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Grant Didn’t Fit the Eastern Theater Mold — Turns Out That’s Exactly What Lincoln Wanted

William W. Bergen — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 13:25:00 +0000

Passengers riding the Orange & Alexandria Railroad in early 1864 witnessed a bleak landscape disfigured by nearly three years of war. “Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with War Virginia is,” Walt Whitman recorded on a trip from Washington, D.C., to Culpeper, Va., that February. “Virginia wears an air of gloom and desolation; no fences, no homes—nothing but the debris of destroyed property and continuous camps of soldiers,” seconded a U.S. Christian Commission representative. “There was nothing,” opined a newspaper correspondent, “absolutely nothing but the abomination of desolation.”

The Union Army of the Potomac’s winter camps surrounding Culpeper depended on the railroad for provisions, munitions, and forage. Keeping the army supplied required 40 locomotives running daily along the 70-mile stretch of tracks that were vulnerable to floods, prone to accidents, and often attacked by Confederate cavalry raiders. Yet such was the efficiency of the U.S. Military Rail Road’s management that when 22 miles had been destroyed by retreating Confederates the previous fall, the line was restored within days, and the high bridge over the Rappahannock River was rebuilt in 19 hours.

A derailed locomotive along the Union’s busy Orange & Alexandria Railroad supply line.

On March 10, a special train comprised of a locomotive and two cars chugged its way south. Aboard the first car was a detachment of soldiers, but riding in the other was the United States’ new general-in-chief, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and a small party that included staff officers, his son Fred, and his principal political sponsor, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne. Grant had formally received his promotion the day before from President Abraham Lincoln in a ceremony attended by the Cabinet. There was awkwardness—Grant was unfamiliar with Washington and nearly all its officials, including Lincoln, whom he had only just met, and the general-in-chief was a stranger to them. More discomfiture lay ahead at his destination—the winter camps of the U.S. Army of the Potomac.

No one recorded details of that six-hour trip aboard a vulnerable train traversing a terrain rendered even sadder by heavy, cold rain, but the trip’s significance could hardly have been lost on Grant. The man who less than three years before had worked as a clerk in his father’s dry goods store in Galena, Ill., now commanded more than 800,000 soldiers in 19 departments in all Union states and several in the Confederacy.

Over the last two years, Grant had won victories at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga and demonstrated tenacity, audacity, ingenuity, and adroitness. But his character was what most impressed his closest friend, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, who had recently told him that he was “as unselfish, kind-hearted and as honest as a man should be.” Sherman added that Grant’s most outstanding quality was his “simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in a Savior.”

Grant would call on those strengths as he faced a more complex challenge than any he had yet faced. He knew he would be directing armies in a year that would see a wartime presidential election that could itself determine the war’s outcome. The new general-in-chief also recognized that winning victories in the coming campaigns would be key to winning at the polls in November.

Rolling Toward Brandy Station

Grant had been promoted to provide a more vigorous prosecution of the war. That Grant, on his first full day as general-in-chief, left Washington to meet the principals of the Army of the Potomac underscored how closely was its success tied to the Union cause. Moreover, Grant’s plans had changed. Whereas he had intended to exercise his new overall command while headquartered in the West, he now understood that he needed to be near Washington to shield the Army of the Potomac from political intrigue and that Lincoln specifically intended that he provide close command oversight. He knew he would soon deliver a mixed message to the army’s leadership.

Illinois Rep. Elihu B. Washburne, one of Abraham Lincoln’s most trusted political confidantes, was an early supporter of Grant in Galena, Ill. In March 1869, during Grant’s first presidential term, Washburne would serve as secretary of state for 11 days.

Grant fully recognized the risks his promotion posed. After his victory at Vicksburg, newspapers had reported that Grant would replace Maj. Gen. George G. Meade as the Army of the Potomac’s commander. The report first appeared in a little-known New York paper, the Express, and might have originated with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. In addition, some, perhaps Congressman Washburne among them, advocated Grant transporting his army to the Eastern Theater and superseding Meade. Talking Stanton out of it was then General-in-Chief Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, Grant’s departmental commander earlier in the war, and Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, who had observed Grant at Vicksburg.

Once it became clear he would not be transferred, Grant expressed relief. It was “a matter of no small importance,” he wrote Washburne, that the change not take place. In that letter and in an earlier missive to Dana, Grant explained the reassignment “could do no possible good.” Noting that the Army of the Potomac was led by “able officers who have been brought up with that army,” the general anticipated that they would resent having an outsider placed over them. Commanding the Army of the Potomac, he continued, meant, “I would have all to learn.”

Even in mid-February 1864, with his promotion to general-in-chief all but certain, Grant remained reluctant, telling a West Point classmate that he was “thankful” that he had not been transferred. Commenting to his wife, Julia, that same week, the general intimated that were he to receive the top command, he would not be confined to Washington. Grant mused they might see more of each other as he would be traveling regularly between his Western headquarters and the Eastern Theater and could stop to see her wherever she elected to live.

But now Grant was about to begin his acquaintance with the most prominent, and unlucky, of U.S. armies. The Army of Potomac was quite unlike the usually victorious forces Grant had led in the West. Still looming over the army that winter was the shadow of its creator, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. Though dismissed 17 months before, McClellan’s influence endured, most notably among the army’s senior generals, nearly all of whom had received their first promotions while under McClellan’s command. To many of these men, McClellan bequeathed his caution and lack of urgency that hampered its operations. He also left an army culture of political engagement with Washington that undermined its effectiveness. Grant’s suspicions were correct—he was bringing a new style, and he and those he brought with him would be regarded as outsiders.

Since McClellan’s dismissal, three men had commanded the army—Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and Meade. Burnside and Hooker were dismissed for their battlefield and command failures and, partly, because their subordinates had lost faith in their leadership. The army had won but one clear-cut victory, and it on the home ground of Gettysburg, and had repeatedly been manhandled by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia led by General Robert E. Lee.

For his part, Meade had been so criticized after his victory at Gettysburg that he had repeatedly offered to resign. Five days before Grant arrived, Meade had testified before Congress refuting false allegations made by several generals and an array of political opponents who sought to have him replaced. His hold on command was tenuous, and Meade would not have been surprised if Grant was bringing word that he would be sacked.In short, Grant was about to engage an army that was, in the words of Bruce Catton, “badly clique-ridden, obsessed by the memory of the departed McClellan, so deeply impressed by Lee’s superior abilities that its talk at times almost had a defeatist quality.”

At 3 p.m., Grant’s train pulled into rain-soaked Brandy Station, Va., the army’s principal supply depot, described as a “vast domain of smoke, guns, and mud-stained soldiers.” There, on the platform surrounded by barrels of beef piled high around the tracks, were two of the army’s principal staff officers, chief of staff Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys, and quartermaster Brig. Gen. Rufus Ingalls. Humphreys was substituting for Meade, his “slightly indisposed” superior, while Ingalls was presumably along to greet his old friend and West Point roommate. Meade’s absence might have appeared to a more protocol-conscious general like a slight, but there is no record of Grant taking offense.

After the train rolled to a stop, guards disembarked from the first car while officers and civilians detrained from the second. Among them was Grant. The only thing remarkable about him, thought Dr. E.W. Locke, was that he was smoking. “His dress is very plain, eyes half closed, he takes little or no notice of anything,” Locke continued, observing that a “very few officers, and as many men, came, took a hasty glance, and have now gone back to their quarters, most of them shaking their heads, and some saying, ‘Big thing.’”

This photo, “Gen. Meade’s Headquarters–Fall of 1863,” was part of Alexander Gardner’s “Brandy Station” series. Although Meade is not shown here, his chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys (standing center, hatless) is.

The party rode a four-horse spring wagon to Meade’s headquarters three miles away, where they were greeted by the camp guard consisting of details from four regiments. One of the army’s finest bands struck up “Hail to the Chief” and other tunes, but rain prevented a more elaborate ceremony, which was just as well. The new general-in-chief never learned how to make an entrance, and if he took note of the welcome, no one noticed. Worse, his hosts could not have known that their new commander was tone-deaf and sometimes found the sound of music excruciating. Grant once confessed—or joked, we know not which—he knew but two tunes, one that was “Yankee Doodle” and one that was not.

Meade, clad in a common soldier’s jacket, opened his tent door to greet his new chief. Exactly what occurred during that meeting is muddled. Most historians have accepted Grant’s account in his Memoirs that Meade offered to step aside in favor of someone Grant knew better, suggesting specifically Sherman. Grant wrote that he was so impressed by Meade’s selflessness that he immediately assured Meade that he had “no thought of substituting anyone for him.” Meade’s more immediate account, written the evening of the meeting, is cryptic, mentioning only that Grant had been “very civil, and said nothing about superseding me.”

But Grant had considered sacking Meade. One of Grant’s aides recorded in his diary on March 10 that Grant had considered replacing Meade with Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith, who had impressed the new general-in-chief in Chattanooga, but that there was now to be “no change.” Many published rumors had predicted that Meade would be fired, mentioning several different generals, and Smith was listed as among the leading candidates. Meade, who knew and disliked Smith from their time serving together earlier in the war, could not have been comforted by knowing that Smith had accompanied Grant on his visit to the army.

In Smith’s telling, Grant had found that the War Department preferred to keep Meade in command and that he accompanied Grant to Brandy Station only at the latter’s insistence. He discreetly spent the night not with Grant’s entourage but with old Army friends. Grant had lobbied for Smith’s promotion to major general and would later assign him to lead a corps in the Army of the James.

Grant recalled that there was “prejudice” against Smith in the Senate and that only after he persisted had the promotion gone through. As he ruefully recorded in his Memoirs, however, “I was not long in finding out that the objections to Smith’s promotion were well founded.” Meade continued to fret; as late as March 17, he was still worried that Smith would take his place.

First Impressions

Just when and how Grant decided to retain Meade is elusive. Grant was apparently surprised to learn in their initial meetings that Lincoln and Stanton were not looking for a change. Meade hailed from a politically important state, Pennsylvania, and was the only army commander who had bested Lee, making him difficult to fire.

Given the infighting that had raged for months among many in the Army of the Potomac, the administration must have noted that most Army generals continued to support Meade. Moreover, Grant knew he was an outsider in an army that did not treat outsiders well, and replacing Meade would only compound that problem. Finally, both Lincoln and Grant recognized that much of the effort to oust Meade came from those whose bad-faith motives ought not to be rewarded.

With Grant now general-in-chief of the whole U.S. Army, rumors were rampant that he would replace Maj. Gen. George Meade (pictured) as the Army of the Potomac’s commander with Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith, a key figure in Grant’s success at Chattanooga, Tenn., the previous October and November.

