Timothy Noah: Why Don't War Heroes Win?
John McCain entered the 2008 presidential campaign with a strong advantage shared by John Kerry in 2004, Bob Dole in 1996, and George H.W. Bush in 1992. All four were war heroes whose opponents bore no record of military service. (Dubya's spotty attendance in the Air National Guard doesn't count.) Yet Kerry, Dole, and Bush pére lost, and McCain will almost certainly lose too. If you broaden the McCain category from "war hero" to "wartime veteran," then add Al Gore (2000) to the roster of vets defeated by nonvets in presidential elections.
Presidents Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan were all World War II veterans, but their service records were unexceptional. Yet they beat out George McGovern, a bomber pilot who flew 35 combat missions; Barry Goldwater, who flew missions to war zones in Asia and Africa and, as a reservist, later rose to the rank of major general; and Jimmy Carter, a pioneering submariner in the nuclear Navy. Carter's seven years in the Navy trumps Ronald Reagan's three years in the Army making wartime propaganda films in Culver City, Calif. But Gerald Ford's near-drowning and heroic rescue work in a typhoon during his wartime Navy service in the South Pacific trumps Carter's peacetime service. Yet, Carter beat Ford in 1976.
With the sole exception of George H.W. Bush in 1988—who won by waging the dirtiest presidential campaign of the modern era and then served only one term—no war hero has won the presidency since John F. Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960. Before Kennedy, there was Dwight Eisenhower, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Before Eisenhower came a century and a half of American history during which war heroes and battlefield commanders routinely won the presidency, starting with George Washington and continuing through Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. Between TR and Truman came a dry spell of 36 years during which no sitting president had served in the military. But that anomaly can be explained partly by the fact that for nearly half that time the president was a single person—Franklin D. Roosevelt. Moreover, both Roosevelt and his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had performed enormously significant civilian duties in World War I, Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the Navy and Hoover as a highly enterprising organizer of famine relief, first as a private citizen and later as an appointee of President Woodrow Wilson. The Oval Office's current drought of military leaders, then, would seem historically unique.
What brought it about?
I posed that question to Alan Brinkley, professor of American history at Columbia. "I don't have an answer," he replied. "My guess is that military service no longer helps the way it once did, but that it does not hurt. I don't think wars have had the romance they did in the aftermath of World War II. Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf War, the Iraq war—no romance there."
Vietnam, of course, marks the starkest dividing line between an era when the American public expressed little or no dissent about war and an era when such dissent was common. One sad consequence of McCain's anticipated defeat is that it becomes possible to imagine, given the passage of 35 years since the U.S. withdrew its combat troops from Southeast Asia, that no Vietnam vet will ever serve in the White House. It could still happen, but the lengthening years now make it likelier that it won't.
David Greenberg, who writes Slate's History Lesson column and is associate professor of American history at Rutgers, agrees with Brinkley that being a veteran, while hardly a negative, is no longer a positive in the way it used to be....
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Presidents Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan were all World War II veterans, but their service records were unexceptional. Yet they beat out George McGovern, a bomber pilot who flew 35 combat missions; Barry Goldwater, who flew missions to war zones in Asia and Africa and, as a reservist, later rose to the rank of major general; and Jimmy Carter, a pioneering submariner in the nuclear Navy. Carter's seven years in the Navy trumps Ronald Reagan's three years in the Army making wartime propaganda films in Culver City, Calif. But Gerald Ford's near-drowning and heroic rescue work in a typhoon during his wartime Navy service in the South Pacific trumps Carter's peacetime service. Yet, Carter beat Ford in 1976.
With the sole exception of George H.W. Bush in 1988—who won by waging the dirtiest presidential campaign of the modern era and then served only one term—no war hero has won the presidency since John F. Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960. Before Kennedy, there was Dwight Eisenhower, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Before Eisenhower came a century and a half of American history during which war heroes and battlefield commanders routinely won the presidency, starting with George Washington and continuing through Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman. Between TR and Truman came a dry spell of 36 years during which no sitting president had served in the military. But that anomaly can be explained partly by the fact that for nearly half that time the president was a single person—Franklin D. Roosevelt. Moreover, both Roosevelt and his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had performed enormously significant civilian duties in World War I, Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the Navy and Hoover as a highly enterprising organizer of famine relief, first as a private citizen and later as an appointee of President Woodrow Wilson. The Oval Office's current drought of military leaders, then, would seem historically unique.
What brought it about?
I posed that question to Alan Brinkley, professor of American history at Columbia. "I don't have an answer," he replied. "My guess is that military service no longer helps the way it once did, but that it does not hurt. I don't think wars have had the romance they did in the aftermath of World War II. Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf War, the Iraq war—no romance there."
Vietnam, of course, marks the starkest dividing line between an era when the American public expressed little or no dissent about war and an era when such dissent was common. One sad consequence of McCain's anticipated defeat is that it becomes possible to imagine, given the passage of 35 years since the U.S. withdrew its combat troops from Southeast Asia, that no Vietnam vet will ever serve in the White House. It could still happen, but the lengthening years now make it likelier that it won't.
David Greenberg, who writes Slate's History Lesson column and is associate professor of American history at Rutgers, agrees with Brinkley that being a veteran, while hardly a negative, is no longer a positive in the way it used to be....