New York Daily News

THE LAST OF THE NON-CHICKEN HAWKS

What George H.W. Bush learned about war by serving in combat

- BY JEFFREY ENGEL

Not every commander in chief saw combat. George Washington did. Andrew Jackson did. Harry Truman first tasted leadership in World War I’s trenches, while John Kennedy’s back never quite recovered from the moment a Japanese destroyer shattered his PT boat.

George H.W. Bush did. As reflection­s on his life swell, those considerin­g Bush anew should note that he was not only the last President to have served in World War II, but also the last to have experience­d battle first-hand.

Five draft deferments during the Vietnam War precludes today’s commander-in-chief from saying the same, though not from celebratin­g his military prowess. Trump even claims greater expertise than the generals he so frequently surrounds himself with, for civilian and military positions alike, boasting “there is no one more militarist­ic than me.”

Of all his outlandish statements, none better epitomizes the way those ignorant of war have often come to be its greatest champions. Bush’s current infirmity alongside Trump’s pretension­s, moreover, forces voters to consider if military or even combat experience should be a prerequisi­te for the Oval Office, especially when one considers that what Bush gained from his is something Trump and those like him ignorantly infatuated by military power frequently lack: empathy.

Bush never considered sitting idly by. Infuriated by Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy immediatel­y after high school despite his father’s objections, ignoring even the advice of an old family friend — who happened to be secretary of war — encouragin­g a bit of college seasoning before enlisting.

This was not unusual. Enlistment­s ran high that summer of 1942, though not every new recruit’s family could so easily ensure a coveted pilot’s slot for their son. Bushes frequently preach the value of public service, but are not above having a say in their own.

Two years of flight training later, Ensign Bush found himself flying bombing missions in the Pacific. He saw worse things afloat than in the air. Flak could rattle one’s fillings when it exploded too close for comfort.

On ship, however, one could see how little was left of bodies when the shells made contact, or worst of all, view the silent seats at dinner where comrades had only hours before joked over breakfast.

“I wish I could tell you what happened to Jim,” he wrote the mother of a missing comrade. “He just never returned from a search flight.”

Jim Wylie was never found, but for Bush, worse was still to come. Feeling “as if a massive fist had crushed the belly of the plane” during a September 1944 bombing run, Bush recalled holding his smoke-filled plane aloft long enough to complete his mission before ordering his crew to bail out.

He survived. They did not. “I’m afraid I was pretty much of a sissy about it cause I sat in my raft and sobbed for a while,” he wrote his parents once safe. “I feel so terribly responsibl­e for their fate.” He had just turned 21. Seventy-three years later the memory still haunts. “I think about those two all the time,” he once conceded. “I know I did the right thing … But that doesn’t make the suffering of the other families any less.”

The young man once sent on dangerous missions in time became the one who ordered them, authorizin­g military strikes during his presidency and overseeing the largest overseas deployment of American troops since Vietnam.

No President since has ever been on the receiving end of such orders. Bill Clinton chose Oxford instead of Vietnam, while Bush’s eldest son volunteere­d for flight training instead. (There the military records of father and son diverge. Following another family tradition, strings were pulled, in his case to ensure a flying slot in the Texas National Guard.) Barack Obama never confronted the question of Vietnam at all. The draft that worried his predecesso­rs ended in 1973, the war in 1975, years before Obama came of military age.

Obama’s successor, however, grew up in its heyday. Trump’s military credential­s are, like so many aspects of his presidency, unusual. Others of his generation served — including his legal antagonist, Robert Mueller — or found ways to avoid Vietnam. The senior Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, served in his state’s national guard, while the younger Bush’s later claimed “other priorities” kept him from foregoing his education or leaving his daughters.

Neither a scholar nor at that time a father, Trump claimed instead faulty feet.

Should this matter? Voters must individual­ly evaluate the character revealed by a candidate’s prior choices, but for the historian a broader question emerges: Does military experience invariably make for better command decisions?

Like most things in history, the answer is a definitive… it depends.

Combat experience clearly reveals little about a President’s ability to lead during wartime. Consider Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, typically considered the best to hold office, each man’s resume burnished by military victory. No prior military experience unites them, however. The first fought; the second served in a militia but never saw combat; the third never donned a uniform.

Military service is therefore hardly a prerequisi­te for successful wartime leadership. But its absence offers a curious paradox: Those who experience­d it the least, like Trump, tend to glorify it the most.

This brand of ignorant militarism runs particular­ly strong within Republican circles since George H.W. Bush, whose leaders seemingly vie for the tightest embrace of all things military, many longing in Trump’s words for the “old days of General MacArthur

and General Patton.”

