Author: James Vizzard

This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History by T.R. Fehrenbach
Paperback, 483 pages. Published 1998 by Brassey’s. ISBN 1-57488-161-2

T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War may be the most oft-quoted history of the Korean conflict, specifically this lyrical passage:

Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life–but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud (pg. 290).

Fehrenbach barely mentions Clausewitz, and yet the Prussian suffuses the book from the title to the final page. His title reflects Clausewitz’s dictum that anyone starting a war must understand both what he intends to achieve and how he intends to achieve it. Fehrenbach’s premise is that in Korea the United States understood neither. We did not understand our enemy or the terrain. Military leaders did not understand the political limitations that would restrict their tactics and scope. In Fehrenbach’s assessment there are two kinds of wars–crusades or jihads, which engage the entire nation and are fought without limitation; and limited frontier wars, fought with professional soldiers on the far edges of empires to hold back the barbarians. In Korea the United States tried to fight a frontier war with citizen soldiers, and the results were not good.

To the 21st century reader, Fehrenbach’s 1963 Cold War language comes across as archaic and simplistic, emphasized by the sonorous prose that would fit nicely in a newsreel or Victory at Sea, but his politics are more complicated that they seem at first. While clearly no fan of liberal social engineering or the Truman administration’s domestic policies, he maintains throughout that Korea did not merit full-scale war. In the age of nuclear weapons, it would have been foolish to risk the existence of civilization over a tiny, peripheral nation. Fehrenbach’s strategic sympathies lie not with MacArthur but with Truman. He also makes a fairly spirited defense of racial integration in the armed forces, albeit with language that jars the modern reader. He argues that all-black units often performed poorly because segregation stigmatized them and stripped them of pride. Once units were integrated, black soldiers performed on a par with all others.

As a combat leader who experienced the war firsthand, Fehrenbach’s primary point addresses the makeup of the army and the nature of soldiers. Prior to World War II, the U.S. Army consisted largely of societal rejects led by a small, insular cadre of professional officers. Some of the rejects took to authority and made good non-commissioned officers who could maintain iron discipline within the ranks of semi-literate, brawling, whoring, enlisted men. In From Here to Eternity one private tells another that he should not be a line infantryman because he graduated from high school. In Fehrenbach’s view, World War II broke the Army in two ways. First, the expansion to over 9 million soldiers broke the old social order, elevating privates to NCO and officer ranks without inculcating the values and norms of the old army. Second, the draft filled the army with “citizens,” by which Fehrenbach means the children of the middle and working class rather than the rejects who filled the pre-war army. The disciplinary methods that were tolerated for the tiny constabulary of 1930 were unacceptable to the mothers of middle America when applied to their own sons. During the war, the harsh discipline of combat masked the inadequacy of legalistic methods. After the war, the confrontation with the Soviets and later the Chinese necessitated a much larger army than the U.S. had ever maintained in peacetime, and therefore conscription. But peacetime conscription meant filling the Army with “citizens” without the discipline imposed by combat. Junior officers no longer had the authority to punish malcontents and shirkers. Soldiers enjoyed levels of due process never imagined by the lifers of the pre-war army. The result was a force unprepared for the harsh realities of combat against a ruthless enemy in pitiless terrain. Returning to his central theme, the United States had built an army for a crusade in Europe but then tried to use that army to guard the frontier on the far rim of Asia.

Fehrenbach’s book is a polemic rather than a comprehensive operational history. This edition includes no maps that would help the reader understand the geometry of the battlefield. His account moves chronologically and captures the general trends of the war, but it is by no means comprehensive. He tells various parts of the story by returning again and again to a few representative individuals–the company commander, the POW, etc. His sonorous prose and free editorializing move the narrative along at a novelistic clip, and he manages to convey the experiences of both front-line soldiers and generals with equal facility. He also pays more attention to Korean units and soldiers than many other historians, crediting them with fierce courage and even some fine leadership within the limitations of poor equipment and training and almost no trust from American leaders. This Kind of War is not sufficient for fully understanding the Korean conflict, but it is necessary.

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 by David McCullough
Paperback, 698 pages. Published 1977 by Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-24409-4

This book was sitting on my shelf for about 30 years. I’m pretty sure I received it as a high school graduation present. Why I never picked it up, I’m not sure, but I had a long road trip so a 700 page doorstop on conquering virgin territory seemed appropriate.

The Path Between the Seas is not McCullough’s most scintillating work. The story drags at times as he relates every meeting, legislative hearing, letter, public rally, and editorial associated with not only the successful U.S. building effort but also the failed French effort that preceded it. It reads as two separate books, and so it probably should have been.

