Who's in Command?
I
AMERICAN soldiers are as much divided i SL as other citizens are in their estimate of the probability of intervention in the European war, but they consider the prospect of ultimate involvement sufficient to justify speculation on the leadership of another A. E. F. Various names are mentioned. It is assumed that the Army would take the field under a General-in-Chief who had exercised regimental command during the World War or had served with credit on the staff at; G. H. Q. Whether the first commanding General would remain, every soldier admits to be problematical. If the nation were fortunate, the Army might have the same General-in-Chief for the duration of the war. As readily, here might be half a dozen.
That Pershing’s successor in France would be well furnished, all agree. The Army has progressed in training since 1917. All the schools are stronger; both the War Colleges give realistic instruction; the intelligence service of the Army has been reborn. Our approach to industrial mobilization will be less blundering. In training for command, the Navy now has everything short of combat. The Army lacks adequate modern equipment and large-scale manoeuvre. Congress never has been brought, to see that much of the worst wastage of war is the result of inexperience in handling large bodies of troops. To reduce initial casualties, the men who are expected to command armies in war should manoeuvre them in peace. The best investment that could be made in national defense today would be the provision of a vast camp where at least 50,000 men could be mustered and marched for a month every summer. That is incomparably the greatest need in the whole realm of Army training.
If, within these limits, there is a measure of confidence regarding the field command of another A. E. F., the approach of a Presidential election raises a question scarcely less serious: Will the next President have a proper conception of his duties as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy?
That question has been asked hypothetically in Washington whenever Mr. Roosevelt has referred to himself as Commander-in-Chief. It had special point last autumn when the patrol of the ‘neutral zone’ was being organized. One could hear with equal assurance that, the President was going dangerously far and that he was displaying precisely the right initiative and control. Since then the general opinion has been that Mr. Roosevelt probably would be a vigorous war President but that he would not interfere in operations.
What of Mr. Roosevelt’s successor? Although the command-in-chief is listed first among the powers of the President, under the Constitution, the American people seldom consider whether a particular candidate would make a good war Executive. In the most recent test, that of 1916, they reelected Mr. Wilson not because they thought he would be a wise leader during hostilities but because he had ‘kept us out of war.’ This time, as the war spreads, is it too much to ask American people to realize that there is such a thing as the problem of Presidential command, and that, if Presidential command be not exercised wisely, the price may be the lives of tens of thousands of boys? An incompetent, officious war President is more dangerous to his country than an incompetent General-in-Chief, because he cannot be removed so readily.
It is easy to state in abstract terms the relation of the President to military operations. As Commander-in-Chief, the President should define the war aims of his country and should muster in support of them the national resources. He should insist that the larger strategy of military and naval operations — the ‘grand strategy’ of Napoleonic military parlance — conform to the war aims. Beyond that, the President as Commander-in-Chief should select the best men he can find to develop and to execute a sound strategic plan. He should give to his Generals and his Admirals full moral support, should sec that their requests for men and munitions are met, should advance promptly those lieutenants who are qualified, and should protect the Army and the Navy from political appointees. In times of disaster or depression, the President as Commander-in-Chief should be able to sustain the morale of the nation.
That is the blueprint of ideal relationship. Details may be elaborated ad infinitum. The difficulty is that actual conditions seldom conform to theoretical design. What the President and the General-in-Chief respectively do in war is determined by what the two men prove to be.
‘Who’s in command?’ may become at once the most personal and the most important question in war. Circumstance has unexpected ways of shaping compulsion.
II
To begin with war aims, a President may find their definition a complex task. In altered circumstances, war aims may be easy to state and impossible to execute. President Polk, for example, had as clear a general plan for his administration as ever a Chief Executive possessed. Among four major objectives, he sought California for the Union, but he intended to procure it by purchase rather than by war. When hostilities with Mexico came, there was long confusion over war aims which, in some particulars, had to be formulated by the Generals in the field. President Lincoln’s war aims, on the other hand, were clear and were stated by him in the positive form most certain to appeal to the North—not as the prevention of secession, but as the preservation of the Union.
