers would have won without more than half an effort, and Lee was permitted to go on making his extremely skillful and devoted campaign against Grant’s principal army. But the fundamental flaw in the Confederate defense system proved ruinous. Lee put up, against the Army of the Potomac, a defense which should have been effective; but because he could not control the armies which resisted the other prongs of Grant’s offensive, this defense was practically nullified, and Lee was at last pinned within the lines at Petersburg, condemned to fight a war which he could not hope to win. The Federal superiority in man power and material resources was allowed to exert its force. Once the siege of Petersburg began, the outcome—as Lee himself had foreseen from the beginning—was simply a matter of time.
Lee’s Last Campaign: the Story of Lee and His Men Against Grant, 1864, by Clifford Dowdey. Little, Brown and Co. 415 pp. $6.00.
This, according to Mr. Dowdey, was principally Davis’ fault. He would not turn over supreme command of all the armies in Virginia to Lee—not until it was too late. He confined Lee to one small sector of the whole. In that sector Lee proved as effective as ever, but to be effective in this one area was not enough. The Federals were making an all-out push; Lee was condemned to make a limited reply, and despite his military genius a limited reply could not be good enough.
Davis was the constitutional commander in chief; he understood the exact scope of his powers, and he used them with courage and devotion. The real trouble, if Mr. Dowdey has it right—and it would be hard to quarrel with him very seriously—was that Davis used them in the wrong way.
An American President is responsible for everything his country does in time of war. He has been given extraordinary powers, and he is supposed to use them to win a victory. But that does not necessarily mean that he must exert constant, day-by-day control over the things his armies do. He controls high policy, which means that the victory which his armies win must at last be the kind of victory that will make his political aims secure, but he goes beyond that at his peril. Once he sees himself as primarily the strategist and the tactician, the man without whose consent no soldier may move, fire a musket, or button his coat, he begins to interfere with the experts who are supposed to be at his service but who must be allowed to achieve his aims in their own way.
The President, then, who is commander in chief, must understand and use his powers to the full, but he must not abuse them. Probably it is just as well that he usually is not a trained soldier himself; not being one, he is more likely to understand his own limitations. One of the fascinating aspects of the comparison between Davis and Lincoln is that Davis was a trained soldier and Lincoln was an unblemished amateur. Being a trained soldier, Davis tried to be a soldier, and the outcome was ruin for his cause. Being wholly untrained, Lincoln came before long to see that there were things he could not do, and so he let the soldiers do them. The result was victory.
Davis is a tragic and appealing figure in American history. He failed, mostly because the cards were stacked against him, but at least in part because he was too literal in his interpretation of the duties of the civilian commander in chief. Mr. Dowdey’s book makes an excellent companion piece to the study engineered by Mr. May.
The Meaning of Victory
By BRUCE CATTON
Meanwhile, there was Lincoln, who—perhaps more than any other President—saw the full potentialities of a President’s wartime powers and used them up to the hilt. What about him? What came of his essay in understanding and exercising the enormous authority which the Constitution gives to a chief executive in time of war?
A great deal came of it, including a complete transformation of American society and a revolutionary change in the American scheme of things. Lincoln accepted the challenge of secession in 1861 as something revolutionary, and he did not hesitate to use revolutionary means to meet it. His war powers, as he saw them, were all but unlimited; in effect, he believed that as commander in chief he could do just about anything that needed to be done to win the war, and most of these things he unhesitatingly did. America has never been the same since.
Allan Nevins looks into all of this in the sixth volume of his monumental examination of the causes, development, outcome, and effect of the Civil War, entitled The War for the Union: War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863. He begins his story early in 1862, when the Federal cause seemed to be winning on all fronts, takes it through the disasters which were inflicted in the spring and summer of that year, and goes on to the beginning of the summer of 1863, when the Union cause was on the verge of winning the enormous victories of Vicksburg and Gettysburg; and he is concerned not so much with showing how and why an apparent victory turned to defeat and then became victory again, as with tracing what happened to the American nation in the process.
What happened to the nation, as Mr. Nevins sees it, was that in effect it was born anew. It became a different nation. It had been loose, amorphous, a sprawling agglomeration of people and resources which, amoeba-like, had no real central nervous system and no real sense of direction. It became hard, compact, organized, a modern America swinging enthusiastically into the industrial revolution, compressing into a few years a development which otherwise might have taken decades, or for that matter might have come out quite differently; and this happened, mostly, because the President with intense singleness of purpose marshaled all of the country’s powers for victory in war.
To do all of this, Mr. Nevins believes, Lincoln had to handle a political-party revolution, an economic revolution, and a social revolution—and, possibly, an intellectual revolution as well. His armies not only had to win victories in the field; they had to be organized, equipped, transported, and supported in such a way that the victories would be possible, and to do all of this changed the nation. The American businessmen had to learn—and the war soon taught them—that they could “create a new economic world as the Revolutionary generation had created a new political world.” The ordinary citizen had to learn that the great war for the Union had to become a war for human freedom as well if it were to be won; the politicians had to learn that their separate struggles for power and advantage must be keyed to the dominating fact of a North unified at least enough to bring its full power to bear on the rebellion; and the soldiers had to learn that their part was to win victories in the field, leaving it to the government at Washington to say just what those victories were aimed at.
The War for the Union: War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863, by Allan Nevins. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 557 pp. $7.50.
All of this, with immense endurance and staggering effort, Lincoln brought about; and Mr. Nevins’ point is that although Federal victory early in 1862 would simply have meant reunion, with no great change in the country that had gained reunion, victory postponed past Vicksburg and Gettysburg necessarily meant a fundamental change in the state of the American nation, the American economy, and American society. The effort that would have to be made after the spring of 1862 would be so profound that it would force changes whether anyone wanted them or did not want them. Once the war got past its mid-point, it was revolution, regardless of what anyone wanted.
How much of all of this did Lincoln himself see at the time? The question is impossible to answer definitely. Lincoln was in a position where he had to improvise, and what comes of improvisations when a nation’s future is at stake is anyone’s guess. The point is that he took the powers that had been given him and used them to the full—and always for a political purpose. His generals might do, or might want to do, this, that, or the other thing; Lincoln concerned himself all the time with what the victory they were fighting for would finally mean, and he never let anyone take the control of that aspect of the war away from him. Once he had found the technicians he needed—the Grants, Shermans, Thomases and so on—he gave them carte blanche. But he never allowed the central thread to get out of his hands.
