A Reluctant Warrior : With Haiti, Clinton Redefines the Post-Cold War Presidency

War defined the presidency long before the Cold War. In this century, every President who came into office devoted to domestic policy was, sooner or later, confronted with having to direct foreign interventions. They stood as commanders at the center of total war.

No one seems more aware of the narrow confines of policy-making by use of force than President Bill Clinton. His speech Thursday night to arouse the nation to back his course in Haiti was filled with qualifications. “I know,” he said, “that the United States cannot--indeed, we should not--be the world’s policeman, and I know this is a time, with the Cold War over, that so many Americans are reluctant to commit military resources and our personnel beyond our shores.” Clinton’s case was spelled out with this large hesitation present in public opinion foremost in his mind.

The psychological momentum of the past impinges on Clinton. The intervention in Haiti, after all, may be just that--certainly not a war as Americans have come to understand wars. Wars are associated with crisis, dire threats to national security, even to our existence. The mere mention of military action summons a range of deep feelings in the body politic: fear and anger, readiness and withdrawal. We may recall air-raid drills, missiles poised, threats and counterthreats.

The person ultimately in charge of disposing of these emotions has been the President. He is the chief executive of crisis management. At the moment of maximum peril, he is in command. Theburden has been almost beyond comprehension, making the President at once a figure who has been handed the responsibilities of near-megalomania and extreme caution. For years we have lived in a fail-safe system, fearful that with one mistake the Earth could blow up--and it was all up to the President.

Clinton in Haiti begins inevitably to redefine the post-Cold War presidency--hesitantly, indirectly, but necessarily. For this is a use of force that is not a crisis, an intervention that is not really a war. To win public support, Clinton has had to explain a policy that is, as he put it, “limited and specific.” What he is conjuring with is more than the immediate situation. He is circling around the dominant image of the President in the 20th Century as warrior-chieftain.

For most of this century, presidential leadership has been defined by battle. The role of commander-in-chief came to overwhelm the other presidential roles. A President who is principally attending to domestic policy--which can never be a clear-cut matter, always requiring constant quarrels and compromises with the Congress--seems, after all the wars, not to be truly presidential. Only in combat, we have been led to expect, is the President filling the Oval Office with his authority.

All the great domestic-policy Presidents were overtaken by wars and became defined by them. Woodrow Wilson, the first of them, came to the presidency warning against interventions generally and heavily pledged to the Democratic Party’s isolationist wing--long headed by William Jennings Bryan, a true-blue Midwestern pacifist, whom Wilson appointed secretary of state. Yet, Wilson intervened in our hemisphere more than any previous President--even invading and occupying Haiti. After World War I, Wilson was greeted in Europe as no American President had ever been before: A deus ex machina, a messiah who would miraculously settle all the animosities that had led to the conflagration.

The assistant secretary of the Navy under Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, partly modeled his early New Deal on the mobilization of World War I. But by 1938, after suffering tremendous losses in the midterm election, reform ground to a halt. Roosevelt’s presidency, however, was recast by the looming conflict in Europe.

His successor, Harry S. Truman, envisioned himself as a domestic-policy man--having little experience with foreign policy. In 1946, after losing both houses of Congress to the Republicans, Truman appeared diminished to the point of imminently vanishing. It was more than his battle royal with the “do-nothing Congress” that brought him back to life. It was also the Cold War, whose fundamental policies he and his secretaries of state, George C. Marshall and Dean G. Acheson, created.

From that point on, any conflict, large or small, was seen in the context of the struggle between the superpowers--a struggle that could never reach culmination because it would mean, as the priesthood of nuclear theologians described it, “mutual assured destruction.”

Presidents after Truman could maneuver, but they could not escape the Cold War. Their presidencies were framed by it. They all were shadowed by a ubiquitous military aide with “the football” in his briefcase--”the football” being the codes to launch nuclear attacks.

More than any President of the Cold War, Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to have it all: the guns and the butter. His Great Society was intended to complete the work of New Deal, but his belief that he could do this and also commit vast resources to a widening war in Vietnam opened a chasm that became known as the “credibility gap.”

Richard M. Nixon consistently made the claim that credibility was at the heart of the presidency and that it depended on trust in the President’s war policy. Any doubt, he and his Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger suggested, radiated into an undermining of the U.S. position everywhere.

Ronald Reagan’s presidency was the Cold War in its rococo phase: A succession of dying Soviet leaders; military actions in Grenada and against Libya, all tied together by the battle against the “Evil Empire,” and the climax of the happy ending with Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

For George Bush, the World War II pilot, there was no idea of the presidency apart from war. The invasion of Panama was, in fact, the first military action taken without mention of the Cold War--though Bush made no explanation of the change. The Gulf War was a kind of valedictory to the wars of the 20th Century fought by our Presidents--complete with Bush’s borrowed rhetoric from Winston Churchill. When he left office, Bush’s legacy included U.S. forces in Somalia and a policy of stalwart indifference to the roiling situation in Haiti.

Clinton, by now, has learned that even in a radically new world and at a time when the public desperately wants foreign affairs to be kept at arm’s length, presidential leadership and credibility can easily be eroded by them.

The Cold War was a permanent state of crisis and mobilization suddenly relieved without a final conflict. For all its terrors, Presidents automatically gained stature and authority from it. So, it is not easy to be released from its momentum. Clinton must deal with problems that are not crises--but may be perceived as such. He must clarify his reasons for action--especially the use of force--against threats that are real but not vital. Our means may seem infinite, with no rival superpower--but our ends are far more limited.

With Clinton, it appears that nothing comes easily. He is assailed as indecisive, a veritable waffle, only seeking approbation. On Haiti, however, he is attacked by his opponents as taking too precipitous an action, flying in the face of overwhelming public opinion. Yet, the threat of invasion was a prelude to a final gesture of diplomacy: On Friday, Clinton enlisted former President Jimmy Carter to head a delegation that included former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.)--good cop, bad cop, bad cop. The mission was to persuade the generals in Port-au-Prince to leave the country--now.

Clinton, if successful in Haiti, may be seen as having negotiated his first real crisis. For what we encounter in Haiti, among other things, is a crisis in our perception of the presidency.