The first half of the book, covering the French failure, manages to convey the sheer force of personality and complete lack of practical knowledge of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez canal and the driver of the French debacle in Panama. De Lesseps was one of those promoters with infinite self confidence, extremely flexible ethics, and little technical knowledge to impede is great dreams. He believed that he could will the canal into existence. Because he managed to do so at Suez, he was hailed as a genius and a hero. When he failed to do so at Panama, he was reviled as a dreamer and a charlatan. Lucky for him he was too old to go to prison, so his son and other enablers did it for him.

The second half is in some ways less intriguing because no character other than Phillippe Bunau-Varilla can hope to compare to de Lesseps. Bunau-Varilla’s part in getting the U.S. into the canal game and funding the stockholders in the failed French canal company ends fairly early, and the book descends into a workmanlike history of a technical marvel. The Americans went through three chief engineers in the 11 years they worked on the canal. The first got himself fired by trying to negotiate a higher salary with Theodore Roosevelt through threats to quit. The second, John Stevens, did a far more creditable job, primarily organizing the workforce and the construction plan, but Stevens was a restless soul and pulled up stakes suddenly. At that point Roosevelt had had enough and put Army engineers in charge. Colonel George Goethals, rejected by Stevens as his deputy, became instead the chief engineer and saw the canal through to completion, ahead of schedule and under budget. Although distant and unloved, he seems to have been universally admired.

If you want a page turner, this book is not for you. If you want to know extensive details about how there came to be a trans-oceanic canal through Panama, it will serve just fine.

James Madison: A Biography by Ralph Louis Ketcham
Paperback, 753 pages. Published March 22nd 1990 by University of Virginia Press (first published 1970). ISBN 0813912652

Ketcham’s Madison biography provides a thorough and engaging survey of Madison’s life, the philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution, and the political maneuvering of the founders and the early republic.  Although a single volume, it delves deeply into Madison’s letters and other primary documents to paint a detailed portrait of the foremost political theorist among the founders.

A child of the Virginia planter class, Madison’s early years help illuminate how a group of rural colonies on the edge of the known world produced such an extraordinary collection of political theorists and statesmen.  Madison’s family had lived in Virginia for generations–long enough to leave the more settled tidewater region and move to what was then the ragged frontier at the feet of the Shenandoah mountains.  Although provincial farmers, the Madisons,  Jeffersons, and others devoted extensive resources to classical education for their sons, including tutors, boarding schools, and universities.  The role of slavery in this equation poses a troubling question.  The Virginia planters did not teach their sons Greek to make them better tobacco farmers.  The Virginia aristocrats were building not only an economic system, but also a social system in which they assumed the role of lords of the manor and embodied the noblesse oblige of a Walter Scott novel.  In an undeveloped wilderness with essentially unlimited free land, there was no way to create subservient captive farmers without chattel slavery.  The early history of America is a never-ending tale of disaffected men pulling up stakes and fleeing farther west, abandoning debts, families, reputations, and taxes. Only chains, whips, and sheriff’s posses could sustain the feudal relationship that southern planters sought to imitate.  Their obsession with classical education revealed a social need that superseded the purely economic requirements of farming and necessitated enslaved laborers to realize.

Madison’s and Jefferson’s educations, regardless of their questionable provenance, paid undeniable benefits for the future of the European colonists.  Jefferson’s flamboyant personality and writing style have placed him in the brightly lit foreground of history, but Madison was far more instrumental in the formation of the republic and demonstrated a much greater grasp of the challenges of representative democracy.  In the Declaration of Independence and later documents, Jefferson showed himself to be the master of the memorable and dramatic phrase, and his facility with propaganda has made him the most quotable of the founders.  It is no accident that Jefferson’s words have caused consternation and dispute over the ensuing centuries as they frequently failed to represent the laws actually enacted by cooler heads.  Jefferson wrote to inspire revolution and to energize what today we would call his political base.  Madison drafted a constitutional scheme to build a functioning government that provided the maximum possible liberty to [white, male, propertied] individuals within the bounds of human frailty and selfishness.  Madison’s grasp of the contradictions of self-rule and his vision for mitigating those contradictions remain as inspiring and extraordinary today as it was more than two centuries ago.  Ketcham repeatedly details Madison’s corrections to Jefferson’s radicalism.  We have received the Jefferson-Madison partnership as one of mentor and protege, but Ketcham shows us that the picture is not only incomplete, but probably downright erroneous.  Madison felt no apparent restraint in contradicting and deflating his senior partner whenever Jefferson’s pronouncements on liberty strayed into the unrealistic or dangerous.