Because Meade’s frequent letters to his wife survive, we know much about his frame of mind during the months preceding Grant’s arrival. Replying to his wife’s late-1863 question, Meade wrote that he knew Grant slightly from the Mexican War, where he was considered a “clever young officer, but nothing extraordinary.” Judging from the then-common usage of the adjective “clever,” the army commander apparently thought of Grant as amiable or well-mannered rather than intelligent.

After explaining that Grant had been compelled to resign his commission because of his “irregular habits”—a reference to Grant’s drinking—he listed Grant’s strength as his energy and “great tenacity of purpose.” Still, he could not resist observing that there was little basis for comparison between the U.S. armies in the East with those in the West, claiming that his army had faced an adversary that was better led and composed of better troops.

Meade followed up his brief March 10 letter four days later. In that missive, Meade gave a longer description, saying he was “much pleased with General Grant,” and that he had shown “much more capacity and character than I had expected.” He told his wife that he had offered to step aside as army commander if Grant wished to replace him with a general he knew better. Meade related that Grant replied with a “complimentary speech,” and disavowed any intention to replace him. Then Grant delivered the less welcome news: He intended to accompany the army during the spring campaign.

“So that you may look now for the Army of the Potomac putting laurels on the brows of another rather than your husband,” Meade concluded, a strikingly prescient prediction. Meade returned to his impression of Grant in a March 16 letter, saying that he was “most agreeably disappointed in his evidence of mind and character. You may rest assured he is not an ordinary man.”

If Meade’s words are condescending, hinting at being pleasantly surprised by Grant’s abilities, that view was shared by top subordinates. “Agreeably disappointed,” although a curious phrase, seems to have reflected a consensus. The army’s senior corps commander, Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, wrote to his sister that he had “spent an evening with [Grant], and was most agreeably disappointed, both in his personal appearance and his straightforward, common-sense view of matters.”

Despite news that Grant might command the army directly, Sedgwick noted, “[G]ood feeling seemed to exist between him and General Meade.” General Humphreys agreed, telling his wife in a March 10 letter that he was “agreeably disappointed in Genl. Grant’s appearance,” describing the new general-in-chief as having “an intellectual face and head which at the same time expresses a good deal of determination.”

Striking a discordant note was Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren. Grant, he said, “seems much more vivacious than I supposed and did not look at me with any apparent eye to discerning my qualities in my face.” Warren perhaps did not mean it this way, but he seemed to fault Grant for failing to perceive his brilliance, an early sign of a personal conflict to come.

The president warmly welcomes his new general-in-chief at the Executive Mansion in March 1864, optimistic that Grant would finally be the commander who capitalized on the Union Army’s military strength and end the war.

The weather having not improved, Grant abandoned plans to visit the various corps, and returned to Washington on March 11. He spent much of that afternoon conferring with Halleck, now his Washington-based chief of staff, and then with Lincoln and Stanton. When Grant said he intended to depart for Nashville that evening, Lincoln implored him to stay for dinner at the White House. Grant declined, citing the urgency of returning to the West, adding that he had “enough of the show business.” Besides, he added, “a dinner to me means a million dollars a day lost to the country.” Lincoln ruefully told the gathering of senior generals and Cabinet officials arriving for dinner that Grant had to leave unexpectedly, and therefore, the evening was “the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”

Grant had earlier promised to stay the night, so there was something precipitous in Grant’s immediate departure for the West. It may be that after a stressful 48 hours, and now knowing he would soon return to the Army of the Potomac’s camps, Grant urgently wished to see familiar surroundings and subordinates. Ahead, he now knew, lay a complex relocation for his staff and family and the transfer of his departmental command to Sherman. He now had a firmer sense of how much there was yet to learn and do.

Nevertheless, he had achieved a favorable first impression, demonstrating that he was a quick study who had quietly impressed strangers with his intelligence, determination, humility, common sense, and what Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells noted was a “latent power.” In adjusting to Lincoln’s preferences to base his command in the East and accompany the Army of the Potomac still led by Meade, Grant showed a quick willingness to follow without complaint his civilian superior’s priorities. That augured well for their future partnership.

Official Washington seemed not to mind that Grant’s visit was brief, with several observing approvingly that Grant was “all business.” Still, as the train chugged away, Grant, again alone with his thoughts and cigars, could not know that he had taken his first sure steps on a momentous road that would, less than 400 days later, end in a stillness at Appomattox.

William W. Bergen, an independent historian based in Charlottesville, Va., has had essays published in the University of North Carolina’s Military Campaigns of the Civil War series. He also has worked as a paid guide at Monticello.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

During Reconstruction Southern Planters Called on the US Army to Enforce an Old Status Quo

J. Jacob Calhoun — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 13:30:00 +0000

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 entirely upended society in the American South, enfranchising Black men across the states of the former Confederacy and placing those states (except Tennessee) under the authority of the U.S. military. The acts created five military districts in the South, requiring new state constitutions to be drafted and the 14th Amendment ratified. While Black Southerners rejoiced at their citizenship status and set about exercising their newly won rights, federal occupation and Black suffrage was widely opposed by the region’s White population. Seeing Blacks casting ballots, negotiating labor contracts, and bearing arms panicked many former slaveowners. But even while residents branded federal occupation as “bayonet rule,” they were quick to seek U.S. troop intervention when feeling threatened by freedmen engaging in politics.

In 1867, Whites in St. Landry Parish, La., were rattled by the emergence of a well-regulated Black militia, which engaged in public drills, marches, assorted military pageantry and, perhaps most important, guarded Republican meetings from local belligerents (the Ku Klux Klan, etc.) and safely escorted Republican voters to the polls for elections. No doubt, St. Landry’s White citizens wouldn’t have resisted a return to the antebellum status quo, with Black Southerners essentially returned to a state of bondage—something they believed was unattainable as long as a Black militia remained mobilized.

Winfield Scott Hancock spent nearly 40 years in the U.S. Army and also ran for president in 1880.

Serving as commander of the Fifth Military District, which consisted of Louisiana and Texas, was Civil War hero Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock. In December 1867, planters in St. Landry petitioned Hancock to send them an entire company of U.S. Cavalry “under the command of a prudent and discreet officer.” White Democrats across Louisiana railed against federal occupation in newspapers and in public speeches, but they nonetheless fully recognized that most U.S. soldiers harbored only a tepid commitment to Reconstruction.

In their petition, the planters claimed they had been satisfied with their previous post commander, Captain William W. Webb. Men like Webb—and White officers in general—had reservations about occupying what they considered domestic soil populated by American citizens. Few were willing to involve themselves in strife between the parties, even when clashes would turn violent and deadly.

The petition below, signed by hundreds of local citizens, was just one of dozens sent to Hancock in the fall of 1867.

Parish of St. Landry, LA
Opelousas, December 27, 1867

Sir: The undersigned citizens…impressed with the importance and necessity of the pacific influence of a small organized military force in our midst, respectfully request the commanding General to station at this place, a Company of U.S. Cavalry, under the command of a prudent and discreet officer.

During the time that Capt. W.W. Webb of Co. E. 4th U.S. Cavalry, was stationed at Opelousas, there were no disturbances; quiet reigned everywhere, and the community felt a sense of perfect security. [He] was eminently qualified for his positions. His firmness, justice and discretion, to say nothing of his affable manners, and conciliatory deportment, rendered him generally acceptable, and gave him a commanding influence, which he used for the promotion of the general good. When, several weeks ago, Gen. [Joseph A.] Mower, then commanding, thought proper to remove Capt. Webb’s command…our citizens respectfully protested, in a written memorial, of which no notice seems, so far, to have been taken…

In point of numbers, this is the most important rural population in the State. This Parish alone has registered about five thousand voters; and there are probably one thousand more male adults, who could not, or were not permitted to register. This large population is sufficiently compact to admit of easy and rapid concentration. It is about equally divided between the two races, who, under the influence of artful demagogues and designing men, are daily placed in positions of more decided antagonism. The failure of the crops of the past year, and the great difficulty of engaging situations for the future, have rendered the colored population restless, dissatisfied and uneasy. They are taught to believe, by unscrupulous leaders, that great injustice is done to them, and that the whites are their enemies. They are becoming more idle and vagrant under these influences, and consequently less obedient to the law. Larceny is becoming epidemic among them….They are just now in that condition when a few incendiary leaders could excite them to deeds of violence and great outrage. This is what we wish to avoid; and we think we are not mistaken in the remedy we suggest.

Such is the general respect for the authority of the U.S. Government, particularly as administered by the able and patriotic Commander of the Fifth Military District, that the mere presence of a Company of U.S. Cavalry, under a proper officer, would impart a…feeling of security, and effectually prevent the outbreak of public disturbance. We beg leave to assure [you]…that it is not from a mere sense of personal fear, as to the result of such an outbreak…that we invoke the presence of the military arm of the Government; but it is because we think the general interests of the Parish, the State, and the nation, would…be materially injured by any collision between the races….

In forwarding the petition to Hancock, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent, Oscar H. Violet, insisted there was no cause for alarm and that the “armed assemblages” of freedpeople were peaceable and used their arms to withstand coercion into unfair labor contracts. Violet acknowledged the validity of the Black militia but nevertheless urged Hancock to dispatch a cavalry unit without delay. He complied, and the troopers began disarming and demobilizing the militia after arriving.

In February 1868, this force, accompanied by Violet, disrupted a meeting of the Opelousas Republican Club, proclaiming it illegal and ordering the freedpeople in attendance to disarm. Chafing at “garrison duty,” the unit’s commander was vocal in opposition to armed meetings of freedpeople and ordered them to cease. Black Republicans could no longer carry their arms in public. The local Black militia had been so weakened, in fact, it prompted one of the most horrific massacres in U.S. history.

In September 1868, the beating of a local freedman’s school teacher by White assailants spiraled into a clash between Black militiamen and St. Landry citizens. Disarmed and demobilized, with no federal troops willing to come to their aid, the militiamen were simply outgunned. White extremists, some of whom even had signed the 1867 petition, combed the parish capturing or killing any freedperson unfortunate enough to cross their path.

In what was known as the Opelousas Massacre, 21 captured militiamen were marched to a mass grave in a nearby woods and killed by firing squad, spawning weeks of racial violence and the slaying of an estimated 200 freedmen. In many ways, the 1867 petition and demobilization of St. Landry’s Black militia had made that possible.

