The Weight of the Last Option

“I heard the bullets whistle,” wrote 22-year-old George Washington after his first exposure to war, “and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”

When King George II was informed of the remark, he observed tartly, “He would not say so had he heard many.”

I was reminded of that exchange from 1754 during the recent Democratic primaries when both Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry and retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark stressed their military service as a qualification to be president. Kerry received the Silver Star for saving his patrol boat in South Vietnam by killing a Viet Cong soldier. Clark was also awarded a Silver Star for fighting on with his troops in South Vietnam despite serious wounds.

Is exposure to the rigors and misery of war a valuable asset for a candidate who seeks to become America’s commander in chief? The question is likely to be with us until Nov. 2.

In Washington’s case, by the time he was commanding troops during the Revolutionary War he had long outgrown any youthful enthusiasm for battle, and he was disdainful of civilians who criticized his strategy from behind the lines: “I can assure those gentlemen,” Washington wrote to the Continental Congress with an asperity he seldom permitted himself, “that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold, bleak hill, and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets.”

When Washington became president, his military experience continued to shape his actions. When he faced the prospect of entangling the United States in further wars, he risked his reputation by maintaining the nation’s neutrality. Some members of the opposition never forgave him for refusing to back France in her war with England.

During the War of 1812, a naval hero named Isaac Hull tried to explain to a group of admiring civilians his reaction to combat: “I do not mind the day of battle,” Hull said. “The excitement carries one through. But the day after is fearful. It is so dreadful to see my men wounded and suffering.” Hull’s president, James Madison, with scant military experience, had led the nation into that hapless war.

Sometimes a leader as humane as Abraham Lincoln will be drawn into war and must try to see it through to victory. But Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, a man who did the fighting, emerged from the Civil War to tell a class of military cadets: “It is only those who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.” Sherman concluded with a one-word definition unlikely to be bettered: “War is hell.”

John F. Kennedy saw combat close at hand in the South Pacific. During his nearly three years in the White House, he brought to Cabinet meetings a vivid sense of what war entailed. Although Kennedy blundered into the Bay of Pigs, he then overruled his military advisors and refused to widen the struggle. During the 1962 missile crisis, he was determined to avoid launching another strike against Cuba.

By contrast, Lyndon B. Johnson’s enlistment during World War II was an exercise in public relations. As a congressman, he joined the Naval Reserve and went to the Pacific Theater just long enough for a Japanese pilot to fire on a plane in which he was riding. Although no one else on the mission was decorated, Johnson promptly collected a Silver Star -- like Kerry and Clark, except that Johnson’s was awarded for spending thirteen minutes as a passenger on a B-26. Johnson quickly returned to Texas to impress voters with his ordeal.

Neither of Johnson’s most prominent advisors on Vietnam had seen any more bloodshed than the president did. McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, drew on his family’s friendship with Rear Adm. Alan G. Kirk and watched the Normandy invasion from the flag bridge of the Augusta.

Robert S. McNamara, who can be seen now in Errol Morris’ documentary, “The Fog of War,” tries to distance himself from his role in Vietnam. Defense secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he prefers instead to lament America’s firebombing of Japan in World War II, even though that was a war most Americans regarded as essential and just.

McNamara attributes the Japan strategy to Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the 21st Bomber Command, who became an insistent hawk during the Vietnam years. Perhaps pilots are more likely than other soldiers to become hawks; although they risk being shot down, their views of war are sanitized by the height at which they fly. President George H. W. Bush flew missions during World War II and yet launched a ground war in the Persian Gulf 46 years later.

As to McNamara, while everything he claims about America’s callous behavior in the 1940s may be true, it is not relevant to his later Vietnam decisions. He was only a minor bureaucrat in World War II, not one of its chief architects. In neither war did he face battle.

Nor did a majority of those officials most responsible for last year’s invasion of Iraq. During deliberations, the one ranking veteran was Gen. Colin L. Powell, and he seemed a reluctant warrior. . It was President Bush who became the war’s cheerleader. And yet, during the Vietnam years, Bush preferred the option of enlisting in the Texas Air National Guard, and he was not particularly diligent in fulfilling even that obligation.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld served in the peacetime Navy of the mid-1950s, benefiting, like many of us, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s two terms in the White House. As a five-star general, Ike could face down lesser military chiefs and his own vice president, Richard Nixon, when they urged him to prop up the French as their occupation of Vietnam was collapsing.

Neither Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz nor national security advisor Condoleezza Rice has served in the military. Vice President Dick Cheney has offered the most revealing rationale for avoiding Vietnam. He was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin “trying to get ahead in the world,” Cheney said. Vietnam and the draft “were not the most important things” in his life.

Surviving on the battlefield does not in itself inoculate men and women against going to war. When a commander’s ego or reputation becomes linked to military success, he may persist against all rational argument -- Napoleon in Russia, Westmoreland in South Vietnam. And sometimes -- like Caesar in Gaul or Grant at Vicksburg -- he may win the gamble.

Given the unpredictable future, voters can only hope to elect a president who will always weigh the nation’s grave choices thoughtfully, aware that war should be the last option.

Thomas Jefferson, another president who steered the country through eight peaceful years, wrote to a friend, “I think one war enough for the life of one man.” Jefferson added, “It may at least may lessen our impatience to embark on another.”