Presidential Greatness as an Attribute of Warmaking

There lies behind the title of this essay a working assumption among students of the presidency of a direct correlation between presidential tenure during war and presidential greatness. President John F. Kennedy, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "observed that war made it easier for a president to achieve greatness" (Schlesinger 2003, 18). No doubt the assumption has been encouraged by the practice of presidential rankings undertaken by political scientists and historians who, with some slight variation, typically have rated as "great" or "near-great" twelve men who constitute the top tier of chief executives and are associated with warfare: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman, John Adams, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, and James Polk (Murray and Blessing 1983). To the extent that scholars have drawn a correlation between wartime presidents and presidential greatness, some consideration must necessarily have been given to either the decision to go to war or to the president's conduct of it, or perhaps to both factors. In any event, it is difficult to contemplate the premise of a correlation between wartime tenure and presidential greatness without recognition of at least one of the factors as a basis for evaluation and judgment. The purpose of this essay is to explore, both analytically and historically, the premise of presidential greatness as an attribute of warmaking. The subject is intrinsically interesting, as measured by both the attention devoted to it in scholarly works and the broad range of coffeehouse rants and ruminations that it engenders. There is, as well, an utterly pragmatic point to it: power. For with distinction, honor, and glory, whether long lasting or merely transitory, there is opportunity. A popular president can draw upon the well of appreciation and admiration for the purpose of effectuating his agenda. This capability has not been lost on advisers to President George W. Bush, who believed that his deep wellspring of popular adoration, gained by his status as a wartime president, would be a major weapon in his 2004 reelection campaign (Balz 2003, A1). And where there is power, there are seekers--hence the broad and deep interest in the issue of presidential greatness. This work is conceived as an essay because an adequate examination of this subject exceeds the capacity of a single article. "The essay," Felix Frankfurter once wrote, "is tentative, reflective, suggestive, contradictory, and incomplete. It mirrors the perversities and complexities of life" (quoted in Casper 1997, 6). This essay is not without a point of view, however, because the subject is one of central importance to the study of the presidency and constitutional government. The question of the relationship between executive use of force and a reputation of greatness is, of course, older than the Republic itself and, indeed, plumbs the depths of history. The founders of the nation, like the Framers of the Constitution, engaged in an extended, thoughtful, and penetrating examination and analysis of the question of whether an individual might achieve some measure of fame and glory through the use of military force. Their assessments and conclusions, as we shall see, represented driving forces behind the design and configuration of the War Clause of the Constitution. Various presidents and their advisers, moreover, have viewed the use of military power as a means of achieving both immediate popularity and historical standing. Yet, questions remain. Does the historical record support an assumption of a significant correlation between presidential employment of force and presidential greatness? What conclusions may be drawn about the "success" of unilateral executive warmaking ventures? What, indeed, is the relationship, if any, between executive use of force and the national interest? These, and related questions, constitute the focal point of this essay. …