J. Jacob Calhoun is a UVa. Ph.D. candidate.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

During the Vietnam War, These Colorful Posters Aimed to Win Hearts and Minds

Larry Porges — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 17:08:26 +0000

The word “propaganda” evokes many images, few of them positive. We often think of propaganda as sinister attempts to brainwash a population into embracing authoritarian political systems, with posters typically part of the effort. History has shown that it’s indeed easy for propaganda to turn ugly—governments have long utilized it to indoctrinate a population to act in ways that it normally would not, and to demonize people and views. Nazi Germany’s vilification of Jews is an obvious example.

But propaganda is often more subtle and can often be attempts to simply inspire and promote the shared values and objectives of the community. Take Uncle Sam “wanting you” to defend America during World War I, Britain’s “Keep Calm” posters of the Second World War, and the strength behind the let’s-all-pitch-in message of Rosie the Riveter.

Propaganda from North And South

The ongoing conflicts in Southeast Asia—from the French Indochina wars beginning in the late 1940s through the U.S. withdrawal in 1975—was a classic case where winning over the population was half the battle. At its heart, the Vietnam War was a civil war.

Here are a series of posters, many quite rare, extolling the virtues of both the communist North and the democratic South—all efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people of Vietnam. Poster art had a long tradition in Vietnam. Because 80% of the population was still illiterate as of 1945, the power of imagery was critical in promoting viewpoints, conveying ideas, and inspiring people to action.

For the North, the artists’ message often tried appealing to the population’s sense of community and country, while also attempting to recruit solders for the fight. Meanwhile, the South tended to focus on rallying the population to fend off the wider specter of communist aggression—a focus encouraged by the United States. By 1969, the U.S. had produced more than 23 million propaganda posters and pamphlets for South Vietnam.

A 1954 poster created for South Vietnam by the U.S. Information Agency warns that: “Anywhere there is communism, there is terrorism and assass-ination.”

A 1964 South Vietnamese recruitment poster—with text proclaiming that “The Army is Your Future”—advertises the skills soldiers could learn in the ARVN.

Ho Chi Minh’s legacy lived on long after his 1969 death. This 1980 poster celebrates the man revered as the father of the country’s communist revolution. The poster reads, “Nobody loves Uncle Ho as children do, nobody loves children as Uncle Ho does.”

A 1975 North Vietnamese poster features an ethnic-minority woman with a machine gun over her shoulder. The North tried to emphasize that all of Vietnam’s many ethnic groups were included in their vaunted national fight against imperialism.

In 1953, a 20-year-old peasant girl named Tran Thi Tam led a guerrilla team of seven women on a mission against the French. Her spirit is shown here floating above a female solider, encouraging her and other women to fight.

Women were often depicted in Vietnamese propaganda posters. Here a female Viet Cong fighter stands ready; behind her the split red and blue colors of the VC flag represent the division within Vietnam.

1968’s Tet Offensive inspired this North Vietnamese battle poster. One of the captions reads, “Sweep clean the American enemy aggressors.”

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

As part of the effort to shape worldwide public opinion, the U.S. Information Agency in 1965 produced a policy paper and an affiliated poster outlining the North’s “brutal campaign of terror and subversion against a peaceful nation.”

Another U.S.-made poster counseled that ARVN soldiers “must be close to the people, protect the people and help the people.” U.S. Army advisers frequently had to remind their South Vietnamese counterparts to be courteous to the local population, taking care, for example, to ensure their tanks didn’t run over farmers’ chickens.

An early warning of the communist threat is shown in this 1951 poster made during the French Indochina War showing representations of China, the Soviet Union, and North Vietnam attacking the South.

A South Vietnamese propaganda leaflet promotes Strategic Hamlets, fortified villages set up in the countryside to fight communists. The pamphlet explains that, in these hamlets, the “whole population actively participates in guerrilla warfare.”

This call to arms implores Southern peasants to “Destroy the Viet-Minh,” and shows the slashing of North Vietnam’s flag.

This same North Vietnamese flag is proudly held up by a Northern woman encouraging agricultural development: “Raise pigs to be strong, to guide the growth of new paddies and the planting of tea.”

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

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How Did World Media View the War in Vietnam?

Zita Ballinger Fletcher — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 16:33:14 +0000

This formerly classified analysis of media coverage on the Vietnam War was prepared by famed journalist and war correspondent Edward R. Murrow for U.S. National Security Advisor McGeorge “Mac” Bundy in 1963.

In the document, Murrow arrived at the conclusion that major media in most other countries around the world displayed virtually no support or sympathy for the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, with the exception of the staunchly anti-communist South Korea, the Philippines, and to a lesser extent Thailand. Bundy served as a presidential advisor until retiring from the role in 1966.

Formerly classified analysis of media coverage on the Vietnam War was prepared by famed journalist and war correspondent Edward R. Murrow for U.S.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

The Complicated Vietnam War Legacy of Henry Kissinger

Zita Ballinger Fletcher and Larry Porges — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 17:45:36 +0000

Henry Kissinger, U.S. national security adviser and later secretary of state at the height of the Vietnam War, died on Nov. 29 at the age of 100. His polarizing career saw him serve every president from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, with achievements that included masterminding a new relationship with communist China, softening the Cold War friction with the Soviet Union through a diplomatic policy called détente, and eventually negotiating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Southeast Asia and ending the Vietnam War, for which he was co-awarded (with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, who declined his) the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.

Born in Germany in 1923, young Kissinger and his Orthodox Jewish family emigrated to the United States in 1938 as the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies ramped up. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, where he served as an interpreter in his native Germany as World War II was coming to an end—and where he saw firsthand the threats from the communist East that he feared were intent on upending democracy.

The intellectual Kissinger enrolled in Harvard in 1950, and soon began developing diplomatic theories of “realpolitik,” advocating for calculated foreign policies that delivered practical results, sometimes at the cost of a perceived larger morality. He was known and respected for his ability to broker high-level negotiations between nations with diametrically opposed ideological viewpoints. The BBC notes that Kissinger was the only American to have personally interacted “with every Chinese leader from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping.” In a testament to his ability to interface between nations with opposing worldviews, Kissinger’s passing was mourned in China as well as by leadership of the European Union.

Nonetheless, Kissinger’s approach to politics and diplomacy, which decidedly influenced U.S. foreign policy over the course of many decades, was controversial during his lifetime and remains so after his death. Kissinger was straightforward about his belief in separating morality from political affairs. Former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes argues in The New York Times that Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik “mistakes cynicism — or realism — with wisdom.” A tribute featured in The Independent however praises Kissinger’s approach as “his finest of attributes”.

Rising quickly through the U.S. government’s ranks, it was during his tenure as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon in 1969 that Kissinger’s sense of realpolitik played out most controversially. Kissinger instituted a strategy of heavily-bombing Cambodia, a theoretically neutral country but long a sanctuary for North Vietnamese forces and resupply in the Vietnam War, to disrupt the flow of enemy troops and equipment.

While the policy may have had military merits, the bombing was too little, too late to have a strategic impact on the war’s outcome, and the deaths of tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians in the bombings remains a cloud on his record. The bombing, contends Rhodes, “did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.”

All the same, Kissinger negotiated the end of the war after years of talks with North Vietnam, resulting in the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and the withdrawal of American troops. South Vietnam fell two years later when Hanoi broke the accords, invaded South Vietnam and overran the country within weeks.

Kissinger stayed on as secretary of state under Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, until 1977. He continued advising future presidents on a myriad of topics. He counseled U.S. President George W. Bush and controversially supported the Iraq War. He lectured and published books and policy papers for many years, and remained actively engaged in foreign policy discussions until his death.

Debates about Kissinger’s legacy will continue. An article published in The Rolling Stones blasted him as “a war criminal” immediately following his death. Marking his passing, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken hailed him as someone who “really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job.”

As for Kissinger himself? He was well-aware of the criticisms he faced but appeared to have been unfazed by them. “I’ve been thinking about these problems all my life…the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable,” he later said. With regard to the Vietnam War, Kissinger was typically matter of fact: “We did the best we could.”

Leap Back on the Political Merry-Go-Round

Richard Brookhiser — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 14:00:00 +0000

His fans compare it to the Second Coming, his enemies to the second coming of January 6. So far Donald Trump’s 2024 run for president seems most like a 1980s arcade game with an outlandish hero bouncing among indictments and own-goal interviews in pursuit of the big prize.

Trump is not the first ex-president to try to win one more time. (He does not think he is quite an ex-president, of course, since he believes contrary to all evidence that he won in 2020.) For nearly 200 years losers and voluntary retirees alike have sought to reoccupy the White House.

Five of the first seven presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson—chose to step down at the end of their second terms. The one-termers had their own choices to make. After John Adams lost his reelection bid in 1800 he went home to Quincy, Mass., to lick his wounds for 25 years. His son John Quincy Adams was more ambitious. Elected in 1824 and beaten in 1828, he angled for the nomination of the new Anti-Masonic Party in 1832. JQA offered to reveal the secrets of Phi Beta Kappa, his undergraduate fraternity. The Anti-Masons were not interested. After this rebuff, he contented himself with the lesser office he already had—congressman from Massachusetts.

Another disappointed one-term president was already struggling to get back, with even more determination.

Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook, N.Y., was the first president to be born an American citizen (in 1782), and the only one whose first language was not English (his was Dutch). Van Buren rose in local, state, and finally national politics on the strength of populist principles, an easygoing manner, and hard work. He helped create the modern Democratic Party, uniting vote-rich New York with the South, and served its first champion, Andrew Jackson, as Secretary of State, then vice president. Van Buren succeeded his mentor—or had he really been his protégé?—in 1836.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

Van Buren’s term was almost immediately blighted by the depression of 1837. A new party, the Whigs, rose up to fight him. They appealed to Americans writhing under hard times by depicting Van Buren as a dude: Van Buren, son of a shabby innkeeper, had always worked a little too hard at his wardrobe. His 1840 campaign against William Henry Harrison was a disaster.

The Whigs soon encountered disasters of their own. Harrison died after 30 days in office and his veep and successor John Tyler quarreled with every other Whig. Van Buren took a nationwide listening tour in 1842—he spent one Illinois evening trading stories with a young Abraham Lincoln—and offered himself to the 1844 Democratic convention.

The party had a rule, however, that the nominee needed a two-thirds vote, not a simple majority. Although Van Buren had appeased the slaveholding South throughout his presidency, he had announced that he would not now annex the rebellious Mexican province of Texas: he didn’t want the political headache of integrating a new slave state. Angry expansionists withheld their support, and after 10 deadlocked ballots the convention turned to former Speaker James K. Polk.

Van Buren made slavery the linchpin of his last campaign, as candidate of the Free Soil Party in 1848. The party touted new territories and states whose soil for free White men, not Black slaves. Van Buren won only 10 percent of the popular vote, but that took up enough votes to prevent pro-slavery Democrat Lewis Cass from winning New York, helping Zachery Taylor gain the White House.