Always war aims should be as definite as this, but always they must be wi hin the range of what can be done with forces that will be available. So long as attainable war aims relate to economics and morale, their definition is primarily a matter for the President and his cabinet, but when it comes to the military aspect of attainable war aims, the duty and the right of the President as Commander-in-Chief may clash. War in the Pacific might present a case in point. If the Philippines were lost to an invading force, should the President, set the recovery and reconquest of the Islands by a combined land and naval force as an attainable war aim? The immediate answer, of course, is that no President in the possession of his faculties would dream of stating such a war aim until he had taken counsel with his military and naval advisers. True that is, but. there have been instances where Presidents on their own motion fashioned war aims almost as fantastic as that of the prompt recovery of the Philippines from a first-class sea power. Jefferson Davis’s persistent design of stamping out Federal resistance by a simultaneous invasion of Ohio and Pennsylvania proved hopelessly beyond the resources of the Confederacy. During the illness of General McClellan in the winter of 1861-1862, President Lincoln ordered a general advance that his armies could not undertake. Perhaps the warning here is that any President who attempts to state military war aims in terms of his own grand strategy is apt to get himself in trouble.
When a President, as Commander-inChief, has set attainable military war aims and has called upon the high command to shape and execute the plans for achieving those aims, he begins his greatest gamble. The President may be sure that his field lieutenant will avoid certain elementary mistakes; but the chances that the first General-inChief will be an eminent strategist and a competent army administrator are not high. A prudent wartime President may as well assume, in fact, that his principal task as Commandor-in-Chief will be that of finding ‘the man’ who can win the war.
Presidents Polk and Wilson were more fortunate in this quest than were the rival Northern and Southern executives of the 1860’s. Winfield Scott, one of the ablest of all American soldiers, was in 1846 at the peak of his powers. For personal reasons the President was unwilling at the outset to employ General Scott, but in the end he was induced to use old ‘Fuss-and-Feathers.’ The subsequent expedition from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, which decided the war, was conducted flawlessly. A shabby cabal that deprived Scott of his command after the capture of the Mexican capital served only to show how well the Army had been led. It was an historic oddity that Mexico, almost seventy years later, should have been one of the testing grounds of General Pershing. Fie was selected in 1917 by a cold, careful appraisal of all t he men of promise in the Army, and from the first he met every essential requirement as commander of the A. E. F.
In the experience of Mr. Lincoln and of Mr. Davis are examples of virtually all the difficulties a President may expect to encounter in searching for ‘the man.’ The first of those difficulties was that of chance assignment. General Scott was too old and too feeble for field service in 1831, though his broad strategic plan of operations, slightly revised, was the one by which Federal victory was achieved. At his instance, Major General Robert Patterson was given command in the lower Shenandoah Valley. Patterson was a Mexican War veteran; he was head of the Pennsylvania militia; his reputation and his proximity to the scene of operations made him appear desirable. Irvin McDowell owed his rise to the good opinion of Scott and, no less, to the influence of Secretary Chase. When a division in the command around Washington became desirable as a matter of organization, McDowell was given responsibility for the troops on the south side of the Potomac — and apparently without a thought that this might involve the conduct of the first major operation of the war. Patterson failed to cooperate with McDowell, while Johnston was marching to reenforce Beauregard. The result was the battle on Bull Run and a frightful blow to the pride of the North.
When a defeat as disgraceful as that of Bull Run is sustained by the Army, what is the duty of the President? He may permit a Patterson to be mustered out, and he may give to a McDowell a command less exacting; but where is he to look for a General-in-Chief? If the President, the Secretary of War, and the Chief of Staff are courageous and detached, they may go over the Army list and may conclude that the general record of, say, four or five men indicates that one or another of them probably has the qualities of command. A man chosen from such a fist has perhaps better than an even chance of being a good soldier; but if public alarm is high and resentment over defeat is sharp, the President may make an appointment on the basis of promise. That was what President Lincoln did. General George B. McClellan had conducted a brisk and clever little campaign in Western Virginia against feeble Confederate forces that were operating on a frail, extended line of communications. The Federal commander had made the most of his opportunity and had advertised his success thoroughly. Newspapers sounded his praise. He was acclaimed the ‘Young Napoleon of the West,’ and in the eyes of President Lincoln he seemed to be ‘the man.’ Although McClellan had retired from the Army in 1855 as a captain of cavalry, he had been recommissioned in May 1861 as Major General in the regular Army and, after the defeat of McDowell, was given the key command, the Department of the Potomac, which covered the defense of Washington. In November, when Scott retired, McClellan became General-inChief.
