Historian: Trump’s reluctance to visit war zones is an aberration
On the second day of battle, the commander in chief stood within range of sharpshooters to survey the field.
Rounds snapped over his head. “Get down, you fool!” a young officer shouted to President Abraham Lincoln.
Confederate troops had laid siege to Washington and the crucial outpost of Fort Stevens in July 1864, and Lincoln understood the need to show resolve in the nation’s capital. But his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, believed Lincoln took too many risks and said he would compel Lincoln to evacuate. “I thought I was the commander in chief,” Lincoln bristled in response.
Presidents throughout history have sought battlefield visits to better grasp conditions, reverse public doubt and signal to U.S. and enemy forces that this country took war efforts seriously. Veterans have split on the value of such visits, with some suggesting “dog and pony” shows obscure realities of close fighting and drain resources such as aircraft and security details.
President Donald Trump has been different in his approach. Increasing public scrutiny of Trump’s rocky military relations has fueled criticism about the fact that he has not yet visited a war zone during his administration, at a time when American troops have been killed fighting in seven countries.
Trump has suggested a willingness to do so, according to a report in The Washington Post that also said he has been concerned over his own safety and does not want to legitimize wars that he believes should have not been waged.
On Thanksgiving, the president, who spent the holiday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, spoke with troops around the world by teleconference.
Trump’s reluctance is a departure from that of a number of commanders in chief throughout history, including some who have exposed themselves to danger, said historian and “Presidents of War” author Michael Beschloss.
“In modern times, we expect presidents to do that much more than in the old days, when travel was more difficult,” he told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “When Trump doesn’t come anywhere close to meeting the expectation, it makes people wonder why.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in Europe during World War II, made a bold campaign promise just days before he won the 1952 presidential election.
“I shall go to Korea,” Eisenhower said of the conflict spinning out of control, and promised to “review every factor — military, political and psychological — to be mobilized in speeding a just peace.”
Eisenhower made good on his promise. As president-elect the next month, he met commanders and surveyed Chinese and North Korean positions from an artillery spotter aircraft. In a thick parka, he squatted on an ammunition crate and ate lunch shoulder to shoulder with soldiers.
The visit confirmed his belief the war had become a stalemate. “We could not stand forever on a static front and continue to accept casualties without any visible results,” he later said. He brokered an armistice later that July.
President Lyndon B. Johnson arrived in a surprise visit to South Vietnam in October 1966. The presidential trip to the battlefield morphed into a campaign to blunt negative public opinion of an increasingly unpopular war.
Johnson stood in a jeep at Cam Ranh Bay to address troops gathered around him. And although he was not under direct fire, he moved closer to the front than any president since Lincoln at Fort Stevens, Beschloss wrote.
Johnson hollered in thick Texas twang, and may have been speaking at once to the troops and midterm election voters angered over Vietnam: “Chin up, chest out — we’re gonna get out of this yet.”