Throughout the 19th century, some ex-presidents, following JQA’s example, sought lower office: John Tyler was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, Andrew Johnson to the U.S. Senate (both men died before taking office). Other exes aimed for the top: Whig Millard Fillmore, who succeeded Zachary Taylor at his death in 1850, ran in 1856 as the candidate of the anti-immigrant American (or Know-Nothing) Party. The Know-Nothings, wrote one contemporary, “came out of the dark ground, crawled up the sides of the trees, ate their foliage in the night, chattered with a croaking harshness, split open their backs and died.” Fillmore got 21 percent of the popular vote, and carried only Maryland.

Ulysses Grant, after serving two terms, took a triumphal tour of the world, and tried a third run for the GOP nomination in 1880. But the nominating convention tapped Ohio Rep. James Garfield instead. But one defeated president—like Van Buren, a New York Democrat—managed to win back the White House.

What’s It All Mean? Grover Cleveland, dressed as a beefy water fairy–or something like that–gazes at his reflection in this odd political cartoon.

Grover Cleveland was a Buffalo, N.Y., lawyer, noteworthy for his capacity for heavy labor, and heaviness: he “eats and works, eats and works, works and eats,” wrote one reporter. He was also personally honest and a stickler for administrative responsibility: noteworthy qualities in the post-Civil War era when an enlarged government was awash with cash to spend and contracts to assign. Cleveland became successively sheriff of Erie County, Mayor of Buffalo, and governor of New York. By the 1880s the Democrats had not won the presidency for a quarter-century. They ran urban machines like New York City’s Tammany Hall, and could count on a solid white-power South after the end of Reconstruction. But to win nationwide they needed the support of Republican defectors concerned with good government. Cleveland was the perfect candidate to lure them.

His opponent in 1884 was James G. Blaine, a Republican workhorse—congressman, senator, Secretary of State—who had, however, taken a bribe from a railroad earlier in his career. Republican researchers learned that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child (he had done more than work and eat, it seemed). But a late-breaking anti-Irish screed by a Blaine supporter tipped New York, and the election, to its homeboy.

Cleveland’s run for reelection in 1888 did not go so well. His vice president, Thomas Hendricks, had died in office, so the party gave him for a running-mate Allen Thurman, a 74-year-old congressman so feeble he could not finish speeches he began. Cleveland and Tammany meanwhile quarreled over the New York governorship. The GOP, led by former senator Benjamin Harrison, managed to carry New York by 1,400 votes, out of 1.3 million cast. Despite losing the national popular vote, Harrison won in the Electoral College.

Cleveland bided his time. In his 1892 rematch with Harrison, New York returned to the Democratic column, and Cleveland to the presidency.

How had Cleveland done it? The narrowness of his 1888 loss gave his party hope for a rematch; there was a dearth of viable challengers to the former POTUS. The key to victory was obviously New York, and that reality compelled both Cleveland and Tammany to stop feuding, if not to kiss and make up. Cleveland might better not have bothered. A depression in 1893 destroyed his term and his standing in his own party. Debt-pressed farmers in the South and West embraced populism, which marooned men of his stamp.

Trump counts on beating a Joe Biden enfeebled by age. But Trump himself is no spring chicken, and he has an array of legal issues to contend with. The lure is great, but the path is long and steep.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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This Signal Operator Witnessed Nixon’s Withdrawals from Vietnam. What He Saw Convinced Him it Wasn’t Working.

David L. Anderson — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 17:32:41 +0000

On June 8, 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon and Republic of Vietnam (RVN) President Nguyen Van Thieu stood side-by-side at Midway Island and formally launched Vietnamization. The goal was to allow U.S. operational combat forces to depart South Vietnam as quickly as possible before the next U.S. presidential election, leaving South Vietnam able to defend itself. Seven months after this announcement, I arrived in Cam Ranh Bay as a replacement headed for the U.S. Army’s 1st Signal Brigade. I was about to have a front row seat on Vietnamization in practice as a quality assurance NCO. Communication technology is an essential combat support function, which Gen. Creighton Abrams, U.S. commander in South Vietnam, had identified from the beginning as critical if South Vietnam’s Armed Forces were to defend their country on their own.

The short time projected for Vietnamization was inadequate for the South to build an effective national defense force with sufficient training to wage modern warfare effectively. Such a project can require years—especially when the local government’s social, economic, and political foundations have been stunted by a century of colonialism and nearly two decades of violent internal turmoil. From my vantage point in South Vietnam throughout most of 1970, these obstacles to rapid Vietnamization appeared insurmountable.

Insurmountable Obstacles

I reported for induction on Oct. 14, 1968, went through basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas, and received orders for advanced training at the Electronic Warfare School at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. Completing the high frequency radio operator course (MOS 05B) in five weeks, I remained at Fort Huachuca as an instructor. With controversy over the war growing, the Army was having trouble getting junior NCOs to reenlist. Instructors were needed. On Nov. 14, 1969, after only 13 months in service, I was promoted to Sergeant E-5. Near the end of November, the training company’s first sergeant called me into the orderly room, looked across his desk, and said, “Congratulations, Sgt. Anderson, you’re going to Vietnam.”

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

I landed at Cam Ranh Bay on Jan. 6, 1970, with orders to report to Company C, 43rd Signal Battalion at An Khe in the Central Highlands. The 1st Signal Brigade’s clerk at the 22nd Replacement Battalion, a buck sergeant like me, modified the original orders. I literally went up the hill from the replacement center to the 361st Signal Battalion. I could not believe my luck. Cam Ranh was a large and secure combat base. In the evenings off duty, we wore civilian clothes, and there were a lot of creature comforts with barracks, hot showers, mess halls, snack bars, clubs, a big PX, and a beach just over the hill.

There was a problem, however. My MOS was 05B4H: high frequency radio operator, NCO, instructor. My personnel folder also listed college graduate, high-speed code intercept operator, French linguist (based upon Army testing and six semesters of college French), and a secret-cryptology clearance from my work at Fort Huachuca. The 361st operated tropospheric scatter microwave facilities, and the Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE) of this high technology installation that could transmit almost 200 miles did not include any slots for high-frequency radio operators.

Nixon (left) shakes hands with South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California in 1973. Nixon’s plan to rapidly decrease the U.S. presence in Vietnam also decreased the training time for the handover to ARVN troops.

The operations sergeant was on his third straight tour in Vietnam, all at the same job. We called him “Grandpa” behind his back, which was a term of respect because it sure looked like he ran the whole battalion. I knew virtually nothing about tropospheric scatter communication, but Grandpa was pleased to have me, mainly because I was a college graduate who could type and compose a complete sentence. I soon discovered that everyone in the office except the sarge were college graduates. He immediately put me to work as the author of various monthly and quarterly reports but soon realized that I had a more valuable skill—French language ability.

Vietnamization had created an urgent need for a linguist. The operations officer was a signal corps major with an ARVN signal captain as a counterpart. The ARVN officer was in the battalion to learn to manage this integrated wideband communication site. The American officer had studied Portuguese at West Point and didn’t know any Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese captain spoke French but little English. With no training as an interpreter and only basic conversational French, it became my job to help the two officers communicate.

In the 361st Signal Battalion, Vietnamization in 1970 hinged on an American officer mentoring an ARVN officer to take command of a highly technical facility through the hand gestures and college French of a sergeant whose expertise was tactical, not long-range communication, and whose French was better suited to translating Molière than to conveying military technology. The mentoring process was slow and not, I am sure, what Washington envisioned Vietnamization to be. As bad as the situation was for efforts to Vietnamize the 361st Signal Battalion across a serious language divide, the ad hoc process received a further setback with my sudden transfer out with no apparent way to bridge the language gap. The commander of the 1st Signal Brigade later acknowledged in his lessons-learned study that the language barrier hampered training.

A Daunting Task

Brigade headquarters at Long Binh refused to issue permanent orders assigning me to the 361st because my MOS was not authorized for that type of unit. It transferred me to 12th Signal Group at Phu Bai for assignment somewhere in I Corps, the five northern provinces of the Republic of Vietnam. On Feb. 9, I got off a C-130 at Phu Bai airport. I waited in the transient hooch at Headquarters, Headquarters Detachment, 12th Signal Group with my duffle bag packed. I could be off to any of the radio telephone/teletype sites the brigade operated in support of the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile); 1st Brigade, 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized); III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF); 1st ARVN Division; 2nd ARVN Division; or Republic of Korea Marine Brigade. I could expect to spend the next seven months at a division or battalion headquarters, if I was lucky, or a small remote site if I was less fortunate.

As it turned out, I soon learned that I was going to be the group’s quality assurance NCO in charge of a small team of three or four currently being assembled. Col. D.W. Ogden Jr., the group commander, had created the team and its “communication evaluation” mission because, I was told, he was tired of complaints from the combat commanders (termed “customers”) about the quality of signal support from 1st Signal Brigade. The combat commands had their own signal assets, but depended on the 12th Signal Group to link their tactical networks to others in the corps tactical zone and from there to the Integrated Communication System [ICS], Southeast Asia and to worldwide networks operated by the Strategic Communications Command at Fort Huachuca. The technology of this vast system—sometimes referred to as the AT&T of Southeast Asia—was powerful. Through tropospheric scatter, line-of-sight microwave, cable, and other electronic assets, a commander could connect securely by voice, teletype, or data from a combat bunker to anywhere in the world as long as 1st Signal Brigade units in the field kept the complex system up and working.

It was a daunting task for well-educated and thoroughly trained signal soldiers with access to reliable equipment. Would the ARVN be able to manage this critical military infrastructure on its own, especially in the short time that Washington had allowed to accomplish Vietnamization? A new brigade regulation had created Buddies Together (Cung Than-Thien) to train Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces signalmen in highly technical communications skills. Units like ours were also expected to conduct surveys by special teams in each corps tactical zone to determine where American operators could turn over equipment and operations to the South Vietnamese.

My team consisted of an electric generator mechanic (another sergeant), a radio operator (one of my students at Fort Huachuca), and a draftsman. The latter two were SP4s and served as drivers or guards or were assigned other tasks. We usually traveled with the group’s engineering officer and the sergeant major from his office. The colonel had wanted a sergeant first class (E-7) to be the NCO, but senior NCOs were in short supply. He settled for me because of my education and instructor experience, and my rank was at least a hard stripe NCO. There were fewer than 10 E-5 and E-6 NCOs in the group headquarters. The team’s sergeant major (E-9) traveled with us primarily to back me up if the issues at the site turned out to be related to command or personnel problems.