Thus heavily did President Lincoln gamble on the man who seemed his ‘best bet.’ Almost any President would have done the same thing. If a soldier has ‘ military sense’ he will exhibit it at every grade of command. When the record of a good general is examined he almost invariably will be found to have been a good colonel, a good major, a good captain, though, manifestly, it does not follow that every competent captain will be an able general of division. General McClellan’s record, though brief, seemed to justify the hope that he would demonstrate in a large command the abilities he had shown in a small. Before that could be put to the test, he gave abundant evidence that he was an excellent army administrator. Stage by stage he built up for the Army of the Potomac an organization that survived all the shocks and strains of three and a half years of war. It was weak only where General McClellan went outside the Army and used private detectives as the basis of his intelligence service — the costliest mistake he ever made.
By the beginning of 1862, the Army of the Potomac had reached a stage analogous to that attained this June by the enlarged British Army. The troops and the organization seemed ready for the offensive. In Congress and in the newspapers, demands for action were voiced. When these went unheeded, grumbling began. Was General McClellan ceaselessly to strengthen a vast war machine and never to use it? Did he not perceive that the resources of the country were being taxed for the support of so large a force? Why did not he advance on Richmond? This was a challenge to the President no less than to the General-in-Chief. When the same cry was raised day after day, what was the duty of the Commander-in-Chief? Should he wait indefinitely on McClellan and, meantime, defend him before the nation?
For a time Mr. Lincoln excused his General’s delays, but ere long he had doubts of his own. He was not sure that McClellan ever would take the initiative until compelled to do so. Was it necessary for the President to exercise directly his authority as Commander-in-Chief and force McClellan into the field? Reluctantly Mr. Lincoln answered in the affirmative and, without notifying McClellan, issued those ‘President’s war orders’ that remain unique in American history.
Although the provocation was great, the method was inexcusably wrong. McClellan launched his Peninsular campaign, but he believed that the Administration would not support him and he built up in advance an excuse for any failure that might overtake him. By September 1, when the Army was back on the line of the Potomac again, some 42,000 Federal casualties had been sustained in Virginia alone. Whether the President or General McClellan or General John Pope was most to blame for those losses, historians never will agree.
With the failure of McClellan’s offensive, the President took up anew his quest of ‘the man.’ He tried early to assure cooperation among the various field commanders by naming a Generalin-Chief, whose duties were essentially those of a modern Chief of Staff. Unfortunately, Mr. Lincoln’s choice for that position, Major General H. W. Halleck, was not well-suited to his rôle, though he had far more military virtues than have been credited to him. Nor was his authority well defined. One day he was ordering operations that should have been directed only from the field; the next day he might be little more than adjutant to the President or clerk to the Secretary of War. With or without Halleck’s counsel, President Lincoln made the shift from McClellan to Pope, then back to McClellan and on, in succession, to Burnside, to Hooker, and to Meade. Not one of these commanders in the East satisfied President Lincoln. None of them felt that he had the wholehearted backing that he required if he was to defeat Lee.
All the while, in the West, military success was bringing to the fore soldiers who acquired confidence in themselves and won the confidence of the Administration. Grant, Sherman, Thomas, and Buell were fortunate in their adversaries and fortunate also in that they often could employ sea power; but they had the ability to make the most of good fortune. After Grant captured Vicksburg, and Meade failed to follow up the advantage he won at Gettysburg, events trended steadily to the choice of Grant as General-in-Chief.
When President Lincoln at length was satisfied that Grant was ‘the man,’ relations were established between the two that remain a model of those that should subsist between the Commanderin-Chief and the high command in the field. At their first meeting, Mr. Lincoln could not quite suppress his impulse as an amateur strategist, and be explained to the General a plan of operations which Grant was too polite to criticize. The President did not insist that General Grant disclose his own plan, nor did he exhibit curiosity of a sort to embarrass. General Grant in his Memoirs thus recalled their first private conference: ‘Mr. Lincoln . . . stated to me that he never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them; but that procrastination on the part of commanders, and the pressure from the people at the North and in Congress, which was always with him, forced him into issuing his series of “military Orders” — one, two, three, etc. He did not know but they were all wrong, and did know that some of them were. All he wanted or had ever wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance.’
