Changing Presidents During War The election of 2004 is looming as the most momentous since 1864
Barone, Michael
Chan Presi en During War The election of 2004 is looming as the most momentous since 1864. BY MICHAEL BARONE N JANUARY 5, 1762, THE TSARINA ELIZABETH DIED. Russia was in the midst of o the...
...A4 Michael Barone, a senior writer at U.S...
...A change in leadership in wartime can change the outcome of the war...
...There is something to say for Mead's argument, but I take a different view...
...But what he actually had in mind was something he could not say...
...Frederick prevailed on the battlefield and emerged the winner in the treaties signed in 1763...
...Kerry will be the nominee of a party that is split as much as George McClellan's was...
...He was so at odds with the majority of the party that nominated him that he took a week to write his acceptance speech...
...McClellan and a Democratic Congress would not have passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments...
...In both cases Democratic presidents had launched wars which they seemed unable to win...
...Dewey also supported Roosevelt's postwar plans...
...BUT THERE IS ONE wartime election in which the defeat of an incumbent president would have made an enormous difference: 1864...
...McClellan's election thus probably would have made little difference in the conduct of the war...
...Throwing out this president will make a difference...
...About half of Democrats favor the Iraq war and about half are against...
...Adolf Hitler took heart when Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945...
...JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 15...
...He would be boxed in, Mead suggests, by events: he would, as he says, not withdraw from Iraq...
...In the United States leadership changes, of course, not through royal succession but through presidential elections or through a president's death or resignation...
...he would not be able fully to propitiate a France which believes that the central purpose of its foreign policy is to cabin in the United States...
...And Eisenhower continued the main thrust of Truman's foreign policy—containment and the NATO alliance...
...On the No one can be sure whether Hubert Humphrey would have withdrawn troops more rapidly...
...In it he forswore the platform plank that called the war a failure and said, "The preservation of our Union was the sole avowed object for which the war was commenced...
...And we do not call our elections off, unlike Britain, which during World War II suspended its requirement that elections be 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 MICHAEL BARONE held every five years (although some backers of George McGovern spread the obviously absurd rumor that Richard Nixon was plotting to call off the election of 1972...
...He even sent John Foster Dulles to meet with Secretary of State Cordell Hull to agree on a bipartisan statement on what would become the United Nations...
...But he had been a Cold War supporter since he first ran for the Senate in 1948...
...Fully 81 percent of Bush voters but only 48 percent of Kerry voters agree with the statement...
...Union casualties were heavy throughout the year, as Grant pounded the Confederates in Virginia and Sherman headed to Georgia...
...The tone of Kerry's campaign must inevitably have an effect on his administration, in this case to move away from foreign policy positions associated with George W. Bush...
...The Confederacy would have been dissolved in any case...
...It should have been conducted for that object only...
...Her successor, the Tsar Peter III, was an admirer of Frederick, and Russia withdrew from the war...
...In 1947 and 1948 Dewey supported Truman's Cold War policies...
...The very violence of Kerry's denunciations, the contempt for Bush which he makes no effort to conceal, the suggestion ("fraudulent coalition") that America under Bush is totally isolated from the world—these all have consequences...
...Indeed, it's likely that the reason he ran was that he feared the otherwise likely nominee, Robert Taft, would not do so...
...After the election Truman appointed a bipartisan delegation, including Dullesand Senator Arthur Vandenberg, to negotiate the text of the United Nations Charter...
...THAT WAS TRUE IN 1944, , FOR EXAMPLE...
...McClellan, in a speech at West Point in June, had called for continuation of the war...
...neither did Harry Truman, who met with Roosevelt only once during his three-month vice presidency and who on becoming president was taken aside by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and told the great secret...
...The reestablishment of the Union in all its integrity is, and must continue to be, the indispensable condition in any settlement...
...George W. Bush, in his National Security Statement and in his actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, has transformed American foreign policy more than any president since Harry Truman...
...Bob Woodward's Plan for Attack shows how George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks hammered out, after much adversarial back and forth, the war plan which was so hugely successful in Iraq...
...And they will have an effect on the conduct of lower officials in a Kerry administration...
...No one can be sure whether Hubert Humphrey would have withdrawn American troops more rapidly...
...MICHAEL BARONE one hand Kerry is strident in his criticism of "the most inept, arrogant, reckless and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of this country...
...When Jose Luis Zapatero was elected prime minister of Spain after promising withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, Kerry issued a statement urging him to reconsider (he may have been embarrassed that Zapatero had come out for Kerry's election in the United States...
...But there is a big difference between Republicans and Democrats...
...Would such creative work get done in a Kerry administration...
...His most recent book, Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs...
...Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future, was published last month by Crown Forum...
...By the time of the 1944 election, the production lines were humming, the Allied armies and navies were steaming to victory (our forces landed in Normandy in June and MacArthur as promised returned to the Philippines in October), and the atomic bomb was being readied for testing...
...But Harry Truman carried on the war and before the end of the month Hitler was dead in his bunker...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 "Justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for the cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States...
...Pollster Scott Rasmussen recently reported that 62 percent of Americans believe that the world would be a better place if other countries became more like the United States while only 14 percent believe it would be a worse place...
...But he had been a Cold War supporter since he first ran for the Senate in 1948...
...My old boss in the polling business, Peter Hart, has a saying: "The campaign always reflects the candidate...