Inexperienced Operations

The U.S. Army history of military communications in Vietnam describes the urgency of the task at hand. The recently completed Automatic Digital Network (AUTODIN) could transmit an average of 1,500 words per minute, but the tactical teletype circuits to which it was connected passed traffic at 60 to 100 words per minute. Signal operators experienced continuous maintenance problems with their overextended machines. In the summer of 1970, the Da Nang tape relay received 20 flash messages (highest precedence) in a 20-minute period from the AUTODIN. This signal company had to relay these messages to the tactical units on its circuits at 100 words per minute, which required about 20 minutes per message. This volume of traffic overheated the recipients’ equipment, requiring transmission to be slowed to 60 words per minute. As the official history records, “Besides such technical problems, tactical operators lacking special training on the operation of the new Automatic Digital Network were bewildered by its formats and procedures. The 1st Signal Brigade had to keep troubleshooting teams constantly on the road to help inexperienced operators.”

Author David L. Anderson stands next to a Bell OH-58 Kiowa helicopter used for light observation at the Phu Bai helipad as Vietnamization was underway. The quality assurance team usually flew to sites in a UH-1 Huey, but occasionally the author flew alone with the engineering officer or sergeant major in a light observation helicopter.

The group’s Operational Report-Lessons Learned (ORLL) for July and October 1970 recorded major emphasis on improved communications through quality assurance inspections. Working seven days a week, we were responsible for maintaining the efficient and effective performance of installations operated by 17 units in 5 provinces. The QA team conducted 57 site inspections in six months to improve equipment maintenance, operator efficiency, site operating procedures, and customer satisfaction. According to the ORLLs, “Partly due to the effort of the Quality Assurance team the high standards of customer service provided by units of the 12th Signal Group were maintained or bettered.”

The smallest detail could become significant when dealing with modern electronics. In northern I Corps the soil was red clay (red mud in the rainy season and red dust other times), which made it extremely difficult to establish a working electrical ground for the system. In some cases, poor signal quality or even interrupted transmission was owing to where and how deep the metal grounding rods were installed. Without this basic setup at a tactical location, all the immense technical power to connect the corps level and global system was of no use. It was a variation on the “for want of a nail” adage. In this case, for want of a ground, the message was lost; for want of a message, the battle was lost.

My job took me to signal sites from the DMZ southward to the Batangan Peninsula. Traveling usually by UH-1 Huey helicopters, we went to Camp Carroll (the 1st ARVN Division’s forward command post just south of the DMZ), Quang Tri, Dong Ha, Tan My, Hai Van Pass, Da Nang, Hoi An, Tam Ky, Chu Lai, Duc Pho, and Quang Ngai. Our work also included small fire bases and landing zones: Hawk Hill (5 miles northwest of Tam Ky), LZ Sharon (between Quang Tri and Dong Ha), and FB Birmingham (southwest of Camp Eagle, headquarters of the 101st Airborne, about 5 miles from Phu Bai). We went by road to sites in Phu Bai, Hue, and Camp Eagle.

The 63rd Signal Battalion operated this line-of-sight microwave relay at Phu Bai.

The Phu Bai combat base was spartan in terms of clubs and post exchange services, but its gate sign proclaimed it “all right” with two L’s for emphasis.

We tried to get into and out of a site (especially remote ones) in one day without having to stay overnight. On one occasion, because helicopters were unavailable and a signal problem at III MAF needed urgent attention, I went from Phu Bai to Da Nang in an open jeep along Route 1 over Hai Van Pass with only one other soldier to ride shotgun. That we could make that drive at all indicated that by 1970 the level of enemy activity along this key road had declined significantly. My sense was that the enemy was not deterred by the growing size of the ARVN but was waiting for U.S. troop withdrawals to continue. Unknown to me was the CIA’s Special National Intelligence Estimate of Feb. 5 that “Hanoi may be waiting until more US units have departed, in the expectation that this will provide better opportunities with lesser risks, and that Communist forces will be better prepared to strike.”

Phu Bai was a large and relatively secure base. It was not Cam Ranh Bay, but there was a sign at the front gate proclaiming, “Phu Bai is Allright.” It received periodic mortar and rocket bombardment, especially aimed at runways, helipads, and signal towers. Signalmen are soldier-communicators who provide specialized skills and defend their installations against enemy attack. Our detachment had responsibility for about five perimeter bunkers and had a quick reaction team in the event of an assault on the base. With the shortage of junior NCOs in the detachment, I drew the duty as sergeant of the guard, reserve force NCO, or staff duty NCO at least one night a week.

Vietnamization

Most nights were uneventful, but occasionally I was NCOIC during probes of the perimeter or other imminent threats. One occurred during my last month in Vietnam. Perhaps Charlie knew I was short, because enemy bombardments and ground probes of Camp Eagle, nearby Camp Evans, and Phu Bai increased markedly in July and August 1970. Actually, the enemy was testing the progress of Vietnamization and not targeting me specifically.

There were ARVN troops at many of our bases, but most of them provided perimeter security, manned artillery pieces, or handled supplies—not operating signal equipment. Similar to what I had witnessed at the 361st Signal Battalion, there were a few ARVN officers and NCOs shadowing American counterparts, but I observed little interaction or hands-on communication activity by Vietnamese.

Aware of Vietnamization goals, I wrote to my parents: “The Vietnamization program is really going on in earnest over here.… Even 12th Sig. Gp. is getting in on the ARVN training program. We have about 20 ARVN at various sites in the Group receiving on-the-job training on a buddy system basis.” In retrospect, my estimate of 20 ARVN signalmen over a five-province area suggests that the number being trained was woefully small. With the exception of Camp Carroll, an ARVN command post, I seldom heard Vietnamese spoken at signal facilities.

An exception came when my team worked at a line-of-sight microwave installation near Chu Lai. A group of American military and civilian officials appeared. There were ARVN signal soldiers at the site. A high-ranking U.S. officer asked the American signal officer escorting them how long it would be before the Vietnamese would be ready to assume operation of this station on their own. After a long pause, he reasonably estimated about eight years. Enlisted ARVN signalmen had an approximately sixth-grade education. It required two years or more of hands-on experience for American soldiers with high school diplomas to develop the technical knowledge and problem-solving skills needed for this military occupation. The Nixon administration’s timetable for Vietnamization and turning over the defense of the RVN to its own military was measured in months—not years.

Lt. Gen. Walter Kerwin, a senior U.S. adviser, had estimated in 1969 that it would take five years for the ARVN to be self-sufficient. Washington’s goal was to have Vietnamization completed by January 1973. My former unit, the 361st Signal Battalion, had been designated as a test of 1st Signal Brigade’s buddy effort to turn over the fixed communication system to the South Vietnamese Signal Directorate. That initiative explains the presence of the ARVN captain in the battalion S-3 while I was there. That unit’s 1969 ORLLs assessed that South Vietnam’s armed forces lacked the “broad scientific and technical education base…to allow takeover of the ICS in [a] short time frame.” This study projected a minimum of four years for the South Vietnamese to take control and more realistically eight to 10 years.

The 1st Signal Brigade trained ARVN soldiers at the RVN signal school at Vung Tau and through the Buddies Together program. Language barriers and education gaps meant that ARVN soldiers required longer training periods than Vietnamization made available.

As Vietnamization ramped up, so did U.S. efforts to provide more training to ARVN troops. Despite the prolonged U.S. presence in Vietnam, some ARVN troops showed dependency on U.S. forces. In this 1969 photo, a U.S. adviser assists a local soldier in adjusting his M-16 rifle front sight.

As my return to the United States neared, entire U.S. combat units were leaving the RVN. The 1st Signal Brigade’s primary mission of support for U.S. forces was narrowing. Gen. Abrams had wanted to keep a residual U.S. combat support element to bolster Vietnamization, but the Pentagon mandated sweeping reductions.

I left Vietnam on Sept. 8, after 1 year, 10 months, and 26 days active duty and 8 months and 5 days in Vietnam. The 12th Signal Group soon afterward relocated to Da Nang, as U.S. commanders consolidated their remaining strength and transferred their signal assets to the ARVN. American aid paid private contractors to operate the network as a stopgap to meet the South’s military communication requirements, but the days were almost gone when the U.S. Congress and public would pay the bill.

In my two assignments as an impromptu interpreter and as a quality assurance NCO, I experienced some of the problems with Vietnamization. Studies of combat support at the time and soon after the war frequently referenced what I personally witnessed—limitations on the effectiveness of Vietnamization because of language hurdles and lack of expertise on the part of the South Vietnamese to support modern combat operations. In an otherwise upbeat report on Vietnamization at the end of 1969, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird singled out the challenge posed by specialized training as a “serious concern.” “More English language instructors and more trained technicians to man military and civil communications systems are required,” he admitted. He added that there “were simply not enough qualified persons in the Vietnamese manpower pool to fill all the demands for technical skills.”

ARVN perimeter guards stand at the Hoi An signal site in May 1970. As the author prepared to return to the U.S., whole U.S. combat units were leaving Vietnam in accord with demands from Washington, D.C. Responsibility for the South’s military communication network shifted from the U.S. government to private contractors.

The bravery of the ARVN soldiers and their ability to shoot straight were necessary but not sufficient for battlefield success, as Gen. Abrams had perceived when first receiving his marching orders from Washington. As a nation-state, the Republic of Vietnam had major structural weaknesses to overcome before it could field a modern military establishment.

Anderson went directly from Vietnam in September 1970 to a classroom at the University of Virginia, where he later received a Ph.D. in history. After 45 years of teaching American foreign policy, he is now professor of history emeritus at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a former senior lecturer of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. His twelfth book was Vietnamization: Politics, Strategy, Legacy, published in 2019 by Rowman and Littlefield.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Tweet! Jailbird Politicians, An American Staple

Richard Brookhiser — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 14:38:45 +0000

Donald Trump launched his third campaign for the White House amid a blizzard of legal investigations. In New York City, he was indicted for falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. He was also slapped with two civil lawsuits: one for fraudulently overvaluing his assets; a second for defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll when he denounced her belated claim that he had raped her in 1996.

In Georgia, a grand jury pondered whether he had violated state election laws by fielding a slate of bogus Trump electors after Joe Biden won the state en route to the presidency in 2020, or by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” the votes he needed for him to win it. The FBI wanted to know why documents labeled “Top Secret” had been squirreled away at his Palm Beach home Mar-a-Lago, while Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith grilled a raft of witnesses to his alleged attempts (not just in Georgia) to overturn his 2020 loss. Smith’s bag included his veep Mike Pence.

