Agent of Destiny
Eisenhower, John S.D.
BOOKS IN REVIEW Accidental and Forgotten Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott, John S.D. Eisenhower Free Press /464 pages /$27.50 REVIEWED BY Florence King A merica...
...He loved uniforms and spent much time before the mirror admiring the swath he cut...
...Conquered by his charm and mesmerized by his godlike figure dripping gold braid, a grateful Charleston simmered down...
...Scott devised a system of spur lines to Washington and organized the recruits into an army, but in his heart he did not believe in the war...
...The officer in question was none other than Brigadier General James Wilkinson, betrayer of Aaron Burr and widely suspected of being Burr's co-conspirator...
...President Jefferson called on the states to supply militiamen in case of war, and the patriotic Scott, still angry over Aaron Burr, volunteered...
...This process of unlearning had its own logic and momentum...
...Being Scott, he was shocked...
...er, lay in being the chief agent of Manifest Destiny whose victories made national expansion possible...
...Scott served as his own lawyer at his court-martial, which luckicomposed of like-minded officers...
...The narrative ranges over dozens of countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and it also includes the United States where "government [sought] to control the key parts of the economy not through ownership but through a distinctly American approach — economic regulation...
...The Canadian invasion failed once the British had exiled Napoleon to Elba and could concentrate all their firepower on America...
...Given command of the Army's Third Department (northeast), he settled in New York and cultivated valuable friendships with Martin Van Buren and Governor De Witt Clinton...
...Yet he became a soldier almost by chance...
...Scott's nickname, "Old Fuss and Feathers," was never more apt than when he made his triumphal entry into Mexico City...
...Meanwhile, in Britain, the Labour Party won a historic parliamentary majority over Churchill's Tories and proceeded to nationalize industries comprising one-fifth of the nation's work force...
...and being Scott, he was flattered...
...Winfield Scott emerged a brigadier general and national hero at the age of 28...
...The authors seem to feel duty-bound to select one or two for portraiture in virtually each of the many countries covered...
...His first act as an officer was to visit a tailor...
...He was also assigned to protect Lincoln at the Inaugural, but the president-elect, knowing him to be a Southerner, sent an aide to check him out...
...No less interesting are the many figures of the left who, having come to recognize the superiority of markets, helpedto lead the charge rightward, often without explicitly cashing in their leftist credentials...
...With the British stirring up the Indians on the northern frontier, Scott could look forward to plenty of action and rapid promotions in what would become known as the War of 1812...
...Scott, meanwhile, took the PR route...
...Eisenhower Free Press /464 pages /$27.50 REVIEWED BY Florence King A merica has virtually forgotten General Winfield Scott...
...He was played once, for laughs, by Sidney Green-street in the 1940 movie, They Died With Their Boots On, but otherwise he has been relegated to the cutting-room floor of our national consciousness...
...Sometimes, unfortunately, the reach for a light touch throws the authors off stride, as when they seem to ascribe the dawning of China's economic reform entirely to the 1978 drought in Anhui province...
...Fifteen devastated Provinces...to be held for generations by heavy garrisons, at an expense quadruple the net duties or taxes which it would be possible to extort from them, followed by a Protectorate or an Emperor...
...Next he invoked one of the florid classical allusions he could never resist, saying he did not want to be "an Erostratus, the killer of a defender of his country...
...No one was sure which man used it, but a guest who claimed he had overheard them wrote an anonymous letter to the newspaper saying that Scott had used it, and sent a copy of the letter to Jackson...
...When he was born the country consisted of thirteen states...
...Overreacting as always, Jackson ordered his subordinates not to obey any War Department order unless it came through him...
...To prevent him from achieving the battlefield glory that would appeal to voters, Polk kept him in Washington and put General Zachary Taylor in command of the Mexican expedition...
...These include not only reform Communists like China's Deng Xiaoping, but also Brazil's Fernando Henrique Cardoso, India's P.V...
...The trouble started when the touchy Jackson, who was commander of the Western Department, took umbrage at the Secretary of War for ordering one of his officers to Washington with-44 Scott was fearless but he lacked what Eisenhower aptly calls Jackson's 'personal savagery.' 11 out sending Jackson a copy of the order...
...Some of you have known me in other scenes, and all of you know that I am ready to do what my country and what duty demands...
...Six-foot-five and ruggedly handsome, in uniform he was a beplumed, begilded "personification of Mars...
...The sine qua non of the recent discoveries of the Chinese, New Zealanders, Bolivians, and the rest was a vast curve of unlearning that stretched from 1848 or 1789 all the way into the latter half of the twentieth century...
...Why Stalin...
...Narashima Rao, New Zealand's Labour Party, Britain's Tony Blair, even, after an edifying experiment trying to implement socialism, Francois Mitterrand...