From that hour he took command, General Grant neither lacked nor supposed that he lacked the most absolute support of the President. The knowledge that the President would sustain him was as important a factor as his own personal determination in prosecuting the campaign against Richmond. Other Federal commanders had recrossed the Rappahannock when they had been halted by Lee, but General Grant was sure the President would not begrudge the losses or withhold reenforcements if he came to a clinch with his adversary.
Almost three years it had taken President Lincoln to ‘find the man.’ Thirteen months were recpiired to finish the war after the man was found. Neither period must be regarded as typical of what a future President may expect. He may not have to search three years before he finds the ‘fashioner of victory.’ Howsoon success can be won, even by the ablest General, depends in large degree on the condition of the opposing force. General Grant gained in 1864 by all the losses his predecessors had inflicted on Lee’s Army.
III
Jefferson Davis’s experiences, during the rise of Grant, present many variants of the problem, ‘Find the man.’ By every test, Mr. Davis seemed qualified to procure early the best commanders and to give them the wisest aid. No President of the United States except Washington himself ever had as large a knowledge of the military establishment as Jefferson Davis possessed at the head of a hostile government. After graduation from West Point, he had served five years in the United States Army, had distinguished himself in the Mexican War, had been for four years Secretary of War, and for nine had been chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. He was familiar with the record and the rating of every senior officer in the United States Army. For some of those who came under his control as Confederate Commander-in-Chief he had a personal affection that was to show itself in loyalty the most intense. Against a few others he had prejudices of which he found it difficult to divest himself, but his abilities seemed far to outweigh his disabilities.
His first unhappy experience as Commander-in-Chief was one that any President is apt to have: General P. G. T. Beauregard, who had shared in a creditable operation at Manassas, concluded that he was a great strategist and, in an official report, intimated that the President had frustrated a design that held every promise of great success. In this controversy, most of the equities and the verities were on the side of Mr. Davis, but he probably would have lost heavily in reputation had not Beauregard indulged in some patently foolish remarks that discredited him. Next Mr. Davis had to deal with what he regarded as the retreating impulse of his chief field commander in Virginia, General Joseph E. Johnston. After the wounding of Johnston at Seven Pines solved that problem for Mr. Davis, the Confederate President had to cope with a mild opposition among some of Johnston’s officers to the appointment of ‘an engineer,’ in the person of Robert E. Lee, to head the Army of Northern Virginia. Within little more than a month, Lee so clearly had demonstrated his ability that Mr. Davis was troubled no more concerning the direction of Confederate forces in the East; but while Mr. Lincoln was searching for a competent officer to face Lee in Virginia, Mr. Davis was seeking a soldier able to meet Grant in the West. Davis’s loyalty to Braxton Bragg and his antagonism for Joseph E. Johnston alike were disastrous to the fortunes of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. The whole story is full of instruction for every soldier and every executive.
Mr. Davis’s record as Commander-inChief makes it plain that military training is not altogether a prerequisite and may not even be an asset for a wartime President. The one clear benefit of Mr. Davis’s knowledge of military affairs was that it kept him from assigning his ‘political Generals’ to important posts, lie commissioned almost as many politicians at the rank of Brigadier General as President Lincoln did; but he named few such men to the rank of Major General. When he did elevate a ‘favorite son’ for reasons of politics, he usually put the inexperienced officer under a competent and vigilant division commander, or else assigned the politician to a post where little harm could be done.
Perhaps it should be added, though one cannot be quite sure, that Mr. Davis’s military experience served him in dealing with amateur strategists on the floor of the Confederate Congress. He might not be able to hold his own in a strategical controversy with, say, Joseph E. Johnston, but he could overwhelm a Congressman. Mr. Lincoln, on the other hand, and many of his generals in the field suffered much at the hands of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, the curious body that exemplified at the worst what Elihu Hoot subsequently styled ‘government by suspicion.’