Donald Trump likes to define himself in superlatives: biggest, richest, best. But he is not the first politician to seek office under a legal cloud. For example, James Michael Curley, four-time Boston mayor and all-time symbol of the big city Democratic pol, got an early boost from a jail sentence. Curley was the son of poor Irish Catholic immigrants. Throughout his long career, he pitched himself as the champion of his ethno-religious clan and class of origin, steering gifts, jobs and public works to friends and followers (and kickbacks to himself). He proclaimed his good intentions in a rich, rolling voice that one drama critic compared to actress Tallulah Bankhead’s.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Curley won elections to the lower houses of the Boston and Massachusetts legislatures. But in October 1902 he pushed the politics of generosity too far: he took a civil service exam for a would-be letter carrier who doubted he could pass it himself. In September 1903, the impersonator was convicted in federal district court of “conspiring…to defraud the United States,” and sentenced to two months in prison. Nothing daunted, Curley turned the verdict into a campaign slogan. He ran for the Board of Aldermen, the upper house of the Boston legislature, that November, boasting of his bogus test-taking: “[H]e did it for a friend.” Curley was elected and, after his appeals had been exhausted, re-elected in November 1904 while serving his time in the Charles Street jail. “I read…every book in the jail library,” he recalled, “and I made a lot of new friends among the authors.” His flesh and blood friends propelled him, over the following decade, to the U.S. House of Representatives, and his first term as mayor of Boston.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

Another jail house office seeker was Eugene V. Debs, whose fifth presidential race was run behind bars.

Debs’ parents, immigrants to Terre Haute, Ind., from Alsace, named him after French novelists Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. But Debs’ political idols were all-American: Tom Paine, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln. As a teenager he worked as a fireman, or stoker, on train engines; as an adult he became a labor journalist, a union organizer, and the perennial presidential candidate of the fledgling Socialist Party. Debs ran four times from 1900 to 1912, barnstorming the country.

One listener described the effect of his oratory. “When Debs says ‘comrade’ it is all right. He means it. That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man….As long as he’s around I believe it myself.” In the 1912 free for all between Woodrow Wilson (D), Theodore Roosevelt (Bull Moose) and William Howard Taft (R), Debs polled 900,000 votes for a respectable six percent.

The overriding issue of the decade became the World War (it was not yet called I). True to socialism’s international spirit, Debs deplored America’s entry: “the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” After a speech in Canton, Ohio, he was arrested for encouraging resistance to the draft and sentenced to ten years in prison. Debs’ concluding speech to the court was radical poetry. “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free.” Debs was imprisoned first in Moundville, West Virginia, then in Atlanta. So it was that he ran his last presidential race from the slammer. “It will be much less tiresome,” he joked, “and my managers and opponents can always locate me.”

Although Debs had the sympathy of non-socialists who thought him ill-treated, he polled barely more than he had in 1912, while his percentage of a popular vote broadened by women’s suffrage fell to 3 percent. Americans were tired of causes, foreign and domestic. New president Warren Harding commuted Debs’ sentence to time served on Christmas 1921.

Try and Try Again. Eugene V. Debs exhorts an audience. Debs ran five times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, and was in jail during his last effort.

James Michael Curley, after four decades in and out of office in Massachusetts, had a second stint in jail. This time the crime was mail fraud. During World War II, Curley fronted a firm that claimed to help small businessmen get defense contracts, while in fact it only helped itself to its clients’ retainers. Curley, indicted in September 1943, did not go to trial until November 1945. Late in the interim he was elected to his fourth term as mayor of Boston. “Curley gets things done!” was the winning slogan.

Twelve days after his inauguration in January 1946, a jury in federal district court in Washington, D.C. found him guilty. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but in June 1947 the septuagenarian mayor was taken to Danbury, Conn., to serve a six month sentence. He kept up a brave front. “The guests at this hotel,” he wrote of his fellow inmates, “give me cigars, oranges and razor blades….I am fortunate to have friends everywhere I go.” But the prisoner suffered from diabetes and a heart condition. President Harry Truman knocked a month off his time at Thanksgiving. The recidivist returned to City Hall.

Politicians in humiliating circumstances can retain the loyalty of their supporters, and even win elections, for a variety of reasons. Debs and Curley both spoke for the aggrieved—burdened workers, snubbed ethnics. Their personalities, however different, conferred an aura upon them: Debs the idealist, Curley (in biographer Jack Beatty’s epithet) the rascal king. They were stars. But they sought stardom—or seemed to seek it—in the service of others. The others rewarded them with their votes.

Debs ran no more races after he got out of jail. He died in 1926, age 70, appealing for the convicted anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Curley ran for a fifth term as mayor, unsuccessfully, but won something more important: a fictionalized, and sanitized, account of his life as Frank Skeffington in Edwin O’Connor’s best seller The Last Hurrah. His favorite part, he told the author, was “where I die.” He died in 1958, age 83.

At least one of Donald Trump’s legal cases will never land him in jail. In May the jury in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. If their verdict survives appeal, Trump will only be out monetary damages. Even hard time might not end his political career. You can be in the government and a guest of the government at the same time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Most POWs Want to Go Home—But After World War II, Some Faced Death on Arrival

John A. Haymond — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 15:52:49 +0000

When the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945, the United States military had custody of a staggering number of enemy prisoners of war: 4.3 million total worldwide, with more than 400,000 held in prison camps inside the domestic United States. German personnel represented the single largest group of prisoners. However not every soldier in German uniform who fell into American hands—whether through capture, surrender, or exchange of custody with another ally—was actually a German citizen.

Between 1939 and 1945, tens of thousands of Frenchmen, Poles, Dutchmen, and Norwegians wound up in German uniform, either voluntarily or through coercion. Nearly a million Soviet citizens, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks had served in the German military for a myriad of reasons, plus many more millions of captured Soviet soldiers held as prisoners of the Germans were now in American or British hands; it was they who would represent one of the thorniest problems among the former allies in the war’s aftermath.

Forced Repatriation?

Prisoner of war issues during WWII were at least notionally governed by the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, but the conduct of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union demonstrated all too clearly the limitations of international conventions and laws of war. The Soviet Union was not a signatory to the 1929 Convention; Japan signed it but never ratified it; Germany was a full signatory. The legal distinction between them was largely irrelevant, because those three nations were categorically guilty of the worst treatment of prisoners of war of any belligerents during that conflict.

As many as 3 million Soviet soldiers died in German captivity. Japanese treatment of captured Allied soldiers was infamously brutal, with a death rate estimated at 27.1 percent among prisoners of Western armies (the mortality rate for American POWs in Japanese hands was more than 30 percent). Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners was even worse, with a nearly 100 percent death rate—only 56 Chinese prisoners were officially recorded as being released from Japanese custody at the end of the war, for the grim reason that Imperial Japanese forces killed most Chinese prisoners outright. The Soviets, at the end of the war, held as many as 3,060,000 German POWs. How many of those men died in captivity is debated, but of the 1.3 million German military personnel listed as missing in action, the vast majority of them are assumed to have died as Soviet prisoners. More than 50,000 Japanese POWs perished in Soviet prison work camps after the war was over.

The end of the conflict precipitated one of the most controversial episodes related to international conventions on prisoners of war: the question of forced repatriation.

The 1929 Convention stipulated that “repatriation of prisoners shall be effected as soon as possible after the conclusion of peace.” What it did not account for, or at least did not anticipate, was how a nation should handle prisoners of war who did not want to return to their nation of origin.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviets insisted that all Soviet citizens held as prisoners of war by the Germans or liberated from German custody by the Western Allies were to be repatriated without exception. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviet government announced a policy that labeled all its soldiers who fell into enemy hands—whether by capture or surrender—as traitors. Order 270 issued August 16 that year, explicitly stated that Soviet soldiers’ only option was to fight to the last. To be taken prisoner, especially if one was a commander or political commissar, would be equated with desertion and defection to the Nazis. Stalin supposedly said, “There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors.” With that attitude in mind, Soviet insistence on repatriation of their captured soldiers did not sound particularly benevolent.

More than 800,000 Soviet soldiers had in fact changed sides once in German hands for a variety of reasons. After the grim years of the Great Terror of the 1930s and Stalin’s purge of the Red Army before the war, there was no shortage of Soviet citizens in the military who loved the Motherland but genuinely hated Stalin and the repressive USSR government. Stalin was especially unpopular among Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other ethnic groups who had suffered in the years following the Bolshevik victory in the 1917-1923 Russian Civil War.

Some senior Red Army officers, such as Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov, seem to have become turncoats for self-serving reasons, but led thousands of rank-and-file soldiers into peril. Other Soviet soldiers in German custody, faced with near-certain slow death by starvation and slave labor in prisoner of war camps, chose what seemed to be the lesser of two evils and signed on for what they were told would be labor battalions in German service, only to find out too late that they were deployed as frontline combat formations or as guards in Nazi death camps.

A Promise at Yalta

The problem was that when the Soviets at Yalta extracted the promise from their British and American counterparts to repatriate all Soviet citizens, there was no consensus as to who fit that definition. The Soviets insisted that persons from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, annexed by the USSR in 1939-1940, were Soviet citizens, but neither the U.S. nor Great Britain recognized that claim. Nor had the Allies anticipated the problem of what to do with Soviet prisoners who did not want to return. The 1929 Convention made no provision for that situation, and it did not specifically allow a detaining power to grant asylum to prisoners in its control who asked to not be returned to their country of origin.

As the war drew to its close, British and American officials, in both the civilian governments and military command structures, were confronted by this question: did the uniform a soldier wore determine the nation to which he should be repatriated? If a Soviet citizen fought in a German uniform and was captured as a German soldier, did the Geneva Convention say he was a member of the German armed forces and protected by that service as a prisoner of war, or was he a Soviet combatant who should be returned to his country of origin?

This photo shows a large American camp for German POWs located in Rheinberg, Germany, then holding no less than 89,000 internees. Many German POWs were held and used as forced labor by the Soviets for decades after the war.

Legal specialists in the British Foreign Office argued “it was the uniform that determined a soldier’s allegiance and no government had the right to ‘look behind the uniform’ of any POW.” Part of the thinking behind that decision was a desire to avoid reprisals against British and American prisoners still in German control.

Unfortunately, they also had to worry about the risk their countrymen then in German POW camps faced from their own ally, the USSR. As Soviet forces advanced in the east and began overrunning German prison camps containing American and British prisoners, Britain and the U.S. wanted to do nothing that might cause the Soviets to delay the repatriation of those men. Previous Soviet behavior had repeatedly demonstrated this was no idle concern. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, told Churchill, “It is most important that they [British POWs] should be well cared for and returned as soon as possible. For this we must rely to a great extent upon Soviet goodwill and if we make difficulty over returning to them their own nationals I am sure it will reflect adversely upon their willingness to help in restoring to us our own prisoners.”

