This piece in yesterdays WSJ was just tremendous.
Great Leaders Are Forged in War
All past criteria of merit fade when the shooting starts.
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Monday, September 24, 2001 12:01 a.m.
"Great battles," Winston Churchill remarked, "change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, in armies and in nations." We have suffered a calamitous tragedy on Sept. 11--twice the dead of Shiloh--only to have awakened to the world turned upside down. Old orthodoxies are no more; what is to follow is still unsure and untried. In the battles to come we will not have the luxury of the moral smugness of our past, and so no need for the tired voices of conciliation and impotence. The terrible cloud over Manhattan has also ended the era of hesitancy--of kind, predictable, and cautious leaders whose sobriety proved to be their weakness, their reluctance to act now revealed as the recklessness of inaction.
President Bush appears a different sort. He was said to be inarticulate and incapable of leadership. As we saw Thursday night, neither is true. He radiates instead seriousness, even anger. His sternness is so far without arrogance. The president's mettle shows signs that it may prevail in the setbacks to come, when the universities, Europeans and media revile him, or even amid success, when our diplomats and experts beg him to prevaricate and cease.
What are we, then, to look for in our president and his subordinates in the months ahead?
First, an unquestioned faith in victory, without which no great captain can marshal his troops. Pericles rebuked his demoralized and plague-ridden Athenians when the Spartans were in sight of his walls and reminded them that they, not their enemies, were to be feared. Churchill predicted the destruction of Germany even as bombs fell on London. Such confidence in total victory must be near religious in a leader, requiring the acceptance of nearly any cost when calculating "the terrible arithmetic" of battle. President Bush, in his avowals about the fate of his presidency, seems already to grasp that singular leadership requires a sense of personal fatalism, that all of one's past ambitions and aspirations hinge solely now on triumph of the moment.
Leadership in democracy also demands transcendence--the constant reminder to a free and affluent citizenry that their killing and dying is for a higher purpose beyond battlefield victory. At Salamis, the Athenians chanted "Free your native soil" as they speared drowning Persians. We must be retold that we fight to remember the dead, to save the innocent, and to end the violence. Democracies are derided as decadent and soft. They are neither when aroused; but it requires vision to convince a complacent citizenry that moderation in war is imbecility, that true humanity is to end those who would slay the helpless.
Successful command is an outgrowth not merely of confidence, but at times of understated arrogance as well. Caesar, Wellington, Nelson and Grant were not much concerned with what the enemy might do--Are our European allies on board? Might our response prompt greater conflagration in the Muslim world? Can we conquer this new face of terror?--but focused instead on what they knew they could and would do to the enemy. When told that the Athenians opposed his great trek to free the Spartan helots, the philosopher-general Epaminondas scoffed to his Theban soldiers to dismiss such empty threats. Instead, he wagered that it was more likely that his army might well take a detour into Athens, dismantle her majestic temples, and re-erect them atop the Theban acropolis.
So great leaders are not only unpredictable, but often a little frightening. Ronald Reagan at times surely was, but so too on brief occasions were Presidents Truman and Kennedy. President Bush has shown such flashes of anger, and sometimes real emotion, which has already registered among the Taliban. Still, we have been lectured by moderate Arab regimes on what we cannot do, even to the extent that the naming of our campaign "Infinite Justice" is inappropriate. We are waiting for leaders who will advise them sternly that nomenclature is the least of their worries, when 6,000 to 7,000 of our kin are killed in the streets by men from their shores. Periodic scariness is not a vice of military leadership.
Leaders in a democracy must mingle with the rest of us, just as our president walked amid the rubble and hugged our brave rescue workers. But unlike President Clinton, who discussed the nature of his underwear and donned shades to play the saxophone, great captains are not entirely one with the people they lead. Pericles, Wellington, Don Juan at Lepanto, Montgomery and Patton were all beloved by their rank and file. Yet such affinity grew out of the knowledge that these more articulate and polished men sought to elevate their soldiers rather than to descend below them.
Every great army has a soul; it is nourished on military competence along with success; but without an identity and élan it eventually starves. In that regard, commanders must possess real personality, if not eccentricity, both natural and induced. Wellington's nose, Churchill's jowls, Roosevelt's cigarette, Montgomery's beret and Patton's pistols are essential in a leader, whose speech and very manner instantly identify him as memorable.
Consequently, history's battlefield stalwarts are rarely consensus builders. While not insubordinate, they are often at odds with their overseers who strive to monitor and rein in their zeal. President Bush must recognize and accept this as a law of war. In the coming crucible, the nation's real benefactors may prove the most odious to organization and bureaucracy. Sherman was advised by both his superiors that it was foolhardy to go into Georgia. He soon proved to be no Halleck. When Alexander the Great was advised by Parmenio that he would not dare fight against the odds at Gaugamela, Alexander retorted, "I would not either if I were Parmenio."
We have enough handlers and experts to curb our leaders' exuberance, but in our present age far too little audacity. We need generals who this time may well resign if told not to go to Baghdad. They may well misspeak in public. Themistocles and Patton were at last relieved of command; Sherman and Grant came close--Bradley, Mark Clark and Hodges never. History, not the popularity of contemporaries, ultimately decides who were the real peacemakers.
All past criteria of merit also fade when the shooting starts. George McClellan was a dapper executive salaried at $10,000 a year before 1861, only to give way to the slovenly ex-grocer Grant and the unstable Sherman--men whose temperament and comportment made them unfit for high service in times of peace. We do not require "A" students with impressive recommendations, but scrappers who have been overlooked amid the order and routine of the past--the more eager and desperate the better, who know opportunity and fate are not ordained, but fleeting and of the moment.
Scipio Africanus was an untried and ignored youth when Hannibal entered Italy; he crushed him at Zama a few years later. An uncouth, cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay frightened us in peace; we may not have won without him in war. Nathan Bedford Forrest was an atrocious man of the antebellum South; his genius unleashed in war nearly saved his cause.
Are there still such leaders among us, in this, the age of our greatest affluence and cynicism? Perhaps. Some like the once discounted mayor of New York have already come to the fore; others more anonymous at the Department of Defense have shown admirable resolve. Our president with flashing eyes, it turns out, may as well.
Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is the author, most recently, of "Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power" (Doubleday, 2001).
Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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