Over his career, Madison’s opponents challenged his apparent reversals, and his early partnership with Hamilton to produce The Federalist contrasted with their later political conflict presents one of the apparent mysteries of the founding.  Ketcham shows in great detail how Madison’s overriding concerns led naturally to the positions he took both early and late.  While Jefferson was dogmatic on the subject of individual liberty and tended to espouse absolutist positions without regards for their logical sequelae, Madison saw every political question in context.  He viewed government as an instrument for balancing liberty with order and recognized, perhaps better than any other founder, that liberty could not long exist without order and limitation.  At the time of the Constitutional Convention, Madison viewed a weak government, interstate rivalry, and selfish opportunism as the greatest threats to the newly established republic and the personal liberty that it promised.  Once the federal government was established firmly, government overreach and centralized power replaced chaos as the greatest threat.  Madison saw a need to limit the growing power of the federal government and establish precedents that would serve to contain it through the ages.  His particular positions on the issues of the day reflected those concerns, and unlike his more dogmatic contemporaries, he was perfectly comfortable espousing opposing positions at different times to deal with different circumstances.

We must also remember that Madison was a practicing politician throughout most of his life, and that he could not simply ignore the requirement to win elections in order to effect his plans and policies. Having lost an early election to a neighbor with a larger electioneering budget, Madison accepted the grubby realities of partisan politics. Never as underhanded or sleazy as Jefferson in his tactics, he nevertheless served as an effective party leader in the House of Representatives with all of the attendant log-rolling, compromises, and parliamentary maneuvers. Jefferson presents a more appealing picture to the dogmatic purist who can focus on his lofty pronouncements while ignoring his Nixonian political operations and his transparent hypocrisy. Madison, more cautious, dour, and circumspect, offered fewer bon mots, more complexity, and better government. Still, even more than his political maneuvering, his glaring failure on the most pressing issue of the era leaves the hagiographic portrait with a giant stain at its center.  Madison, more clearly than any other southern founder, foresaw the destructive power of slavery and the inevitability of conflict over the issue, and yet he failed not only to take effective steps toward abolition nationally, but also to make any provision for freeing his own slaves. Doing so was certainly within his capability, but not without enormous cost.  The great irony is that his plantation collapsed after his death, and Dolley was left in penury despite the retention of the Madison slaves. She eventually had to sell the slaves and the plantation, and nevertheless ended her days in poverty. Had Madison freed his slaves during his lifetime, his family would have ended no worse off, and he would have set a powerful example for his fellow planters. Such speculation does not represent retrospective application of modern values to an earlier era.  Madison wrote extensively about the evils of slavery, and his close confidant Edward Coles freed his own slaves and repeatedly urged Madison to do the same.

The institution of slavery combined with the cavalier myth to create one of the stranger paradoxes of early American politics, and provides a useful lens for viewing its modern descendants. Fearing for the security of their largest capital investment, southern planters developed a philosophical framework in which they–the “owners” of millions of chattel slaves–represented the defenders of individual liberties, while the merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of the north represented “aristocracy” and “monarchy.” Madison participated in the partisan warfare of the 1790s and the first decade of the 1800s that portrayed Alexander Hamilton and other early capitalists as monarchists seeking to create a hereditary nobility of the wealthy while the southern “farmers,” living on vast estates and maintaining discipline with the whip represented the common man.  As racial politics heated up through the first half of the nineteenth century, later planter-class defenders explicitly articulated the logic in which the maintenance of a sub-human class of enslaved black laborers elevated all whites to a single plane, despite the vast difference in wealth and influence between the richest and the poorest.  Madison himself would never have been so crude, but he must bear the weight of those who followed him and took his political system and compromises to their logical conclusions. By creating a permanent racial underclass, white planters could simultaneously claim solidarity with poor whites while demanding subservience and defense of the “peculiar institution.” Poor whites were left with the Hobson’s choice of sustaining their subservient position to wealthy planters in exchange for a permanent guarantee that they would never sink to society’s bottom rung, or throwing in their lot with millions of black slaves against those who controlled the wealth and political power. The latter course offered no guarantee of success and presented the enormous risk that poor whites would find themselves not just picking cotton in the fields alongside blacks, which many of them were doing anyway, but doing so without any sense of social superiority.

Ketcham’s biography of James Madison is a valuable guide to the intersection of political philosophy and practical politics in the early republic. Ketcham falls prey to a common pitfall in biographies of those with poorly documented childhoods–he repeatedly employs the construction, “Madison may have” or “Madison most likely” to attribute the most mundane actions to a particular person based on our general knowledge of the times.  He and other biographers of our early citizens would do better to draw a general picture of the times and place their subjects in context, attributing to them only those thoughts and actions, if any, that are documented.  The constant, and largely pointless, speculation about Madison’s early life quickly proves tiresome, and the reader is relieved when young Jemmy reaches an age to begin his famously voluminous correspondence.