Even so, some of the language coming out of the Foreign Office in London was starkly coldhearted. As one Foreign Office official stated in an official memo, “This is purely a question for the Soviet authorities and does not concern His Majesty’s Government. In due course all those with whom the Soviet authorities desire to deal must be handed over to them, and we are not concerned with the fact that they may be shot or otherwise more harshly dealt with than they might be under English law.” This attitude did not sit well with many British military officers, but it became the policy of repatriations as the war ground to a halt.

“A Battle of Discourtesy”

The same debate caused problems between civilian and military leaders on the American side. In early 1945 Gen. Dwight Eisenhower grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of good faith cooperation from his Soviet counterparts on POW negotiations—the Soviets demanded much but conceded nothing. It eventually got so bad that Eisenhower suggested to the Chief of the U.S. Military Mission to the USSR in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, that he should simply stop cooperating with the Soviets until they proved more willing to collaborate as allies should. Deane said this would be pointless; there was absolutely no chance, he said, of “winning a battle of discourtesy with Soviet officials.”

Statesmen in Washington also grumbled about the push to give into Soviet demands on the repatriation issue. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson vehemently opposed the idea of “turning over German prisoners of Russian origin to the Russians.” He put it bluntly: “First thing you know we will be responsible for a big killing by the Russians. … Let the Russians catch their own Russians.” The U.S. Attorney General agreed on grounds of legal precedent. “I gravely question the legal basis or authority for surrendering the objecting individuals to representatives of the Soviet Government….Even if these men should be technically traitors to their own government, I think the time-honored rule of asylum should be applied.”

But like the British, the Americans were most concerned about the fate of their own POWs who fell into Soviet control, which overrode all other issues. Edward Stettinius, the U.S. Secretary of State, expressed this clearly in a communique in February 1945 when he wrote, “The consensus here is that it would be unwise to include questions relative to the protection of the Geneva convention and to Soviet citizens in the U.S. in an agreement which deals primarily with the exchange of prisoners liberated by the Allied armies as they march into Germany… we believe there will be serious delays in the release of our prisoners of war unless we reach prompt agreement on this question.” By “agreement” he meant capitulating to Soviet demands, but there seemed no simple solution.

The Soviets knew very well their British and American allies were vulnerable on this point, and they kept the pressure on in a manner that was nothing less than outright coercion. That January, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle glumly told Stimson, “the Russians have already threatened to refuse to turn over to us American prisoners of war whom they may get possession of in German internment camps.” That threat was very much in plain view when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Repatriation Agreement with Stalin at Yalta the next month.

Asylum Would not be granted

By the end of February nearly 370,000 Soviet POWs were in the custody of British and U.S. forces in Western Europe, and a great many of those were taken while wearing the uniforms of the German military. In accordance with the Geneva Convention, Allied command had at first issued orders that forced repatriation would only apply to POWs and Displaced Persons (DPs) who identified themselves as Soviet citizens. That arrangement did not last long.

On May 23, representatives of the Soviet High Command and Supreme Headquarters Allied European Forces signed the Leipzig Agreement, which specified that, “All former prisoners of war and citizens of the USSR liberated by the Allied Forces and all former prisoners of war and citizens of Allied Nations liberated by the Red Army will be delivered through the Army lines to the corresponding Army Command of each side.” The operative word was “all.” Washington passed instructions on to its military commanders in Europe that they were to hand all Soviet citizens over to the custody of the Red Army “regardless of their individual wishes.”

Asylum would not be granted, not even for persons whose status all but guaranteed that they would be executed as traitors when they were returned to Soviet control. Mass repatriations followed, and by the end of September 1945, 2,034,000 former prisoners identified as Soviet citizens were given over to the Red Army, sometimes by use of military force.

Nothing in the 1929 Geneva Convention provided for the forced repatriation of prisoners who did not want to return to their government’s control, so the American and British decision to comply with Soviet insistence on the matter was not compelled by law or treaty obligation. It was, instead, an unpopular course of action driven by the need to protect their own soldiers from an ally whose brutality was in some cases nearly as bad as that of their common enemy.

Refusal to Release Prisoners

By citing the 1929 Geneva Convention in its insistence that Britain and the U.S. had to repatriate all Soviet prisoners whether they wanted to return or not, the USSR’s position was duplicitous in the extreme. The Soviets had refused to join the Convention themselves, but that did not prevent them, during the Yalta negotiations, from pointing to Article 75 with its requirement that “repatriation of prisoners shall be effected with the least possible delay after the conclusion of peace.”

The diametric contrast between the wording of that article and what the Soviets themselves did in practice was absolutely appalling. The Soviet Union kept nearly 1.5 million German prisoners of war as forced labor for an entire decade after the war ended. The last of them were not repatriated until 1955. “Fragmented archival sources,” as historian Susan Grunewald says, “imply that the Soviets primarily held onto German POWs out of economic necessity caused by the war’s destruction.” As many as 560,000 Japanese prisoners were held by the Soviets until 1950 under the same excuse. The USSR used those men to rebuild a national infrastructure damaged by the war, but such practice was directly contrary to the spirit, if not the actual letter, of the very international convention that the Soviets cited when it suited their purposes.

Soviet refusal to release their prisoners after the end of WWII directly influenced the drafting of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 when it replaced the 1929 Convention. Article 118 (Release and Repatriation) begins with the sentence, “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.” At that time, there was still no end in sight to Soviet delaying tactics.

The 1960 Commentary on the Convention discusses Article 118 in refreshingly simple language: “This is one of the most important Articles in the Convention and is intended to remedy very unsatisfactory situations. As a result of the changed conditions of modern warfare, the belligerents have on two occasions, and without expressly violating the provisions of the existing Conventions [of 1929], been able to keep millions of prisoners of war in captivity for no good reason. In our opinion, it was contrary to the spirit of the Conventions to prolong war captivity in this way.” It then explains in detail that the Geneva Convention (III) is interpreted to mean that forced repatriation is unacceptable, and that a Detaining Power has the right to grant asylum to prisoners it holds in any situation “where the repatriation of a prisoner of war would be manifestly contrary to the general principles of international law for the protection of the human being.”

Both interpretations exist today precisely because of the long shadow cast by Soviet policies on the repatriation of prisoners at the end of the Second World War.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Although As Crooked As They Come, This Boston Politician Was Beloved

Peter Carlson — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 13:00:00 +0000

James Michael Curley’s first arrest came in 1903, when he was a 28-year-old Massachusetts state legislator. He was charged with conspiring to “defraud the United States” for taking the federal Civil Service exam while pretending to be one of his constituents, an Irish immigrant who hoped to become a mailman.

“He couldn’t spell Constantinople,” Curley explained, “but he had wonderful feet for a letter carrier.” Sentenced to two months in jail, Curley responded by running for Boston alderman on the slogan, “He did it for a friend.” He won easily.

Curley’s second arrest came in 1943, when he was a 68-year-old congressman charged with mail fraud in a scheme to extract bribes from companies seeking federal contracts. “I’m being persecuted,” he said, by “Communists and radical reformers.” Under indictment in 1944, he won re-election to Congress. Awaiting trial in 1945, he was elected mayor of Boston. Convicted in 1946, he served as mayor while serving time in a Connecticut prison.

James Curley.

In the 40 years between sojourns in the hoosegow, Curley was elected mayor of Boston four times, governor of Massachusetts once, and congressman four times. For half a century, he dominated the state’s politics with his pungent wit, his orotund oratory, his Machiavellian shrewdness—and the support of working-class Irish Americans who saw him as the embodiment of their hopes. And he lived to see himself portrayed as a lovable rogue in the best-selling novel The Last Hurrah, and played by Spencer Tracy in the 1958 movie version.

Son of Irish immigrants, James Michael Curley was born in Boston in 1874. His father, a laborer, died when James was 10. To help his mother, a scrubwoman, support the family, James began working at 11, selling newspapers. He quit school at 15 to work in a piano factory, then finished high school at night, while spending his days delivering groceries by horse and wagon.

Eager to enter politics, he volunteered to run social activities at a Catholic church and worked for the Ancient Order of Hibernians—thus building a political base among the Boston Irish. In 1899, he won a seat on the city’s Common Council, running as a Democrat, the party of Boston’s immigrants, and entertaining Irish voters by mocking the “Boston Brahmin” elite as old, weary has-beens with “dogs and no children.”

He created a political organization, “The Tammany Club,” named after New York’s Democratic machine, and organized picnics and Christmas parties for the poor. He did favors for constituents—providing a meal or a job and, as we’ve seen, taking a Civil Service exam “for a friend.” He recorded each favor in a notebook, expecting recipients to thank him with their votes. And they did, electing Curley state representative in 1902, alderman in 1904, and congressman in 1910.

Three years later, he was elected mayor, using a trick so outrageous it became legendary. Curley learned that the incumbent mayor, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald—the grandfather of President Kennedy—was having a fling with a barmaid nicknamed “Toodles.” A Curley crony informed the mayor’s wife of the affair in a letter, demanding that Fitzgerald withdraw from the race. But Fitzgerald refused, so Curley announced his plan to deliver a public lecture titled “Great Lovers in History: From Cleopatra to Toodles.” Fitzgerald quit and Curley won.

As mayor, Curley exhibited the political philosophy that would continue all his life—a proto-New Deal two decades before FDR’s election. Calling himself “the mayor of the poor,” he spent city money hiring workers to pave roads, expand the city hospital and build schools, sewers and playgrounds. He cut the pay of the highest-paid city workers, and raised the pay of the lowest. Recalling his mother’s years scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, he famously issued long-handled mops to City Hall’s scrubwomen, declaring that no woman should go down on her knees except to pray.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

“Government was not created to save money and to cut debt, but to take care of people,” he said. “That’s my theory of government.”

He did take care of people—but not nearly as lavishly as he took care of himself. Curley was as crooked as a pretzel. He forced city employees to fund his campaigns by purchasing tickets to Tammany Club dinners. He signed sweetheart deals giving city contractors huge profits, provided that they split the booty with him. He hardly bothered to hide his graft. Bostonians watched as construction companies with lucrative city contracts built Curley a 21-room, 10,000 square foot, neo-Georgian mansion with marble fireplaces—and charged him next to nothing.

“Even his core voters knew Curley was dishonest,” Jack Beatty wrote in his excellent Curley biography, The Rascal King. “For many Bostonians, his good works would ever stay their dudgeon at his bad deeds.”