...The moment the hangman saw the American flag rise over these ancient halls of Montezuma, he released the traps...
...America's first military hero to spend his entire life in the army began that life as a lawyer, which turned out to be a very wise mistake...
...Army to fight for Mexico...
...Their portrayal of mankind's gathering appreciation for the efficacy of markets is compelling, but the authors fail to ask why all this learning should have been necessary...
...France undertook its own version of nationalization, featuring worker "co-determination...
...He served fourteen presidents, thirteen of them as a general officer...
...Martin's...
...Henry Clay, the Whig candidate, was defeated by James Polk, an unbending advocate of the annexation of Texas whose victory was a virtual declaration of war on Mexico...
...The American Spectator • May 1998 77...
...Martial glory made him a presidential contender as Polk had feared, but the Whigs, finding more of the common touch in Zachary Taylor than in the imperious Scott, chose Old Rough and Ready over Old Fuss and Feathers in 1848...
...Yergin and Stanislaw use that phrase in the title of their chapter about China, but seem to ignore the implication...
...asked the lawyer-soldier...
...Then, having lured Jackson into a bully's smirk, he did an abrupt about-face: "I should think it would be very easy to console yourself under this refusal by the application of a few epithets, such as coward, etc., to the object of your resentment, and I here promise to leave you until the next war to persuade yourself of their truth...
...One of the strangers happened to be a friend of Wilkinson's and reported the incident...
...Finally, a local sugar mill caught fire and Scott sent 300 unarmed troops to put out the blaze...
...I am, therefore, within your power...
...Peru's Alberto Fujimori and Argentina's Carlos Menem were the exemplars of this tactic, but Poland's Lech Walesa and Aleksander Kwasniewski did much the same...
...The War of 1812 was diplomatically inconclusive—the Treaty of Ghent restored the status quo ante —but it enabled James Madison to rid the army of its Revolutionary War relics and raise young men to high command...
...Scott finally got the Whig nomination in 1852 but his campaign was a disaster, his first faux pas coming in his acceptance speech...
...The cold Polk, unmoved by martial glory, wanted only to gain the most territory with the least trouble...
...The world over, governments have come to plan less, to own less, and to regulate less, allowing instead the JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...when he died it filled the continent...
...When the British raided Buffalo the following year he cleared the Niagara frontier of British and Canadian troops, enabling Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry ("We have met the enemy and they are ours") to move his ships into Lake Erie...
...The hard-liners, he proposed, could create "special Leftist zones" replete with planning, rationing, travel restrictions, and bans on foreign investment...
...He had an unerring instinct for knowing when to get tough...
...insuring the rights of the Church would win the goodwill of the Mexican people, and more important, isolate Santa Anna, who regularly robbed Church coffers...
...T he Commanding Heights is easy to read, lightened with amusing touches...
...Jackson threatened to cut off his ears if they ever met, then let the matter drop...
...Scott and De Witt Clinton were discussing Jackson's brouhaha at a dinner party when the word "mutinous" cropped up...
...Once he had a truce in place the Protestant Scott joined local officials for Catholic mass at Veracruz Cathedral and ordered his occupying troops to salute priests...
...Liking military life and sensing his true destiny lay with it, Scott applied for and got a captain's commission...
...No one else in the army had the experience and know-how to do all the things that needed to be done...
...frontiers of the market to expand," write Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw in The Commanding Heights...
...Bitten by the presidential bug, he tried and failed to get the Whig nomination in 1840 and 1844, but both losses turned out to be providential...
...Attention shifted south when "Wellington's Invincibles" were sent to Maryland, whence they marched on Washington and burned the White House and Capitol...
...Taylor went on to win the battles of Buena Vista and Monterrey while Scott in Washington was left to design the medal struck in Old Rough and Ready's honor...
...As India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, put it: "The idea of planning and a planned society is accepted now in varying degrees by everyone...
...En route to his posting he stopped off in Natchez, where he blithely told a group of strangers at an inn that Wilkinson was a "liar and a scoundrel," and promised to "blow him up" if he ever served under him in combat...
...Winfield Scott was born in Virginia in 1786 to a comfortably-off family and educated at the College of William and Mary, but he was not a member of the planter class...
...Thatcher was an eyeopener....After all we had gotten our Fabian socialism from Britain...
...The whole army detested Wilkinson, whose misdeeds ran the gamut from attempted treason to taking kickbacks from food contractors, but "the army being the army," they had to find Scott guilty of something, so they invented the crime of "unofficer-like behavior" to avoid the fatal "conduct unbecoming," and suspended him for a year...
...Less heroic, but also important to the story are a variety of politicians who won office on populist promises to transcend market discipline but who, once elected, doled out the bitter but necessary medicine they had campaigned against...
...A deputation of Mexican leaders did more, asking him to take over as dictator until order was restored...