...Or will the military and foreign policy consequences turn out to be as marginal as in 1944, 1948, 1952, and 1968...
...Lincoln clearly stood for continued prosecution of the war, and the Republican platform came out strongly for the abolition of slavery...
...Slavery might well have continued, perhaps even after Brazil became the final country to abolish slavery in 1888...
...S THE 2004 ELECTION AS CONSEQUENTIAL as the 1 election of 1864...
...In 1943 and 1944 he called for postwar alliances with Britain and the Soviet Union, which was Roosevelt's idea, and, despite Republicans' old aversion to the League of Nations, supported the idea of an international organization...
...They affect what other nations and what the terrorists think the United States will do and thus help determine how they will act...
...In 1968 Richard Nixon, like Eisenhower 16 years before, hinted at a new war policy but did not lay out specifics...
...But during most of American history, the defeat of a president in wartime would not have changed the course of the war or have vastly altered American foreign policy...
...It was widely expected that General George McClellan, ousted by Lincoln in 1862, would be the Democratic nominee and that he would win...
...Franklin Roosevelt loathed his opponent Thomas Dewey, and vice versa, but they did not differ greatly on the war...
...He speaks forcefully against American withdrawal from Iraq and has called for sending 40,000 more American troops there...
...Resolved, that as slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength of this Rebellion, and as it must be, always and everywhere, hostile to the principles of Republican Government, justice and the National safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic...
...It appears that as president Eisenhower got the Communists to agree on an armistice by threatening to use nuclear weapons...
...Moreover, Kerry will be the nominee of a party that is split as much as George McClellan's was...
...But not always...
...Eisenhower promised to go to Korea...
...America would be a very different country today...
...The Democrats were united around McClellan at their August convention, but divided on policy...
...The Union is the one condition of peace—we ask no more...
...Lincoln was renominated by the Republican National Convention in June, but up through September many prominent Republicans were plotting to have another convention choose another nominee...
...The copperhead wing of the party wanted immediate peace, and they managed to write the party platform...
...the differences between the peace and war Democrats were irrelevant...
...A change in leadership in wartime does not always change the outcome of the war...
...It is true that voters changed presidents during wartime in 1952 and 1968...
...he would have to be concerned about Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs...
...This reflects a deeper split, over American exceptionalism: the idea, embraced as firmly by Franklin Roosevelt as by Ronald Reagan, generally spurned by Jimmy Carter but often voiced by Bill Clinton, that the United States is a special country, specially good and with special responsibilities...
...It was a threat Truman could not have credibly made, because for two and a half years he had not used them...
...Kerry, representing a party that is only halfway inclined to American exceptionalism, and who seems to have a temperamental disposition to come out on both sides of many issues, is unlikely to show the steadiness and determination that George W. Bush has shown...
...He thought Roosevelt's death would rescue him as Elizabeth's death rescued Frederick...
...About half favor the Iraq war, half are against...
...Hull even agreed to some of the clauses Dewey suggested...
...The answer to that question depends on what you think a John Kerry administration military and foreign policy would be, and there is room for thinking many things...
...It's hard to see how American foreign policy would have been much different if Dewey had won in 1944 or 1948...
...In fact Nixon's policy—withdrawal of U.S...
...But Stevenson, if elected and if he were so inclined, could have made JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 13 CHANGING PRESIDENTS DURING WAR the same threat...
...he would largely continue our policy toward China, which has not been much altered since Richard Nixon went to Beijing...
...Harry Truman made only halfhearted attempts to run for reelection in 1952, and both Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower took care not to be too closely identified with his war policy, though neither suggested they would retreat...
...But Elizabeth's death changed everything...
...News & World Report, is the principal co-author of The American Political Almanac...
...Prussia was on the verge of defeat: before he learned of the Tsarina's death, Frederick wrote an aide, "We ought now to think of preserving for my nephew, by way of negotiation, whatever fragments of my territory we can save from the avidity of my enemies...
...Of course Dewey knew nothing about the last item...
...The 11 states of the Confederacy probably would have been given representation in Congress immediately...
...Kerry promises to go to the United Nations and "rejoin the community of nations...
...The next four years are likely to present challenges we have not foreseen, and the difference between Bush and Kerry, while not as great as the difference between Lincoln and McClellan, is likely to be greater than the differences between candidates in the wartime elections of the 20th century...
...Eisenhower suggested change obliquely when he promised, "I shall go to Korea...
...But would slavery have disappeared...
...By the time of the inauguration, March 4, Union troops were almost in Richmond...
...Russia was in the midst of o the Seven Years' War, fighting alongside Austria and France and against the Prussia of Frederick the Great...
...Yet Kerry takes care to sound another note...
...troops and training of a competent South Vietnamese military—was already being carried out before he was elected by General Creighton Abrams, who had succeeded William Westmoreland as commander in Vietnam shortly after the Tet offensive of February 1968...
...Walter Russell Mead of the Council of Foreign Relations argues that a Kerry foreign policy would not be much different from George W. Bush's...
...They signal to France and the rest of Old Europe that under Kerry America would be more likely to defer to their wishes...
...Dewey had left behind the isolationism of most prewar Republicans, and Roosevelt conducted the war on a bipartisan basis, with Republicans as secretaries of war and the navy and Republican businessmen deeply involved in the war production effort...
Vol. 37 • June 2004 • No. 5
