Democrats and Generals

During the 1916 presidential campaign, Democratic incumbent Woodrow Wilson campaigned on a slogan of “He kept us out of war”, referring of course to the First World War which had engulfed Europe. Thanks in no small part to this slogan, he won re-election. A month into his second term, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

During the 1940 presidential campaign, Democratic incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt declared, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”, referring of course to the Second World War which had engulfed Europe. Fourteen months later, Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.

During the 1964 presidential campaign, Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson declared, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves”, referring of course to the fighting between North and South Vietnam. In 1965 Johnson increased the number of American troops in Vietnam eight-fold (from 23,300 on December 31, 1964 to 184,300 on the same date a year later).

Promising not to go to war and then breaking that promise seems to be something of a time-honored tradition among Democratic presidents. The criticism here is not so much of the eventual decision to go to war, but rather in the earlier promise not to go to war (or, in Wilson's case, the overwhelming implication not to go to war). Such promises should never have been made, for how can you know that Pearl Harbor will not be bombed? Or that your merchant ships will not be torpedoed? Who were Wilson and Roosevelt and Johnson to try their hands at fortune-telling?

The Lord's brother James touches on this human frailty in chapter four of his epistle, verses 13-15: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow, we shall go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and also do this or that.’”

So: Beware the Democratic presidential candidate who promises no war! But if we cannot trust Democratic presidents to keep us out of war—and four of the five wars America fought in the 20th century were Democratic wars—is there a class of president who does avoid war?

My father pointed out to me long ago that America has never gone to war while an ex-general has been president. And we have had no shortage of ex-generals reach the White House: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William H. Harrison, Zachary Taylor, U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower.

This is less surprising than it might seem. There is a special hatred of war that only those who have sent men to their deaths can know. Writing to his brother in May 1943, Ike mentioned pacifists back home and observed, “I doubt whether any of these people, with their academic or dogmatic hatred of war, detest it as much as I do. They probably have not seen bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying human flesh. They have not visited a field hospital crowded with the desperately wounded.”

It is wonderfully ironic that old warriors like Eisenhower—with belligerent-sounding policies like massive retaliation and brinksmanship—do more to achieve peace than placard-bearing protesters or ivory-towered intellectuals. Or, apparently, liberal Democrats.