In a country as disposed to war as the United States has been, the relationship between the commander in chief and his admirals and generals is as critical as that between the president and Congress. Just how critical that relationship may be is the theme of this book, the first full-length history of its subject. It should be required reading in the White House, the Pentagon, and Foggy Bottom—in this, and every succeeding administration. The history it relates is sobering.
Matthew Moten is the kind of authority you’d want for a guide through the subject: As the former head of West Point’s history department, an Iraq war veteran, and a former legislative aide to the Army chief of staff, he has the broad field and staff experience essential for understanding political-military relations in their many forms—and from inside. He’s thorough, disenthralled, critical, and balanced in his judgments. No one can dismiss what he writes.
Moten isn’t the first historian, the first military officer, or the first elected official to bewail the current state of civil-military relations. Among historians, Richard H. Kohn has preceded him with the greatest authority and urgency, although not with Moten’s narrative sweep or particular focus. Moten concentrates on what he calls political-military relations, a narrower set of connections than those between the military and larger society. Even then, Moten has unfortunately little to say about the mutual responsibilities that Congress and the military may have to each other: Presidents and Their Generals focuses hard on the office of the president and the top officers of the major armed services.
High-level American political-military relations, Moten believes, have gone through three phases in our history. The first, lasting from George Washington’s presidency in the 1790s until Abraham Lincoln’s in the 1860s, was a kind of exploratory season when roles and conventions were cobbled into being, and senior military and civilian officers gathered a sense of what might and might not work to create and implement military strategy. The second, from Lincoln’s presidency through Franklin Roosevelt’s in the 1940s, was the high point—the classical age—of relations between presidents and their senior commanders, decades during which understanding between the White House and the military services was functional and firm, and roles were clear. From the Truman presidency on—the third phase—things have fallen apart.
At the heart of the best relations between presidents and their generals, Moten emphasizes, is “mutual trust born of candor, respect, demonstrated competence, a shared worldview, and an expectation that each partner would take responsibility for the decisions made.” Conflicts, “both natural and inherent,” will exist. But mature professionals—the presidents representing political society and the generals (Moten specifically emphasizes generals, not admirals) representing an institutional hierarchy—can work through them. The best have done so.
As he did in so many respects, George Washington established the template for the entire history of political-military relations in his bearing and acts during the American Revolution. Resisting pressure from others, fending off a prospective putsch, and swallowing his pride, Washington resolutely kept military leadership subordinate to political authority. Had he not done so, the nation’s history, to say nothing of the military clauses of the Constitution, would have been vastly different. Not that Washington had it easy, or avoided serious mistakes; but his great stature ensured that he would not face opposition during his presidency from his top military officers—or be held to account publicly, as his successors were.
Once Washington left the scene, presidents were in deeper waters. John Adams faced a disloyal secretary of war, whom he eventually had to fire, as well as the opposition of one of Washington’s great revolutionary military aides, Alexander Hamilton. It did not help that, until West Point had graduated many young men, military officers did not think of themselves as professionals who had to comport themselves accordingly. Commissions and service assignments were as political as they were military, based on favoritism as much as competency. Even when a president—James K. Polk being a good example—had first-class generals to fight his wars, he could not be sure that they weren’t angling for a presidential nomination under the opposition party. Polk, a Democrat, was justified in his suspicions: Both Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor sought the presidency as Whigs. Trust in one’s senior officers did not come easily under such circumstances.
Abraham Lincoln opened his presidency in the same fix. The difficulty he had in finding his own trusted supreme commander is an oft-told story. George B. McClellan wouldn’t fight, and he undermined Lincoln politically. Only when the president turned to Ulysses S. Grant did he find a commander with whom he could have mutual trust and respect. Together, the pair led the Union to victory. It made things easier that Grant disavowed any interest in the presidency, that both men could grow fast into their respective responsibilities, and that both had what Moten calls “character.” The result was “the first true strategic collaboration between a president and supreme commander in American history, one that has yet to be surpassed.”
It’s no doubt that because of his sympathy with Lincoln and Grant (and who could not have it?) Moten’s study comes most fully alive as he writes about the almost century-long period after their wartime collaboration when presidents and commanders worked in as close synchrony as is imaginable. Moten’s two case studies here are Woodrow Wilson’s relations with his European commander, John J. Pershing, and Franklin Roosevelt and his generals, especially George C. Marshall. While I can only mention the nuances of Moten’s evaluation of these partnerships, he presents them as generally harmonious and very much to the nation’s benefit, even if Pershing exercised military authority too independently, an independence exploited later by Douglas MacArthur. FDR and Marshall—one informal and ebullient, the other formal and correct—had a harder time trusting each other than did Lincoln and Grant. But their eventual mutual confidence and respect, oiled by Harry Hopkins, created the last great partnership between politics and military affairs in the White House.