...A thunderstruck Senator Thomas Hart Benton reminded him that sedentary occupation, while inimical to the American temperament, was ideally suited to the Spanish, who "loved procrastination...
...When William Henry Harrison defeated several tribes at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, James Madison and the "War Hawks" in 74 May 1998 • The American Spectator Congress—Henry Clay and John Calhoun — decided to invade Canada and eliminate the British from North America...
...Jackson sent Scott to reinforce the federal garrisons at Charleston, then stirred the pot in his typical fiery fashion, calling secession treason, mocking Calhoun's nullification theory as an "impractical absurdity incompatible with the existence of the Union," and sending Congress the "Force Bill" authorizing him to use troops to collect the tariff...
...I tell you, then, except it be over my body, you shall not pass this line —you shall not embark...
...Scott inspired another famous remark when he won the battle of Chippewa in 184...
...Polk, a Democrat, saw Scott as a potential Whig challenger in 1848...
...Scott had entered the army on the spur of the moment in 1807 after a British warship fired on and boarded the American vessel Chesapeake to look for British deserters...
...Scott the lawyer weighed each case and decided to hang fifty of them...
...He was burned in effigy at the University of Virginia and denounced as a "free-state pimp" for arranging the guard detail that protected members of the Electoral College when they met in Washington in February 1861 to make Lincoln's victory official...
...Between patriotism and vanity he was happy to give up law for soldiering...
...Led by John Calhoun, a state convention nullified the tariff, ordered the Port of Charleston to cease collecting it, and threatened to secede if the federal government interfered...
...Senator John Tyler delivered an impassioned speech in defense of states' rights and looked upon Scott, his fellow Virginian, as a traitorous Hun...
...This oddly named but interesting book traces the world-wide learning curve about the virtues of markets...
...The best anecdote concerns the purported reply of one Chinese Communist reformer to a hard-liner's criticism of the market-oriented "special economic zones" that Deng had created...
...I t was an ideal time to start a military career...
...John Eisenhower, son of the thirty-fourth president, rescues our forgotten general from an undeserved obscurity in Agent of Destiny, a brilliantly conceived and executed study combining an affectionate biography of a complex man with military history so well-written that even the most detailed battle scenes are as vivid as a bang-up miniseries...
...American efforts to bribe Santa Anna into making peace went awry when he cheated Polk's representative out of $1o,000, and so the war went on...
...under Lee and Beauregard captured seventy "Patricios," a band of Irishmen and Irish-Americans who had deserted the U.S...
...A deputation from Virginia tried to enlist his services for the Confederacy but he told them: "I have served my country under the flag of the Union for more than fifty years, and as long as God permits me to live I will defend that flag with my sword, even if my own native State assails it...
...It was the first time American professional soldiers had defeated their British equivalents...
...And so it was...
...In West Germany the reborn Christian Democrats, the right-wing alternative to the Social Democrats, denounced capitalism and promised economic "planning...
...Cui Bono...
...He was married that year to a wealthy belle, Maria Mayo, the toast of Richmond, and started a custom that would last over a century when he took her on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, "showing her the scenes of his former triumphs—no doubt in excruciating detail," writes Eisenhower...
...When Nehru explained that everyone accepts the necessity of planning, this was nearly 200 years after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations...
...By 1813 he was a full colonel...
...At the battles of Contreras and Churubusco, Scott's forces44 Once he had a truce in place the Protestant Scott joined local officials for Catholic mass...
...Democrat Franklin Pierce, who had served under him in Mexico, won by a landslide...
...In 1838, his friend, President Van Buren, sent him to Buffalo to prevent anti-British Americans from getting involved in the Canadian independence movement called the Patriots...
...Accepting Jackson's challenge meant he would either be killed or kill a national hero, so he penned what started out as a timid withdrawal...
...The engineer of Bolivia's economic liberalization tells Yergin and Stanislaw that the principal influences on him were the experiences of China and New Zealand...
...Scott, who as a lawyer had attended Burr's treason trial in Richmond, had developed a visceral aversion to Wilkinson that reawakened two years later when, as a 22-year-old army captain, he was assigned to Wilkinson's command at New Orleans...
...It was a replay of his Charleston PR...
...Fifty years later, the trend has turned 18o degrees...
...Always loath to risk lives unnecessarily, Scott rejected a frontal attack of Veracruz for an "active siege"—first cutting the city off and then bombarding it...
...The biggest problem once Lincoln had called for volunteers was getting troop trains from the North through secessionist-minded Baltimore...
...An Indian leader is quoted: "What happened under Mrs...
...Knowing his way around a cross-examination would come in handy whenFLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...To this end he conceived a plan he called "masterful inactivity" in which American troops would simply occupy large areas of Mexico and wait for the Mexicans to offer peace...
