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WW 1
about 14, 000,000 US entered late,
Nineteen-month World
War 1 killed
116,516
from all causes with 204,002 wounded in action.
World War 2 killed
U.S entered European Theater late,
405,399
from all causes with 670,660 wounded in action. Losers were not
punished. Russian
Bear having suffered an
estimated 26.6
military and civilian deaths used
their newly occupied eastern European territory to provide a protective
buffer.
Editor's Note: Presidents
often use consultant to assist them making decisions. The problem with
consultants is their first responsibility is to stay employed. To do
this they find out who provides the next pay check and what do they want
me to recommended.
Kennedy's consultants knew he wanted to stay out of
Vietnam and sure enough, their fact finding trip found we should stay
out. So we stayed out of Vietnam. Johnson's consultants went knowing
he wanted to escalate so they analyzed and returned saying we can
win.
Ike went to South Korea, looked around,
and took us right out.
The problem with consultants is they tend to be experts
in an activity and prejudice for this activity clouds their judgment.
Used car sales people think used cars are a better economic purchase
than new cars,
academic educators think academic education
benefits everyone ...
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Five Best: Michael Beschloss on Books About Wartime
Presidents
From the author, most recently, of “Presidents of
War.”
The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845-1849
Edited by Milo Milton Quaife (1910)
1. Easily one of the most revealing diaries ever written
by a president, James Polk’s was first published six
decades after his death. Through detailed reportage on
his own illicit wheeling and dealings, the nerveless
Polk, a slave owner, unwittingly reveals his own lying
and maneuvering to get the United States into a war
against Mexico—thus facilitating the grab of almost one
million square miles of territory. “We must obtain Upper
California and New Mexico,” he writes. The diary relates
how he fabricated an incident that enabled him to order
American forces to fight the Mexicans all the way to
Mexico City. Polk complains bitterly of press leaks.
And, afflicted by the harsh prejudices of his time, he
complains about his secretary of state (later
president), James Buchanan, who was thought by some
Washington contemporaries to be homosexual. Writing
during the Mexican War, Polk sneeringly derides what he
claims to be Buchanan’s “habits of intimacy” and his
“constant and intimate intercourse” with a New York
Herald columnist, John Nugent, to whom Buchanan gave
unauthorized scoops. Senators were unable to see the
secretary of state, Polk charges, “because this fellow,
Nugent, was closetted with him.”
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945
By James MacGregor Burns (1970)
2. Four years before I became Jim Burns’s student—he
would remain my mentor and friend until his death in
2014—he published this Pulitzer Prize-winning history of
Franklin D. Roosevelt as war president. Burns had been
given access to Roosevelt’s unprocessed private papers
shortly after World War II, but he delayed writing this
volume until crucial documents were declassified in the
late 1960s. “The Soldier of Freedom” would prove so
influential in shaping the later literature on the
subject that it remains remarkably current. While
admiring Roosevelt’s genius for wartime leadership,
Burns surprised many of his peers at the time by placing
considerable emphasis on FDR’s shortcomings—especially
the way his lofty ends were sometimes corrupted by his
means. Well ahead of many other scholars, Burns thrashed
FDR for signing Executive Order 9066, which compelled
the internment of Japanese Americans, and for failing to
do more to thwart the Holocaust. In the end, however, he
argues that to “look at the man as a whole” during World
War II is “to see the lineaments of greatness—courage,
joyousness, responsiveness, vitality, faith.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Morocco
in January, 1943. PHOTO: CORBIS/VCG
VIA GETTY IMAGES
A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison
By Paul Jennings (1865)
3. Not many books reveal a wartime president as seen by
someone he enslaved. In this very slim memoir, Paul
Jennings, the body servant of James Madison, architect
of the Constitution, recalls him as a man who would not
“strike a slave, although he had over one hundred.” “I
never allow a negro to excel me in politeness,” Madison,
according to Jennings, would say. During the War of 1812
the British invaded Washington, intending to burn the
Capitol building and White House—and perhaps capture and
hang the president. We have few accounts of the Madisons’
anxious flight from the capital. But Jennings was there.
