Steven M. Gillon’s New Bio Shows How WWII Shaped the Worldview of Seven Presidents

‘Presidents at War: How World War II Shaped a Generation of Presidents, from Eisenhower and JFK through Reagan and Bush’By Steven M. GillonDutton, 528 pagesPresidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush (the elder) all were in uniform during World War II. Reagan never served in action, or near the front — instead producing films and participating in other programs to support the war effort, and Johnson was aboard a bomber as an observer on just one dangerous mission.Reagan’s wartime service has often been ridiculed, as though he was merely playing soldier. As Steven M. Gillon points out, Reagan’s eyesight was so bad that at his examination a doctor joked he would have mistakenly shot a U.S. general. Another added that he would have missed.Reagan was carefully shielded from active service by his powerful agent Lew Wasserman, who argued he was more valuable producing propaganda films, and though Hollywood stars such as Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart did see significant wartime action, many others like Dana Andrews and John Wayne did not fight but appeared in important wartime films.Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve, applied for active duty days after Pearl Harbor and served several months in the Pacific Theater but avoided combat, having been assigned by President Roosevelt to inspect General Douglas MacArthur’s operations. On one occasion whose veracity has been questioned by biographers, Johnson boarded a bomber that came under enemy fire, and was honored for coolly observing every aspect of the mission.No matter the degree of participation in the war, however, all of these presidents, Mr. Gillon shows, were patriots who not only advanced America’s interests but were shaped by a world war that forever influenced their views of world politics in positive and, in certain respects, unfortunate ways when it came to understanding what was at stake in the Cold War. Johnson, Kennedy, and Nixon already had political careers in mind that factored into their patriotic behavior.As different as these men were as presidents with quite different personalities, they were all profoundly affected by the appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich by the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. Kennedy actually watched in the House of Commons as Chamberlain admitted that his policy had failed; he wrote about that failure, which led to his famous presidential declaration that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.”Such an open-ended declaration — a spurning of Eisenhower’s more measured, if still similar policy — led to such disastrous wars as Vietnam, in which, as Mr. Gillon puts it, every significant American foe was compared to Hitler. Such analogies, Mr. Gillon argues, as many historians have done, distort history, making it impossible to understand the particularities of each conflict, as American presidents became fixated on America’s role as a global power and, as some critics would have it, world policeman.It is not surprising, then, that Mr. Gillon comes down full force on President Trump, allowing his first-term chief of staff, General John Kelly, to make the argument for him:Kelly has “claimed that Trump often praised Hitler,” Gillon writes. “Kelly recalled Trump saying, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’ like ‘[rebuilding] the economy.’ Kelly replied, ‘But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.’ Trump did not respond. Trump’s ignorance of the sacrifices made to stop Hitler shocked Kelly: ‘It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the four hundred thousand American GIs that were killed in the European theater.’” I am left wondering, however, exactly how Mr. Trump, now attacked as an imperialist, not an isolationist, fits into Mr. Gillon’s conclusion: “By 2024 . . . many Americans had grown weary of foreign adventurism, cynical of democratic institutions, and distrustful of their political leaders. But they would do well to heed the lessons of the past, reject the siren call of isolationism and the odious pleadings of demagogues, and adopt a new, chastened view of America’s role in the world that balances global responsibility with a recognition of the limits of US power. If not, the democratic values for which these seven men—and all veterans of World War II fought—will be lost.”Mr. Rollyson’s forthcoming book is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”

Steven M. Gillon’s New Bio Shows How WWII Shaped the Worldview of Seven Presidents

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