History Suggests Clinton Runs a Risk Not Seeking Congress’ OK

In claiming the authority to invade Haiti without congressional approval or even much debate, President Clinton is following a road traveled by most of his postwar predecessors, often at great cost to their presidencies and the country.

“Because he (Clinton) hasn’t got congressional backing, he has no political cover at all,” points out American University presidential scholar Allan J. Lichtman about the assault the President foreshadowed in his televised address Thursday night. “That means if things go wrong, he will get all the blame.”

Frequently things have gone wrong, as they did for another Democratic President, Harry S. Truman, when he sent U.S. troops into Korea without consulting Congress. To minimize the U.S. commitment, Truman referred to the conflict as a “police action,” but it turned into a prolonged and bloody struggle that cast a pall over his presidency.

Noting that some Administration officials have been referring to a contemplated assault on Haiti as a police action, Truman biographer Alonzo Hamby said: “For a Democratic Administration to use that phrase is like talking about rope in the home of someone who has been hanged.”

Of Truman’s Korean venture, Hamby said: “It would have been better if he had gotten congressional approval. At the end of the day, Congress would have supported him, and at least he would have been able to say: ‘This is not something I went into myself like some bullheaded Missouri mule.’

Mindful of the value of congressional endorsement, President Lyndon B. Johnson prodded lawmakers into passing the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution giving him a hazy grant of authority for combatting aggression in Southeast Asia. But he never got explicit congressional or public backing for his massive escalation of the war, which divided the nation so badly that it forced him to abandon his hopes of reelection.

No strangers to political realities themselves, says Duke University law professor William Van Alstyne, the Founding Fathers took politics into consideration when they framed the war powers section of the Constitution, which reserved for Congress the right to declare war. Van Alstyne is one of a group of 10 constitutional scholars who have petitioned Clinton, urging him to seek congressional approval before launching an attack on Haiti.

The records of the Constitutional Convention show that its architects wanted to avoid the consequences at home and abroad of “a divided nation going to war,” Van Alstyne said. “When Congress is convened and the President presents his case and gets approval to launch an attack, that lends both authority and credibility to what the U.S. intends to do,” he said.

Getting congressional support also protects the President on the domestic front, Van Alstyne contended. “Once you go into war, you don’t want the prospect of members of Congress who stay silent so they can calculate the odds after the fact and then insist that this is what should have been done all along.”

Of course not all unilateral actions by Presidents abroad turn out to be disasters. The lightning-swift conquest of Grenada ordered in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, who claimed the Caribbean isle was being transformed into a launching pad for aggression by Fidel Castro’s Cuba, boosted Reagan’s standing in the polls. It was also credited with fostering an overall revival of patriotism in the United States.

Reagan did not get congressional approval, claiming after the action that public debate would have jeopardized several hundred American medical students on the island.

Similarly, President John F. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union without congressional involvement, was a triumph for him both at home and abroad. But conscious of the great risk Kennedy took, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, one of the small circle of advisers consulted by Kennedy during the crisis, later confided to friends that he thought the President had been reckless. According to historian Alan Brinkley, Acheson privately offered this verdict on Kennedy’s management of the crisis: “Plain dumb luck.”

Even if Clinton is just as fortunate in the initial confrontation with Haiti’s puny armed forces, in the aftermath of the invasion the United States will face the problems of restoring and maintaining civil order and putting the Haitian economy on a working basis. These tasks could lead to political problems back home, biographer Hamby warned.

“All sorts of things could happen to make this a very long military commitment and a very open-ended economic commitment,” he said. “In effect, we would be adopting Haiti as a protectorate. This could turn into the greatest social welfare problem the Clinton Administration has to face.”

In the past, some Presidents have benefited from dramatic events abroad because of the tendency of Americans to rally around the flag during such crises. Any such boost would come in handy right now for Democrats in the midst of an election campaign with most of the portents against them.

But Republicans already have served notice that they will challenge any attempt by Democrats to gain political credit from a Haitian invasion.

“The overwhelming majority of Americans do not want the U.S. by itself or in concert with anybody else to invade Haiti,” GOP National Chairman Haley Barbour recently declared. “There is no good public-policy reason to invade Haiti. The U.S. has no national security interest in Haiti. There is no excuse for invading Haiti. If they (Democrats) think invading Haiti is going to help them politically, they need to rethink that position.”

Evidence suggests that politics often plays a part when Presidents take military action abroad, even if they claim to be motivated solely by national security interests.

In 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched 15,000 Marines to Lebanon amid civil unrest, he claimed that the tiny country was vulnerable to Communist takeover. But Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose wrote that Ike also had a political motive: He wanted to rebut Democratic criticism that the U.S. defense Establishment was top-heavy with strategic weapons and lacking in the flexibility to wage brush-fire wars.

Similarly, scholars said that Clinton’s Democratic predecessors, Truman and Johnson, hoped U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam would refute Republican charges that Democrats were soft on communism.

Though the Cold War is over, Clinton also apparently has something to prove in Haiti. He has been under constant attack by Republicans for waffling on foreign affairs, and his national security adviser, Anthony Lake, recently was said to list the need to bolster U.S. credibility abroad as among the reasons for the Haiti invasion.