Contrary to legend, Dolley Madison didn’t carry out the
George Washington portrait, Jennings writes, but instead
“caught up what silver she could crowd into her
old-fashioned reticule, and then jumped into the chariot
with her servant-girl Sukey.” Jennings then met up with
the president, rushing onto the Georgetown ferry, and
“we all crossed over” to Virginia. Madison’s slave
remained at his side until the former president died at
age 85. A decade later, the Massachusetts Sen. Daniel
Webster bought Jennings his freedom.
The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House
Years
By Joseph A. Califano Jr. (1991)
4. Joseph Califano’s frank, detailed and nuanced story
of his four years as one of Lyndon Johnson’s chief
advisors deserves more attention than it ever received.
The shrewd Brooklyn-born Harvard Law graduate—Johnson
told him what he had learned in Brooklyn’s streets would
be more useful than what he learned at Harvard—fought
hard for LBJ’s Great Society aims, but was increasingly
unsettled by his expanding Vietnam War as well as some
of his personal tendencies. He writes of how his boss
carped that the communists were “brilliantly
orchestrating a propaganda effort” to stir antiwar
protests on college campuses, and how he himself “smiled
nervously” when LBJ observed that Mr. Califano liked
attending the parties of Johnson’s archenemy, Robert
Kennedy. After RFK’s shooting, Mr. Califano writes, the
president kept asking him, “Is he dead yet?” He couldn’t
tell, the author notes—because Johnson himself didn’t
know—“whether he hoped or feared the answer would be yes
or no.”
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vols. IV to VIII
Edited by Roy P. Basler et al. (1953)
5. Abraham Lincoln’s writings were often sublime and
tell more about his inner life and aims than those of
any other war president tell about theirs. By order of
his eldest son, Robert, Lincoln’s private papers could
not be opened until midnight 21 years after Robert’s
death. (Officials from the Library of Congress made that
opening, in July 1947, into a Hollywood-like ceremony,
with exploding flashbulbs and songs sung by Lincoln
biographer Carl Sandburg). A melancholy Lincoln in
August 1864 scrawls a note saying that he expects to be
defeated for a second term that fall and that he will
have to help “President elect” George
McClellan—Lincoln’s Democratic opponent—“save the Union
between the election and the inauguration; as he . . .
cannot possibly save it afterwards.” Seeking to
understand God’s purpose as the Civil War grinds on,
Lincoln writes to himself that since the Almighty “could
have either saved or destroyed the Union” and “yet the
contest proceeds,” thus “it is quite possible that God’s
purpose is different from the purpose of either” North
or South.
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The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845-1849
Edited by Milo Milton Quaife (1910)
1. Easily one of the most revealing diaries ever written by a
president, James Polk’s was first published six decades after his
death. Through detailed reportage on his own illicit wheelings and
dealings, the nerveless Polk, a slave owner, unwittingly reveals his
own lying and maneuvering to get the United States into a war
against Mexico—thus facilitating the grab of almost one million
square miles of territory. “We must obtain Upper California and New
Mexico,” he writes. The diary relates how he fabricated an incident
that enabled him to order American forces to fight the Mexicans all
the way to Mexico City. Polk complains bitterly of press leaks. And,
afflicted by the harsh prejudices of his time, he complains about
his secretary of state (later president), James Buchanan, who was
thought by some Washington contemporaries to be homosexual. Writing
during the Mexican War, Polk sneeringly derides what he claims to be
Buchanan’s “habits of intimacy” and his “constant and intimate
intercourse” with a New York Herald columnist, John Nugent, to whom
Buchanan gave unauthorized scoops. Senators were unable to see the
secretary of state, Polk charges, “because this fellow, Nugent, was
closetted with him.”
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945
By James MacGregor Burns (1970)
2. Four years before I became Jim Burns’s student—he would remain my
mentor and friend until his death in 2014—he published this Pulitzer
Prize-winning history of Franklin D. Roosevelt as war president.
