When I studied the US Constitution for the first time in the late 1990s as a high-school student, I noticed that it gave Congress, not the Presidency, the responsibility of declaring war. This seemed contrary to my experience, in which the President led the nation into war. It is commonly said that the UN Charter, ratified by Congress, supersedes this earlier practice.
Beschloss seeks to tackle this inconsistency head-on. By providing detailed historical analysis, he describes the way our nation has drifted – for better or for worse – from an early view that only Congress could speak for a people entering war. Instead, Congress has willingly (that is, without much complaint) given up its responsibility to declare war to the Chief Executive. Despite extensive American engagements in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan, Congress has not declared war on a country since World War II.
Beschloss details this trend’s beginnings under Founding Father James Madison in the War of 1812. Even Madison (who helped co-author the Constitution and defended it to the masses in The Federalist Papers) did not resist expanding Presidential powers in wartime. In the Mexican War, Polk defied Congress with a willingness to speak first and ask questions later. In a quest to save the American Union, Lincoln declared martial law and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. McKinley conducted the Spanish-American War based off of a false inciting narrative. Lyndon Johnson lied to lead America into Vietnam despite his strong disposition that the US would lose that war.
To his credit, Beschloss does not make a moral judgment on this American tendency to defy the Constitution; he only notes the historical trend. Congress has done little to reassert this power, either in the courts or in popular opinion. The start of wars has often begun with doubts about truths (the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, and the second Iraq War).
As I write this in the era of Trump, I find it uncanny how the imbalance of a president’s mental stability mirrors those in prior times. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump all seem relatively unsteady and disrespectful towards truth and facts. All three have used questionable means against the opposition in elections as well. Accounts of their private interactions in the White House present a common obsession of image over substance and a fixation on needing to win at all costs (even, in LBJ’s case, at the cost of losing).
I study American Presidents with regularity and find Beschloss’s contribution to the literature to be well-researched and relatively objective. (He relegates affairs after Vietnam to the Epilogue, but is very critical of Johnson.) Although the product of his labor is lengthy and the span of research is immense, Beschloss seems to pull this feat with ease. Anyone with an interest in the American Presidency would enjoy this tome.
Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times
by Michael Beschloss
Copyright (c) 2018
ISBN13 9780307409607
Page Count: 739
Genre: US Presidential History, Military History
www.amazon.com