American History Revised (40 page)

But there is another dimension of war, often overlooked: the courage of ordinary soldiers trying to maintain their humanity. In World War I, there occurred a memorable event called “A Christmas Peace.” There were no Americans involved, just British and Germans. On Christmas Day 1914, a coterie of German and British soldiers came out of their trenches and shared their skimpy rations and gave gifts to each other to celebrate the spirit of Christmas. At the end of the day, they retreated to their positions and resumed killing each other.

A similar event happened at the end of World War II. It was March 1945. The war was drawing to a close. A group of Germans trapped in foxholes were fighting for their lives against a much larger group of Americans, when out of the American side there emerged a man walking toward them. The Germans looked hard and were puzzled: he was not an Anglo-Saxon, he appeared to be a Native American. The Germans were confused—he had no bonnet of feathers, he had no knife, who was this strange man? The Germans were so overwhelmed by the man’s courage that they put their guns down and came out of their foxholes and surrendered. Observed one of the Germans, Karl Schlesier, “In that place, at that time, he must have been the most reasonable man, the most perceptive, the most understanding and by far the most brave. We had not expected to live and he must have seen how idiotic this all was and he acted on his own to save us, risking his own life in the process.”

The Germans knew they owed their lives to this singular man. In the prison camp, they all talked about him and how he had demonstrated such initiative. “If he had not come to get us we would have died in our foxholes. His action was a personal one. He was not ordered to do what he did.”

So impressed was Karl Schlesier that after the war he immigrated to the United States and became a U.S. citizen, spending the next fifty years as a professor of anthropology in New Mexico. “I never knew to which tribe or Indian nation the brave soldier of March 1945 belonged, or if he survived the war,” he said. “I owe him my life and have lived it accordingly.” In an article that appeared in the
Albuquerque Journal
newspaper in 2000, he wrote, “I am seventy-three … Who was the Indian soldier who saved the lives of German soldiers in an act of kindness and bravery? If you are still out there, let us know.”

1956
While America has had a number of bellicose presidents who talked tough, such as TR, JFK, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, it has never had a militarist president—except one.

First, a distinction: bellicose presidents may engage in skirmishes and wars, threaten other major powers, engage in expansionist policies, and build up the military budget. But they do not talk foolishly or take pleasure in brinksmanship. They do not view war as just another option.

The man who dropped the atom bomb knew exactly what he was doing. One can question whether President Truman was right to do what he did, perhaps, but not that he lacked integrity or self-discipline. President Truman made a conscious decision, and made sure he would never have to make a similar decision again, by giving massive amounts of foreign aid to help Japan and Germany rebuild their economies and democratic institutions. The bomb to him was an unthinkable weapon, never to be used again.
*

Arrayed against Truman were two distinct groups, both with extreme views on the use of the bomb:

• Pacifists who were so frightened by the bomb that they advocated universal disarmament, world government, and sharing of atomic secrets with everyone, including the Russians.
  

• Militarists who saw the bomb as merely another step up in the development of military weapons, to be used like any other weapon when necessary.
  

The extreme militarist of the day was General Douglas MacArthur, who wanted to “atomize” China so he could have his military victory in Korea. Truman put him in his place by sacking him. But MacArthur wasn’t the only militarist with facile ideas about the bomb; so, too, were the leading Republican standard-bearers, Senator Robert Taft and General Dwight Eisenhower.

Eisenhower may have warned about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address, but his record as president was one of adventurous militarism. No man did more for the military-industrial complex than this ex-general: in
1960 his military budget was three times that in 1950, at the height of the Korean War. The 1956 Republican Party platform called for the “establishment of American bases all around the world.” By 1958 the United States had alliances and military agreements with nearly sixty countries.

More than a huge military buildup or eagerness to assume imperial worldwide responsibilities, the mark of a militarist is how he behaves. Eisenhower developed two new tools of statecraft: covert action and nuclear brinksmanship. Under Eisenhower, the CIA was transformed from an intelligence-gathering operation into a secret army of the president, dedicated to overthrowing governments in Iran, Guatemala, Egypt, Indonesia, and Laos. The covert-action budget jumped from $82 million in 1952 to $800 million in 1956. When an independent advisory board, the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, issued critical reports in 1957 and 1958 on the CIA’s covert activities, President Eisenhower paid no attention. What he did pay attention to were the French. When France became heavily involved in Indochina and asked for American military support, Eisenhower was enthusiastic about getting involved. He backed off only when his Army chief of staff, General Matthew Ridgway, convinced him that any commitment would have to be far more massive than the American public would tolerate.