Burns had been given access to Roosevelt’s unprocessed private
papers shortly after World War II, but he delayed writing this
volume until crucial documents were declassified in the late 1960s.
“The Soldier of Freedom” would prove so influential in shaping the
later literature on the subject that it remains remarkably current.
While admiring Roosevelt’s genius for wartime leadership, Burns
surprised many of his peers at the time by placing considerable
emphasis on FDR’s shortcomings—especially the way his lofty ends
were sometimes corrupted by his means. Well ahead of many other
scholars, Burns thrashed FDR for signing Executive Order 9066, which
compelled the internment of Japanese Americans, and for failing to
do more to thwart the Holocaust. In the end, however, he argues that
to “look at the man as a whole” during World War II is “to see the
lineaments of greatness—courage, joyousness, responsiveness,
vitality, faith.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Morocco in January,
1943. PHOTO: CORBIS/VCG
VIA GETTY IMAGES
A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison
By Paul Jennings (1865)
3. Not many books reveal a wartime president as seen by someone he
enslaved. In this very slim memoir, Paul Jennings, the body servant
of James Madison, architect of the Constitution, recalls him as a
man who would not “strike a slave, although he had over one
hundred.” “I never allow a negro to excel me in politeness,”
Madison, according to Jennings, would say. During the War of 1812
the British invaded Washington, intending to burn the Capitol
building and White House—and perhaps capture and hang the president.
We have few accounts of the Madisons’ anxious flight from the
capital. But Jennings was there. Contrary to legend, Dolley Madison
didn’t carry out the George Washington portrait, Jennings writes,
but instead “caught up what silver she could crowd into her
old-fashioned reticule, and then jumped into the chariot with her
servant-girl Sukey.” Jennings then met up with the president,
rushing onto the Georgetown ferry, and “we all crossed over” to
Virginia. Madison’s slave remained at his side until the former
president died at age 85. A decade later, the Massachusetts Sen.
Daniel Webster bought Jennings his freedom.
The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years
By Joseph A. Califano Jr. (1991)
4. Joseph Califano’s frank, detailed and nuanced story of his four
years as one of Lyndon Johnson’s chief advisors deserves more
attention than it ever received. The shrewd Brooklyn-born Harvard
Law graduate—Johnson told him what he had learned in Brooklyn’s
streets would be more useful than what he learned at Harvard—fought
hard for LBJ’s Great Society aims, but was increasingly unsettled by
his expanding Vietnam War as well as some of his personal
tendencies. He writes of how his boss carped that the communists
were “brilliantly orchestrating a propaganda effort” to stir antiwar
protests on college campuses, and how he himself “smiled nervously”
when LBJ observed that Mr. Califano liked attending the parties of
Johnson’s archenemy, Robert Kennedy. After RFK’s shooting, Mr.
Califano writes, the president kept asking him, “Is he dead yet?” He
couldn’t tell, the author notes—because Johnson himself didn’t
know—“whether he hoped or feared the answer would be yes or no.”
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vols. IV to VIII
Edited by Roy P. Basler et al. (1953)
5. Abraham Lincoln’s writings were often sublime and tell more about
his inner life and aims than those of any other war president tell
about theirs. By order of his eldest son, Robert, Lincoln’s private
papers could not be opened until midnight 21 years after Robert’s
death. (Officials from the Library of Congress made that opening, in
July 1947, into a Hollywood-like ceremony, with exploding flashbulbs
and songs sung by Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg). A melancholy
Lincoln in August 1864 scrawls a note saying that he expects to be
defeated for a second term that fall and that he will have to help
“President elect” George McClellan—Lincoln’s Democratic
opponent—“save the Union between the election and the inauguration;
as he . . . cannot possibly save it afterwards.” Seeking to
understand God’s purpose as the Civil War grinds on, Lincoln writes
to himself that since the Almighty “could have either saved or
destroyed the Union” and “yet the contest proceeds,” thus “it is
quite possible that God’s purpose is different from the purpose of
either” North or South.
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