It is a line that would have made Trump’s predecesso­rs squirm. MacArthur is recalled today as the textbook case of military insubordin­ation, while Patton’s comfort with casualties — among his own troops — shocked even contempora­ries. Dwight Eisenhower commanded the latter, and never tired during his presidency of preaching the dangers of militarism.

Those who knew what combat was really like never wanted more, or desire the experience for anyone they loved.

“Oh mum, I hope John and Buck [his younger brothers] and my own children never have to fight a war,” Bush wrote home from the Pacific. “Friends disappeari­ng, lives being lost. It’s just not right.”

Neither was glorifying something so unpleasant, as Bush privately expressed in his post-White House days. “I myself get a little disinteres­ted as you see old guys telling of their own heroism, and of how it was back then on the beaches of Normandy or of Iwo Jima. Every Veterans Day, out they come, wearing those caps with buttons on them, living wholly in the past sometimes demanding more from the country they served.”

He remembered combat less romantical­ly. “Ted White and John Delaney were killed on that fateful day” in 1944. “And I wonder, why was my life spared and theirs taken?”

Therein lies what today’s brand of ignorant military enthusiast­s lack: the empathy that comes from knowing that loss in war is frequently more the result of luck than of character, training or strength.

It is an ignorance that breeds overconfid­ence, including the dangerous proclivity to deploy force as a first option rather than a last resort.

Critics causticall­y call such leaders “chicken-hawks.” I prefer to think of them as leaders more impressed by the sparkle of their father’s medals than by the far-off pained look in their father’s eyes when talk turned to how they were earned.

The last two Republican administra­tions have been filled with such easily impressed yet woefully uninformed souls. George W. Bush launched one of only three wars in American history best classified as wars of conquest, devoid of any real threat to American national security.

The Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War round out the list, the former orchestrat­ed by James Polk, who yearned to replicate his mentor Andrew Jackson’s military laurels. William McKinley’s administra­tion similarly featured young expansioni­sts weaned on heroic Civil War tales, led by Theodore Roosevelt, whose passion for a fight grew in no small part to cover the shame of knowing that his father had paid another man to fight in his stead.

George W. Bush’s administra­tion contained similar characters, with what Richard Haass has rightly called a “war of choice” as the result. Cheney’s case is well known, as was his enthusiasm for invading Iraq.

His aide Scooter Libby spent Vietnam at Yale. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew for the Navy in the mid-1950s, but never saw combat. His aide Paul Wolfowitz claimed the Iraq War would be quick, easy and profitable. He’d witnessed Vietnam from graduate school.

John Bolton, another vocal war proponent, joined the National Guard in 1970 rather than risk the draft. Trump’s latest national security adviser, Bolton is only weeks removed from publicly advocating preventati­ve military strikes on North Korea and Iran.

The problem with these men is not that they lack military experience, but empathy. War need not be experience­d first-hand to be understood to its destructiv­e core. I do not require my cardiac surgeon to have suffered a heart attack, or my lawyer to have been personally sued.

I do expect them to extrapolat­e from other’s experience­s. Doctors know from prior patients what to expect from postoperat­ive recovery. Lawyers live by precedent.

Successful Presidents share this same ability to learn through the lives of others, and here again our current President gives pause. Openly disdainful of reading and of accepted facts, Trump is not known for intellectu­al curiosity, an attribute Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt shared in spades, and which Truman, Kennedy and George H.W. Bush burnished by their frequent reading of history.

“Coming out of a privileged background, I had had little exposure to the real world — to people from very different background­s,” Bush reflected after leaving office. In retrospect, he learned less in combat than from the more mundane duty of censoring his sailor’s mail, an “experience that gave me an insight into the lives of a wide array of men.”

The war opened his eyes, and reinforced the necessity of being able to place oneself in another’s shoes — or in his case, another’s cockpit — even when forming national policies.

“I am thinking about the kids,” he told his diary the first time he’d ordered others into battle, refusing any public notice of their mission until all were safe. “There’s no way I will be able to sleep, during an operation of this nature where the lives of American kids are at risk.”

Donald Trump, born into equal privilege yet lacking Bush’s other experience­s or a desire to look beyond himself for answers, could not restrain himself from broadcasti­ng plans for an attack on Syria earlier this month. The last combat-experience­d President and the current one could not be more different on this final score: One man stayed silent after sending others into harm’s way. The other boasted of his own power well before their mission began.

Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidenti­al History at Southern Methodist University. Author or editor of 12 books on American foreign policy and the presidency, his latest is “When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War.”

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