wisdom of keeping the power to declare war out of the hands of a single executive. Madison, Hamilton, and their fellow framers were building structural barriers against what they saw as the darker aspects of human nature. The lures to war—personal hatreds, political glory, material spoils, and the simple atavistic enthusiasm for violence—might be too enticing for one man to resist, and might be too easy to promote “by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory,” as a later congressman, Abraham Lincoln, put it, “that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy.” Madison wrote in his notes during the constitutional debates that Virginia delegate George Mason “was for clogging rather than facilitating war; but for facilitating peace.”
The framers clogged up the works by making the decision to go to war a communal one. By vesting it in the Congress—a large, slow-moving deliberative body of varied and often competing viewpoints—the Constitution assured that the case for any war would have to be loud, well argued, and made in plain view. The people’s representatives would be forced to take time and care to weigh the costs against the benefits.
This structure did not make the young United States what you’d call pacifist; we didn’t spread ourselves from sea to shining sea on high ideals and impeccable manners alone. But the wisdom of erecting high barriers to war making traveled unimpeded through early generations of Americans. In his first term in Congress, Abraham Lincoln reiterated the founding principle with a low-born frontiersman’s understanding of who pays the costs of martial elan: “The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”
In 1973, the successors of that frontier congressman had just had a painful refresher course in the perils of lowering the barriers to war. They had allowed Johnson to exercise tremendous prerogative; he’d shoved more than half a million soldiers into Southeast Asia without taking his case through Congress and the American people. So in 1973, the United States Congress reasserted itself. It passed legislation to raise and reinforce the structural barriers to a president waging his own wars. The post-Vietnam Congress wanted no future president to be able to act with that sort of impunity. (As the crotchety old Justice Hugo Black would remind folks who complained about the roadblocks to criminal prosecution embedded in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “They were written to make it more difficult!”)
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was an imperfect law. But by passing it, the legislative branch was putting the executive on notice—it no longer would settle for being a backbencher on vital questions of war and peace. If the president wanted to execute a military operation (
The assertion of congressional power had strong support across party lines. When an incensed President Nixon vetoed the War Powers Resolution, both the House and the Senate overrode that veto with votes to spare.
And the legislature didn’t stop there, especially not when the subject was once again Vietnam. In April 1975, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suspected that Nixon’s replacement, President Gerald Ford, wasn’t telling all about his latest request for financial support for our allies in South Vietnam, President Nguyen Van Thieu’s failing army. As far as the committee members could discern from the parade of witnesses sent from the White House, President Ford wasn’t willing to accept the facts on the ground: the North Vietnamese Army was about to overrun the friendly government in Saigon and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. American combat troops were long gone.
During an executive session of the committee, the senators worried aloud that the Ford administration had not made a real plan for the coming collapse of Thieu’s government. They worried that the president’s stubborn support for a failing South Vietnamese military might lead us back into a hot war there, with combat troops once again on the ground. Congress had given Johnson and Nixon too many chances, and these presidents had made too many costly mistakes and miscalculations. The Senate was not in a mood to give Ford free rein. The game was up. Ford wasn’t going to get his $722 million appropriation. He needed to understand that.
So the committee, in the middle of that executive session, dialed up and requested a nearly unprecedented face-to-face consultation with the president, and then marched en masse down to the White House and into the Cabinet Room. “We wanted to tell you our concerns and hear from you your concerns,” Ford’s fellow Republican, Sen. Howard Baker, told the new president. “We hope when we have, we will have established a new era of negotiation between the Executive and Legislative branches.”
Ford was horrified. He wrote in his memoir that the last time the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had showed up at the White House demanding a meeting was back in the Woodrow Wilson administration. Ford— having just come from the House of Representatives himself—was floored by the legislators’ presumption. He described the meeting as “extremely tense.”
And it was. The minutes show the senators pointedly suggesting that the president get control of his ungovernable and unrealistic ambassador in Saigon, that he make a
“If there isn’t some indication of aid,” Ford harrumphed, “the situation could disintegrate rapidly.”
“I will give you large sums for evacuation,” Sen. Jacob Javits told the president point-blank, “but not one nickel for military aid for Thieu.”
“We are not wanting to put American troops in, but we have to have enough funds to make it look like we plan to hold for some period,” Ford offered at the end of the meeting. But the senators damn sure weren’t going to get sucked into any more combat missions, even in the effort to evacuate.
“This is a reentry of a magnitude we had not envisioned,” Sen. John Glenn, the famed pilot and astronaut, told the president. “I can see North Vietnam deciding not to let us get these people out and attacking our bridgehead. Then we would have to send forces to protect our security forces. That fills me with fear.” The Senate had dug in its heels, and there was little the president could do.
Oh, but those days stuck in the craw of the inhabitants of the West Wing circa 1975. Gerald Ford’s chief of staff would still be complaining bitterly about that “congressional backlash” and the War Powers Resolution nearly forty years later. “The resolution, despite its questionable and still untested constitutionality,” Donald Rumsfeld huffed in his 2011 memoir, “undercut the President’s ability to convince troublemakers of America’s staying power.” Ford complained aloud to his cabinet that Congress had stepped in where it had no business, forcing him to become the president who would, as he put it, “cut and run,” who would “bug out” of Vietnam. Secretary of State Kissinger actually whined to Ford that a few Republican senators had been
But this wasn’t about mean. This wasn’t about Kissinger, it wasn’t about Ford, it wasn’t personal at all. This was about the fundamental question of American martial power and how it’s wielded.
In the aftermath of America’s decade-long tragedy in Vietnam—in the military demobilization, in the course corrections, and in the political recriminations that followed—something important happened. The new structures that grew out of that searing experience—the Abrams Doctrine, the War Powers Resolution, a newly muscular Congress—had real, fundamental, change-the-country force. Taken as a whole, they had the sort of salubrious outcome old George Mason would have cheered: they clogged up the country’s war-making apparatus.
The questions of how we provide for the common defense, how we apportion our limited resources to the military, how we prepare for war, and whether or not we go to war were back where they belonged, out in the open, subject to loud and jangly political debate.
It must be noted for the record, however, that sales of G.I. Joe remained soft, even with the Kung Fu Grip.
CHAPTER 2