From then on, relations have gone downhill, and Moten is unsparing in his characterizations and criticisms. Having gained “suzerainty” during World War II, the supreme generals and admirals, against previous experience, secured a place “near the apex of the Washington power structure.” They took on institutional, rather than military and advisory, values. The insubordinate MacArthur made all presidents after Truman distrustful of their generals, many of whom, from Dwight Eisenhower’s military advisers on, became “company men,” part of a “professional assembly line [presidents] could not control.” It didn’t help that recent wars have been those of choice, making presidents select military chiefs who might offer public support as much as disenthralled advice.
The quintessential story of this era concerns Douglas MacArthur. Had it not been so serious—had he not gone so far beyond the bounds of good sense and controlled ego—MacArthur’s conflict with Washington would, as it occasionally can, seem laughable, so egregious was the general and so timid were his superiors in Washington (including Truman) about disciplining him. All misunderstood the need for presidents to be free to involve themselves in military operations to some extent and for generals to think of strategic and international affairs. Then there was John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, which permanently altered any successor president’s confidence in his military counsel. That fiasco also elevated the wily Maxwell Taylor, whom Moten severely criticizes, to be “Kennedy’s general”—and subsequently the figure on whom Lyndon Johnson relied too much for bad advice. It was, declares Moten, “dysfunctional political-military relations that initially misled the nation into tragedy in Vietnam” and then kept it mired there.
Moten reserves his most detailed analysis, as well as his severest criticisms, for our most recent presidents, supreme commanders, and cabinet secretaries, and for the institutional structures at the highest level of the executive branch. It’s difficult to fully capture the number and sharpness of his strictures. Very few senior officers, both civil and military, escape his arraignment. Much stems from the fact that the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are no longer required to seek the advice and consent of their service commanders. Colin Powell was as wily as Maxwell Taylor, and more partisan. The reputations of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Tommy Franks, and others will not gain by Moten’s evaluation of their judgment and behavior. Many others meddle in partisan politics and lend their names, after their service, to one or another of the political parties. Moten is not the first to call these men to account; but his is the first work to set their actions into historical context.
Nevertheless, Moten is careful to remove some of the onus of error and self-aggrandizement from individuals alone by insisting that “participants on both sides of the [political-military] relationship are handicapped by their own institutional cultures. . . . Admitting that both sides shoulder parts of this responsibility [for the common defense] does no violence to military professionalism.” Given the range of Moten’s history, it may be unfair to ask for more. After all, a sweeping history cannot be a comprehensive one. Yet one of the missing opportunities in Moten’s case-study approach is any attention to two great commanders who became presidents: Andrew Jackson and Dwight Eisenhower. Yes, we learn (as we must) of that other great general-president, George Washington; and another, William Henry Harrison, puts in an appearance, although as military leader alone. But we would have gained much from learning more about how Jackson and Eisenhower, two large historical figures from different eras, one of whom was a supreme commander in the field, moved from one role into another while carrying the residue of the first with them. Given Moten’s concerns about the deterioration of relations between presidents and commanders since 1945, it would have been useful to learn what, if anything, an experienced senior officer brings to the White House that those without senior military experience do not.
More regrettably, Moten relies on narrative to make his points. He doesn’t draw them together or put his own experience to use by suggesting what specifically—through law, institutional reform, or practice—might be done to improve on recent experience. What, for instance, ought to be undertaken to reform the culture of the Pentagon? He also does not reflect on how it might be possible to build trust between a commander in chief and his most senior generals, or how to prevent too much trust between a few people from leading the nation into disaster. In what resides the “character” that, as in the case of Lincoln and Grant, makes the best relationships work? How do institutions and practices create trust and character? Should they be expected to do so? Moten’s brief list of desirable reforms does not begin to approach the difficulties he has astutely portrayed. He would, for instance, reform the National Security Acts of 1947 and 1949 and disband the Joint Chiefs of Staff in favor of a National Military Council whose members would serve renewable two-year terms. But it’s hard to see how such few, and entirely institutional, reforms would solve the problems Moten has analyzed.
Nevertheless, Presidents and Their Generals makes a signal contribution to the historical knowledge of its subject over the long sweep of our nation’s history. It’s probably the case that a history of command in war in other nations, and at other times, would reveal more of what Moten’s subtitle calls simply an “American history” of its large subject. It’s surely the case that Americans need to understand better than they do what might be going on in the highest councils of government as their armed forces march, sail, and fly off to battle. Precisely because it hasn’t been a pretty picture in recent decades, the subject is worth the attention of us all.
James M. Banner Jr. is a historian in Washington.