A further contrast between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Davis will serve to emphasize the final most important duty of the President as Commander-in-Chief. No matter how successful he may be in finding the soldier who can interpret war aims in terms of strategy, each war President must bear on his own shoulders the responsibility of making those aims popular. His task it is to assure financial support from Congress and among private investors. When war weariness comes, he must combat it. If zeal for the nation’s cause seems to wane, he must revivify it by some captivating restatement of war aims or of the nation’s ideals. Mr. Davis never was able to do more in this respect than to issue some moderately appealing state papers and to deliver a few speeches somewhat above the Senatorial average. His adversary in Washington seldom failed to rally the North in its hour of depression. Mr. Lincoln’s slow but watchful approach to the issuance of the emancipation proclamation is one of the most interesting examples in American history of deliberate waiting for the moment of largest psychological opportunity. The proclamation made double sure a last-ditch fight by the South, but it fired the imagination of the North.
At almost every stage of his difficult service, from the enunciation of war aims to the rally of the nation for the largest sacrifice, the President as Commanderin-Chief must have, above everything else, willingness to learn from his own experience and from that of his predecessors. The lessons are there for every man’s reading. Nowhere is better emphasized the truth of Sir George Adam Smith’s dictum that ‘History never repeats itself without interpreting itself.’ The success of Woodrow Wilson as a war President should make a student of every Chief Executive who has to direct a war, because there is no doubt whatsoever that Mr. Wilson in 1917-1918 shaped his administration largely by what he knew of the successes and mistakes of Lincoln and of Davis. One may get the general plan of Mr. Wilson’s own war administration from his comments on the Union and Confederate Presidents. His admiration of Mr. Lincoln’s political sagacity often was expressed. In his History of the American People, where he listed some of the extralegal emergency acts of Mr. Lincoln, he remarked that, despite these, nobody suspected Mr. Lincoln of wishing to be a dictator. Is it not a safe assumption that this memory of Lincoln prompted him, as soon after the Armistice as conditions permitted, to urge on Congress the repeal of his own emergency powers? Woodrow Wilson lived close enough to the era of Jefferson Davis to have a fuller knowledge of the Confederate President, to have heard all the complaints about Mr. Davis’s disposition to ‘run the army’ as well as the government. A single phrase in Mr. Wilson’s History expresses inferentially his amazement that a President should attempt to conduct operations, but that phrase epitomized the rule of his administration. I remember asking Newton Baker in 1921 whether President Wilson ever had given him or General Pershing a direct order for a military operation. ‘Never,’ Mr. Baker said. He specified: ‘The most Mr. Wilson ever did was to inquire if we had considered the possibility of such and such a course. Usually I was able to tell him we had, but whether we had or not, he did not go further than to ask the question.’
Some of those who have been wondering what manner of Commander-inChief they could expect in President Roosevelt have forgotten, apparently, that in 1917-1918 he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He felt, as Newton Baker did, — as Pershing did, as Daniels did, — the immense advantage of working for a President who did not dabble endlessly in departmental affairs. If Mr. Roosevelt felt free to speak on a subject so delicate, he doubtless would say that, while Mr. Wilson often made discerning observations and posed sharp questions, he never gave an order for a fleet operation.
The memory of that training under Mr. Wilson is one, but only one, of the reasons for predicting that if America entered the European war — which God forbid — before next January Mr. Roosevelt would disappoint those who expect him to be President and General-inChief and Admiral of the fleet. That is not his method, anyway. In a spirit of comradeship with the armed services of which he is proud, he sometimes calls himself Commander-in-Chief; but in actual administration he shapes policies and expects his lieutenants to execute them. He would shape war aims, but he scarcely would dictate strategy. All that he had learned of public psychology he would apply in assuring subscriptions to war loans and in maintaining national morale. He would not attempt to tell the Generals or the Admirals what to do in a realm as technical as his own, Reassurance concerning his policy is to be found in his deliberate orders of 1939 that no officer should be promoted General who could not serve full four years at that grade. This denied promotion to many excellent men, but it displayed the soundest military sense. A President who will do that for the Army is capable of doing more. His zeal for the Navy, and his contributions to it, need not be stressed.
No, it is not Mr. Roosevelt but his successor whose aptitude for the military duties of the Presidency should be a matter of question and concern . The American people think of the President as Commander-in-Chief almost exclusively in grumbling terms of a twenty-one-gun salute. They need to realize that in war he can add incredibly to the efficiency of their national defense, or, by his blundering, can butcher their boys.