Should a soldier lead the White House?
By Ross K. Baker
If you are part of that small fraction of Americans who are paying close attention to the Democratic presidential nominating contest, the recent announcement of candidacy by retired general Wesley Clark and his quick rise to the top of the polls must have been a real shocker. Not only did he surge ahead of his nearest Democratic rival, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, but Clark edged out President Bush in a hypothetical polling matchup.
Clark's jet-assisted takeoff is ascribed to an illustrious military career that gives him, almost alone among Democrats, the credentials to challenge Bush on national security issues. But a chest full of ribbons and a sterling combat record are no guarantee of success — either as candidate or as a president.
The latest example of a professional soldier as president is Dwight D. Eisenhower. Although he commanded all Allied forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower was not primarily a combat leader. He was a gifted staff officer, a kind of military bureaucrat who excelled at organization and had a pleasing disposition. That enabled him to deal with such difficult individuals as Gen. George Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. He was not a bad president, but he hardly ranks among our greatest.
Before Eisenhower, you have to go back to Ulysses Grant to find an academy-trained career officer of high rank who managed to capture the White House. There were generals in abundance as candidates and as presidents from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the 19th century, but these were essentially citizen soldiers who won high rank on the battlefield. Presidents Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield and Benjamin Harrison all ended the war with stars on their shoulders, but none was a professional soldier. Only Grant, deemed a failed president for the cloud of corruption that surrounded his administration, was a career officer.
One West Pointer, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, won the Democratic nomination in 1880, but was nosed out of the White House by former major general Garfield, who had been a college president.
Although the tradition of soldier-as-president began with George Washington, the military credentials of most of his successors in that office were astonishingly thin. Abraham Lincoln's service as a junior officer in the Black Hawk War wasn't one of his notable achievements. Between Washington's administration and the Civil War's end, there were several political generals, including Andrew Jackson and Franklin Pierce, and two long-time soldiers, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor. In most cases, high rank was a political ornament, not a reward for long service.
Most students of the presidency, of course, take note only of the winners. The ranks of also-rans are filled with high-ranking military officers. Douglas MacArthur, a hero for his conquest of Japan, never even got close to the Republican nomination in 1952. In the 1988 primaries, former general Alexander Haig was an early dropout. More distantly, the celebrated soldier Gen. Leonard Wood failed to get the 1920 GOP nomination.
Perhaps the most ignominious showing was by a military officer who embodied the triumph of the U.S. as a new imperial power, Adm. George Dewey. The overused adjective "iconic" actually fits Dewey well. After his fleet's gallant dash to Manila Bay to destroy the overmatched Spanish fleet in 1898, Dewey's image appeared on everything from wall clocks and dinner plates to candy dishes and hat racks. But when he ventured onto political terrain in the hopes of securing the Democratic nomination in 1900, he made one of the most imbecilic statements ever uttered by a presidential hopeful. The office of the presidency, he asserted, "is not such a difficult one to fill."
Even in 1900 that statement was preposterous. His candidacy sank like a Spanish battleship.
The decidedly mixed political record of generals and admirals tells us that those who doff the uniform and plunge right into the political skirmish don't do as well as those who get a little civilian seasoning. Eisenhower, in some ways the best of the successful soldier-politicians, served as president of Columbia University during his transition from the Army to the GOP nomination in 1952. Grant served only briefly as an interim secretary of War under President Andrew Johnson but was mostly untutored in civilian politics.
A lifetime in the military can be too much of a good thing. To have served honorably as a civilian soldier may be enough to reassure voters that your patriotism is firmly intact and you know one end of a rifle from the other, but you are not so steeped in the armed forces' structured environment that you might not easily adjust to the zaniness of politics and its lack of anything resembling a chain of command.
Clark, however, is not exactly a neophyte in the world of politics. No one rises in the military as spectacularly as he did without political skills, and he also has been exposed to the corporate world as a consultant. In government, however, orders issued are not necessarily orders executed. The scope of the presidency, moreover, is more dauntingly complex than even the most elaborate military campaign.
Outgoing President Harry Truman, reflected with a sinking heart on just that after a briefing for president-elect Eisenhower on Nov. 18, 1952: "I had the feeling that, up to this meeting in the White House, Gen. Eisenhower had not grasped the immense job ahead of him," Truman wrote. "... It may have been that this meeting made him realize for the first time what the presidency and the responsibilities of the president were. ... If that is so, I can almost understand his frozen grimness throughout the meeting."
Truman, the former artillery captain, spoke with seven years of White House experience behind him. He recognized that however dense the fog of war, the smog of politics is a good deal murkier.
Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, is on USA TODAY's |