Unlike Truman, who had opposed any U.S. intervention in Iran to help the British whose oil companies had been nationalized, Eisenhower jumped in wholeheartedly.

In further sharp contrast to Truman, Eisenhower made nuclear weapons an essential component of his military strategy. He elevated the Strategic Air Command, capable of inflicting massive nuclear retaliation, to be the spearhead of American military power. He permitted his generals to consider dropping nuclear weapons on Korea, Laos, Vietnam, and China. He even threatened nuclear blackmail at one of his press conferences: “I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” While Eisenhower in his later years as president moderated his language, the nuclear buildup accelerated: compared with one thousand nuclear warheads when Eisenhower became president, the U.S. had eighteen thousand when he left.

He personally approved the highly risky and provocative U-2 flights over Russia. When one of the planes finally got shot down by the Russians and the pilot was captured alive, Khrushchev put the issue in true perspective: “Just imagine what would have happened had a Soviet aircraft appeared over New York, Chicago, or Detroit. How would the
United States
have reacted? … That would mean the outbreak of war!”

Eisenhower’s advice to his successors was that of a war hawk. He advised JFK to invade Cuba and intervene in Laos. He advised
LBJ to “go all out” in seeking victory in Vietnam, and if necessary, “to use at least tactical atomic weapons” against China (advice that LBJ found astonishing).
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When LBJ announced in 1968 that he was halting most of the bombing of Vietnam, Eisenhower privately called him a coward.

If one were to suggest America’s second-most-militarist president, who might that be? The answer is not George W. Bush, who responded to 9/11 with the novel theory of the “preemptive strike.” Such a strike was defensive (that the perceived Iraqi threat was based on faulty intelligence and turned out to be nonexistent, is another issue).

Militarism is not defensive; it means aggression against another country for the sake of empire. America’s runner-up militarist president is not the bellicose “carry a big stick” Theodore Roosevelt—he never started a war and in fact picked up a Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the Sino-Russian War. Rather, our runner-up would be Woodrow Wilson, who combined lofty ideals with a hair-trigger willingness to use troops whenever necessary in search of peace. He objected to America’s entry into World War I, but he certainly had no qualms about picking on small fry. In the words of one historian, “Wilson created a more benign role for the military while using it as a major agent of his foreign policy.” In just seven years, from 1913 to 1920, he kept the armed forces busy by sending them off to ten countries on nineteen different occasions: Mexico, Russia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, China, Cuba, Panama, Dalmatia, Turkey, and Guatemala. His two armed excursions into Siberia, opposed by his military advisers, turned out to be a losing quagmire and almost got America involved in a full-scale war with Russia.

1980
In this pivotal year, an American president launched the beginning of World War IV.

Since World War II, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon (with Ford), and Reagan all waged World War III—the Cold War—with grit and determination. George H. W. Bush led the worldwide rescue of Kuwait. Clinton, fearful of his draft-dodging past, indulged the ever-expanding American military and ordered attacks on Kurdistan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. George W. Bush launched the war on terrorism by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq.

Absent in this lineup of bellicose presidents
is Jimmy Carter, the one man with a military career background (albeit short-lived), yet the one who tried hardest to achieve stability through diplomacy alone.

Surprisingly enough, it was this pacifist-leaning president who launched America into the World War IV that the country has been waging ever since, the war to protect Middle East oil from hostile takeover. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Jimmy Carter announced the Carter Doctrine:

So asleep was America at the time (read: Middle East oil as an American birthright) that nobody noticed. But stop a minute and consider: the only previous “doctrine” America ever had in two hundred years was the defensive Monroe Doctrine, forbidding European interference in Latin America. Now, all of a sudden, America was on the offensive, declaring the Middle East as part of the American “lake.” President Carter was not about to let any loss of the Middle East threaten the vaunted American way of life, in which cars and plentiful gasoline were taken for granted.

Fast-forward to today. Out of this little-remembered speech emerged American military policy for the next twenty-five years. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, trying to ensure a steady flow of Iraqi oil to counterbalance an increasingly precarious Saudi Arabia, were following the Carter Doctrine. History moves in trends, not abrupt revolutions. Observes historian Andrew Bacevich in his well-balanced book
The New American Militarism
, “Charging George W. Bush with responsibility for militaristic tendencies of present-day U.S. foreign policy makes as much sense as holding Herbert Hoover culpable for the Great Depression.”