At this juncture, we can stipulate that President Trump would probably have been well advised to follow Gen. John Kelly’s reported advice and write a letter of condolence to the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson instead of calling her on the telephone. No doubt Trump had reasoned that words of regret, delivered personally, would be preferable to some palliative message mailed from the White House on behalf of the nation. How wrong he was.
To be sure, Donald Trump is scarcely our most articulate president. But his awkward tribute to the Army sergeant killed in action in Niger was, in his fashion, deeply felt and sincerely expressed to the soldier’s widow. What Trump failed to realize, and had no way of knowing, was that a bumptious member of Congress would be eavesdropping on his telephone call—and in the toxic atmosphere of contemporary discourse, eager to denounce him publicly for whatever was said privately.
Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) may not be quite the “empty barrel” that General Kelly described in his hasty press conference, but her own comportment and words (“I have to tell my kids that I’m a rock star now”) speak for themselves. In a perfect political world, further comment from the president or his chief of staff would have been superfluous. In that sense, General Kelly might have benefited from the same counsel of restraint he had offered President Trump.
So now we are engaged in a great civil war about whether the president of the United States “disrespected” Sergeant Johnson and his grieving widow, and what Rep. Frederica S. Wilson may or may not have said when the ribbon was cut for an FBI field office in Florida. The national press corps is in full umbrage mode—Is the phrase “empty barrel” a racial epithet? Should retired officers serve on the White House staff?—but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the whole sorry episode might well have been avoided if Trump had settled for signing a letter. As usual, no good deed goes unpunished.
The irony, of course, is that expressions of presidential sympathy under such circumstances—the notion that commanders in chief owe survivors their time and attention, as well as detailed explanations of policy—are not just recent in practice. They are symptomatic not of wartime but the semblance of peace. This became evident a dozen years ago, when a woman named Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier-son had been killed in action in Iraq, kept vigil for several well-publicized weeks near George W. Bush’s Texas home. Mrs. Sheehan had already met with Bush in the company of other bereaved families, but was subsequently persuaded that her son had “died for oil . . . to make [Bush’s] friends rich” and demanded a second meeting to denounce the president personally.
“You tell me what the noble cause is that my son died for, and if [you even start] to say ‘freedom and democracy,’ I’m gonna say, ‘Bulls—t,’ ” she warned.
Needless to say, Sheehan quickly acquired a following, not least among journalists reflexively hostile to Bush. “The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute,” wrote Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. But the fury at Bush’s refusal to receive Sheehan was based on a curious misapprehension. Not only have war presidents in American history failed routinely to “meet” with survivors of soldiers, sailors, and airmen killed in combat, or attend burials, or write personal letters, but the extraordinary numbers of casualties in the past—406,000 fatalities in World War II alone—would have made such gestures impractical.
Indeed, in the Good War, the bland, impersonal tone of War and Navy Department telegrams to families of the dead—“The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret . . .”—seems cold, even shocking, by contemporary standards. Americans of the 1940s evidently felt otherwise. The relatively modest number of casualties in the war on terror tends to magnify each individual loss, and in recent years, the pressure on presidents to alleviate emotional distress—after natural disasters, gun violence, military skirmishes—seems to grow with the office.
Then again, as Trump has discovered, it is not always possible to gauge the reaction of bereaved families or of injured warriors. In the hours and days after the death of a child or spouse, most people are likely to welcome words of regret and solicitude, and behave accordingly—but not all. When emotions are raw and shock is immediate, the human animal remains a bundle of nerves. And memories endure: Even so sophisticated and amiable a statesman as Sen. Robert Dole, decades removed from his grievous wounding in Italy in 1945, could not resist an embittered allusion to “Democrat wars” in his 1976 vice-presidential debate with Walter Mondale.
Nor, for that matter, is Trump’s recent embarrassment entirely unprecedented. The most famous presidential letter of wartime condolence—Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 note to Lydia Bixby lamenting the death of her five sons fighting for the Union—is not just problematical but instructive. It is by no means clear that its rococo language—“how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming”—is Lincoln’s own; his secretary John Hay is believed by many to be the author. And only two of Mrs. Bixby’s five sons were killed; two, in fact, seem to have been deserters.
Yet the letter, which was swiftly published in the Boston Evening Transcript, no longer exists in manuscript. It might have been discarded by the Evening Transcript editor—or, as I like to think, destroyed by Mrs. Bixby, who was reputed to be a Confederate sympathizer and angry at the president. That is to say, Abraham Lincoln had “disrespected” Lydia Bixby, and the rest is history.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