...Later, as president, he grudgingly admired Scott for the way he handled the Nullification Crisis of 1832, which erupted when South Carolina challenged the legality of what the South called the "Tariff ofAbominations...
...As his troops stood their ground under fire, the British commander, used to facing our poorly trained volunteers, exclaimed: "Those are regulars, by God...
...True, Chinese reforms were a process of unrehearsed trial-and-error, but this version omits the evidence that Deng was seeking a reform path after his first rehabilitation in the early 1970's and probably even in the 1960's when he coined the phrase, "Who cares if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice...
...The American Spectator • May 1998 75 T he election of 1844 led to the event that made Scott a legend...
...Seeing his chance, Scott drew up a plan based on the conquest by Hernando Cortes, and Polk, knowing that no one else could pull it off, gave him command...
...Twenty-five-year-old Winfield Scott was promoted to lieutenant colonel...
...At this time the United States did not have a standing army, just volunteers that were called up and disbanded as needed, but with Britain making trouble again Jefferson decided to establish a permanent force...
...Hanging the Patricios lost himthe Irish vote, and his tendency to preen was exploited by the opposition, who recycled some of his bombastic gems, such as his famous order to "fire upon my rear...
...It was called socialism, an idea that gripped the imaginations of human beings as no other secular Why Lenin...
...Scott was fearless but he lacked what Eisenhower aptly calls Jackson's "personal savagery...
...Scott, whose military mind equated the platform with an order, thought he had to obey all of it...
...Although they range so widely that they sometimes sacrifice depth for breadth, the authors succeed in capturing a sense of global intellectual development...
...76 May 1998 • The American Spectator Winfield Scott resigned from the Army in October 1861 and died in the hotel at West Point on June 1, 1866...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...Seventy-five years old, he had dropsy, vertigo, and a huge belly from a lifetime of gourmandizing, but the citizens of Washington, expecting invasion at any moment, were reassured by his mere presence despite his age and infirmities...
...We tend to have trouble getting interested in historical figures unless we can connect them to the Civil War, yet Scott commanded the future heroes of the Confederacy in the war with Mexico, winning territory that aggravated the debate over the expansion of slavery, and in his last years literally rose from his sickbed to organize the Army of the Potomac for Abraham Lincoln...
...Life was perfect until Andrew Jackson challenged him to a duel...
...Riding at the head of his army to "Yankee Doodle," he was so resplendent in his gold epaulets and snowy plumes that even some Mexicans applauded him...
...Since they had outwaited the Visigoths for 30o years and the Moors for 700 years, said Benton, the only course was to capture the port of Veracruz and march on to Mexico City...
...In 1840 the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, won the election but died after a month in office, creating so much upheaval and confusion in the government that the bill naming Scott General-in-Chief sailed through the Senate and was signed by his enemy, the dazed new president John Tyler, almost as an afterthought...
...First he claimed that dueling was against his religion...
...How easily ideas fly across borders...
...A natural schmoozer, he stroked the local officials, ordered his troops to use meticulous courtesy in dealings with citizens, and invited Charlestonians to visit Fort Moultrie for what today would be called an open house...
...Not only in Europe, east and west, was "planning" all the rage...
...ever he was hauled up before a court-martial or board of inquiry to explain something that had issued from his baroque pen or his opera-buffa mouth—such as announcing publicly his intention to frag his commanding officer...
...To win Southern votes, the Whigs had included a platform plank pledging support for the Fugitive Slave Law...
...Sick in bed when the aide arrived, Scott struggled up and said: "If necessary, I shall plant cannon at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and if any of the Maryland or Virginia gentlemen who have become so threatening and troublesome show their heads or even venture to raise a finger, I shall blow them to hell...
...H e was still General-in-Chief on the eve of the Civil War...
...Able to read French, he studied Napoleonic artillery manuals and adopted the "flying artillery," a light gun that could be moved wherever it was needed...
...Confronting an angry crowd in his full-dress uniform, he said: "I stand before you without troops and without arms, save the blade by my side...
...Abandoning the careful statement Horace Greeley had written for him, he promised to do so, which promptly alienated Northern Whigs, who shouted, 'We accept the candidate but we spit on the platform...
...Thatcher is, deservedly, the prime among the many heroes in this account...
...It was done immediately after Scott's men and forty Marines captured the fortress of Chapultepec...
...The nations of Africa and Asia, newly liberated from colonialism, were all but unanimous in their strategy of "planning" their way from backwardness to modernity...
...A man who carried out the dreams and plans of other men, his legacy, writes John EisenhowThe Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World Daniel 'Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw Simon & Schuster /457 pages /$26 REVIEWED BY Joshua Muravchik I n the first decade after World War Two, Communism spread outward from the Soviet Union to eastern Europe, North Korea, and China...
Vol. 31 • May 1998 • No. 5
