Presidents At War
By opting to invade Iraq, George W. Bush was following in the footsteps of history
Roosevelt did a masterful job, however, better than any other president, far better than Lincoln, of selecting the right commanders for the right tasks early on--Gen. John Marshall for organizing the Army, Adm. Ernest King for directing the Navy, Gen. Douglas MacArthur for the Pacific Theater, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower for the European Theater, and Gen. Matthew Arnold for the Army Air Force. He also did a masterful job, though the work often seemed chaotic, of organizing war production and producing tanks, airplanes, and ships in numbers far greater than almost anyone thought possible.
But plans changed, operations took longer than expected, troops early on performed below expectations, and materiel and equipment were not always plentiful or optimally functional. In the European Theater, the great brunt of casualties was borne by the Soviet Union, and it was possible in 1941 and 1942 that it would collapse. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill feared until nearly the end that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler as he had in August 1939. In the Pacific Theater, the fierce resistance of Japanese troops and the kamikaze attacks of 1944-45 made forward progress exceedingly costly in casualties.
As late as the summer of 1945, some military leaders hesitated to recommend invasion of Japan's home islands because they expected the cost to be 1 million American lives. And even after the atomic bombs exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Japan's emperor had to persuade the military to surrender.
Neither Roosevelt nor Truman in 1945 had plans for what turned out to be the Cold War. The United States was now the world's prime military power. But Truman swiftly demobilized the forces, as public opinion demanded, and the draft was dropped. By 1949, the Soviets had their own atomic bomb--which raised the specter of mutual assured destruction if both sides were to employ the weapons they brandished.
Cold conflict. Truman set the United States on the course it followed, with some deviations, for the 40-plus years of the Cold War. As the Soviets moved to undermine governments in Eastern Europe and replace them with Communist regimes, Truman in March 1947 urged Congress to aid Greece and Turkey to prevent Communist takeover. In the process, he set out an ambitious goal: "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
Under the Truman Doctrine, the draft was reinstated and the armed forces built back up, but in choosing whether to wage war Truman and his successors were constrained by the threat of nuclear war between the two superpowers. Even so, when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel in June 1950, Harry Truman felt obliged to defend South Korea. American forces proved insufficient after the Chinese unexpectedly invaded in November 1950, and the United States and its Allies were thrown back into a southern perimeter around Pusan. General MacArthur responded with an audacious amphibious landing at Inchon. He wanted to go farther, to bomb and attack the Chinese beyond Korea's northern boundary. Truman, fearful of a nuclear confrontation, said no--and when MacArthur persisted, fired him in April 1951. "There is no substitute for victory," MacArthur proclaimed in a speech at West Point. Truman's popularity plunged to a record low.
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