“Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War” by Andrew J. Polsky

Those political goals are not limited to military victory but include the broader aims victory was intended to achieve. “Think of Woodrow Wilson banishing war and bestowing self-determination on oppressed peoples, Roosevelt establishing a benign liberal order that would encompass all the major powers (including Stalin’s Soviet Union), or Bush remaking Iraq.” This history, joined to the fact that war typically entails a sacrifice of the president’s domestic priorities, leads Polsky to claim that ultimately the problem of war is not that presidents are too powerful but that they are too weak. For all the latitude the Constitution and the American people give them, wartime presidents are, ultimately, subject to forces they cannot control, even in victory.

Polsky’s case studies are constructed almost exclusively from published secondary sources, but there are two ways in which his reading of the past seems unduly influenced by his conceptions of the present. First, his appraisal of Iraq as a “war of choice” leads him to seek out the ways in which earlier presidents’ choices about national security also created the conditions for taking the nation to war. Although these accounts are sometimes subtle and illuminating, they seldom convey the degree to which these presidents felt they had no choice but to fight. He seems uncomfortable with the notion of a war of necessity, which by definition leaves little room for presidential avoidance.

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(Oxford Univ) - ‘Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War’ by Andrew J. Polsky

Second, his criticism of earlier presidents for not focusing sooner on postwar planning seems unjustifiably harsh. Polsky’s wartime narratives largely ignore the fear and contingency of war, which create an obsession with military victory. Thus presidents rarely have the luxury “from the outset [to] focus attention on peace-building,” as Polsky recommends. One of the historian’s most difficult tasks is to recapture the uncertainty of the past, when the fog of war heavily shrouded the knowable future. Wartime presidents usually are not free to choose their fixations — or to look beyond them.

Polsky more nearly captures this reality when he acknowledges “the troubling possibility that wartime political leadership, with its multiple, demanding challenges, exceeds the capacity of any person.” This recognition, more than any elegant constitutional logic, is likely to give pause to a future president contemplating war — as appears to be the intent behind Polsky’s thought-provoking volume. But what if previous presidents had access to Polsky’s conclusions? Would Lincoln, for instance, still have moved to keep Fort Sumter in April 1861?

Russell L. Riley chairs the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

ELUSIVE VICTORIES

The American Presidency at War

By Andrew J. Polsky

Oxford Univ. 445 pp. $29.95