In 1934, Curley was elected governor. As he had done in Boston, he hired the unemployed to build roads and schools. But he also purged the state Finance Commission, which was investigating corruption in Boston’s government, a subject Curley preferred to keep hidden. He fired one member, appointed another to a judgeship, and replaced both with toadies uninterested in investigating their boss.

For lesser jobs, Curley appointed cronies. His chauffeur got a state job; so did his gardener. A man who had served time for forgery was hired as an auditor. Curley also displayed unusual sympathy for prisoners, pardoning or paroling 254 on Christmas Day 1935—an act of mercy inspired by generous gifts to the governor from the prisoners’ attorneys.

Soon, newspapers and magazines began attacking Curley’s corrupt regime. “Governor Curley appears to be suffering now from delusions of grandeur,” a Springfield Union editorial charged, “and sees himself becoming dictator of this Commonwealth a la Huey Long.”

Realizing he couldn’t win re-election in 1936, Curley ran for the Senate instead, but he was trounced by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1937 and 1941, he ran for mayor of Boston but lost both races.

He seemed finished, an aging relic of a bygone era. But in 1942, Boston voters elected him to Congress, and in 1946 they elected him mayor. After spending five months of his term in federal prison, he ran for mayor three more times, though never winning again.

He was 82 and sickly in 1956, when Edwin O’Connor published The Last Hurrah, his novel about a very Curley-esque politician. Curley loved the book but sued to prevent release of the movie version, claiming it violated his privacy. The producers responded that they had already paid him $25,000 for his permission. Curley denied ever receiving their money or giving his permission. Anxious to avoid a lengthy court battle and eager to premier the movie in Boston, the studio paid Curley another $15,000.

That was his final scam, his last hurrah. When he died, two months later, 100,000 mourners filed past his coffin.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Why Did Lincoln’s Right-Hand Men Call Him the ‘Tycoon’?

Gary W. Gallagher — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 12:50:00 +0000

John G. Nicolay, John Hay, and William O. Stoddard served as secretaries to Abraham Lincoln. Nicolay and Hay worked in close proximity to their chief throughout the war, while Stoddard spent significant time in the White House between July 1861 and July 1864. Loyal to “The Tycoon,” as they called the president, the three young men logged endless hours and experienced frustration and exhilaration in generous measure. They also created valuable testimony that Southern Illinois University Press published in a quartet of essential volumes: Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (1997); Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (2000); Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860-1865 (2000); and Harold Holzer, ed., Lincoln’s White House Secretary: The Adventurous Life of William O. Stoddard (2007).

Hay’s observations shed light on innumerable events and personalities. On November 11, 1864, the just re-elected Lincoln spoke to his Cabinet about the famous “Blind Memorandum.” He took the document, written on August 23, 1864, from his desk and said, “Gentlemen do you remember last summer I asked you all to sign your names to the back of a paper of which I did not show you the inside? This is it.”

The president “had pasted it up in so singular style that it required some cutting to get it open” before he could recite the brief text: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”

Lincoln next explained that in late August he had believed George B. McClellan would receive the Democratic nomination and meant to urge “Little Mac” to “raise as many troops as you possibly can for this final trial, and I will devote all my energies to assisting and finishing the war.” Secretary of State William H. Seward remarked that McClellan would have said, “‘Yes—yes’ & so on forever and would have done nothing at all.’ ‘At least’ added Lincoln ‘I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.’”

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Hay’s diary underscores Lincoln’s disappointment in the wake of Gettysburg. On July 11, though “rather impatient with Gen Meade’s slow movements,” the president believed his general “would yet show sufficient activity to inflict the Coup de grace upon the flying rebels.” Three days later “the Prest. seemed depressed by Meade’s dispatches of last night. They were so cautiously & almost timidly worded—talking about reconnoitering to find the enemy’s weak place and other such. He said he feared he would do nothing.”

On July 15, Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, “says the ~~Tycoon~~ President [Hay made the substitution] is grieved silently but deeply about the escape of Lee. He said ‘If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.’ I know he had that idea.”

A year earlier, Nicolay described reaction to George B. McClellan’s retreat after the Seven Days’ Battles. President Lincoln recently made a “flying visit” to the Army of the Potomac and seemed to have “returned in better spirits.” For the public, in contrast, it “has been a very blue week here among all classes of society….I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began than during the past ten days.” Many leaders exhibited “little real faith and courage under difficulties,” commented Nicolay, while the “average public mind is becoming alarmingly sensational. A single reverse or piece of accidental ill-luck is enough to throw them all into horrors of despair.” Although Nicolay played down the significance of McClellan’s failure at Richmond, his letter suggests the degree to which the Seven Days’ countered recent Union success in other military theaters.

On August 25, 1864, Nicolay vented to Hay about the volatile political situation that had prompted Lincoln’s solicitation, two days earlier, of signatures on his blind memorandum. “Hell is to play,” he began, “The N.Y. politicians have got a stampede on that is about to swamp everything.” Moreover, “Weak-kneed d—-d fools like Chas. Sumner are in a movement for a new candidate—to supplant the Tycoon.”

William O. Stoddard wrote memoirs that remain an important source on the Lincoln White House, even if exaggerated at times.

With everything in “darkness and doubt and discouragement,” Nicolay thought the nation had reached “a turning point in our crisis.” He lauded Lincoln’s “patience and pluck” and hoped other Republicans would emulate his example. “If our friends will only rub their eyes and shake themselves,” he concluded, “and become convinced that they themselves are not dead we shall win the fight overwhelmingly.”

William O. Stoddard’s recollections of Lincoln, notes editor Holzer, inspired dismissive comments from both Nicolay and Hay. Historians also have questioned some of Stoddard’s claims, as when he insisted the president asked him to manage the substitution of Andrew Johnson for Hannibal Hamlin as the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1864. Yet his autobiography contains ample material of interest. Charged with sorting the mass of unsolicited daily mail addressed to Lincoln, Stoddard had his pulse on the concerns and attitudes of the loyal citizenry and created excellent snapshots of key moments in the war.

One such moment conveys anticipation of public anger over news of Joseph Hooker’s ignominious defeat at Chancellorsville. Nicolay remembered that “[A] terrible, great, black cloud…came rolling across the Potomac and into the White House from the lost battlefield of Chancellorsville.”

John Hay told him that “Stanton says this is the darkest day of the war. It seems as if the bottom has dropped out.” Stoddard knew on that “awful day,” when it “almost seemed as if the White House itself had been transferred to the battlefield,” what the mail would soon bring. “[T]he wails and the mourning…would quickly come down from the North,” he foresaw, “and, mingled with these, would be the sounds of despair and the unsuppressed curses of the unreasoning people who would surely hold Mr. Lincoln and his administration responsible for this one more lost battle and its dead.”

Best read together, Lincoln’s secretaries afford readers an insider’s glimpse into an administration caught in the crucible of a great war. They also remind us of our debt to scholarly editors and university presses.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

A Vietnam Medal of Honor Recipient Shares Leadership Lessons

Zita Ballinger Fletcher — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 15:44:13 +0000

Lt. Gen. Robert F. Foley has led a distinguished career in the U.S. Army. Graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he served as a company commander in Vietnam with the 27th Infantry Regiment, famed as the “Wolfhounds,” and received the Medal of Honor for his actions during Operation Attleboro in November 1966. Foley subsequently rose to become a battalion and brigade commander with the 3rd Infantry Division in Germany, served as West Point commandant of cadets, and was commanding general of the Fifth U.S. Army.

In his autobiographical book Standing Tall: Leadership Lessons in the Life of a Soldier, Foley offers us an in-depth view of his life and military career. The book contains a detailed account of Foley’s life, including his family background, career milestones, interactions with comrades, his marriage, faith, and experiences with mentors. It is a very personal book and there is a lot of material to sink into. Readers of Vietnam magazine will likely be most interested in Foley’s overall observations about the Vietnam War and the details of his experiences as an infantryman “in country,” especially during Operation Attleboro.

Views on Vietnam

Foley is a battle-tested Wolfhound and it is with justifiable pride that he frequently alludes to the prowess of his regiment, organized in 1901 and fighting under the motto, Nec aspera terrent, meaning “No fear on earth.” Fearless in combat, Foley also shows himself to be fearless in sharing his overall views about the Vietnam War itself. Some soldiers are leery of wading into politics, but Foley makes some controversial observations which merit further reflection.

Foley, second from left, is pictured at Cu Chi, South Vietnam in 1966.

Foley’s criticism of the war is not reactionary; he is well-read on the Vietnam War in addition to having experienced it himself, and he cites a variety of firsthand sources as a foundation for his criticisms. Foley alludes with regret to a failed opportunity for the United States to form a working alliance with North Vietnamese leaders, describing how Ho Chi Minh’s life was saved by U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officers in August 1945. “After the OSS dissolution on October 1, 1945, its solidarity with the Viet Minh vanished in the wake of the American and Allies’ pursuit of a new world order,” Foley writes. He also cites the words of Col. Harry Summers, founding editor of Vietnam magazine, from the latter’s work On Strategy: “Every military operation should be directed towards a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective.”

Foley is plainly skeptical of the Eisenhower administration’s policies based on an abstract “domino theory.” He argues that the Vietnam War “had no clearly defined objective” and that “conditions for declaring war against North Vietnam did not meet the criteria for a national security interest.”

The Wolfhounds

On Aug. 5, 1966, Foley became the commanding officer of Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry (Wolfhounds) while serving in Vietnam. His descriptions of the actions he took in the war zone demonstrate his competent leadership. For example, his “cure” for VD among his troops was depriving the stricken misbehavers of bed rest and ordering them instead to participate in all regular combat duties, regardless of their physical discomfort springing off helicopters and shuffling through leech-filled rice paddies. The rate of infections quickly dropped to zero.

“We lived with our soldiers 24 hours a day—we knew them and they knew us,” writes Foley. He allowed his subordinates leeway to devise deceptive methods to counteract communist forces attempting to infiltrate their base camp in night attacks. Foley also shares humorous anecdotes about his encounter with a bamboo viper and an occasion when he toppled into a well, only to be serenaded by his grinning men later with a new take on an old nursery rhyme: “Ding Dong Dell, there’s a captain in the well!”

“Angry As Hell”

Foley describes Nov. 5, 1966, as “the most difficult and devastating day” for his company in Vietnam. During Operation Attleboro, Foley was ordered to break into an enemy bunker system to create a corridor through which trapped comrades could escape back to friendly lines. He and his men were facing NVA regulars, and because the surrounded Americans were so close to enemy bunkers, his options were limited. “I couldn’t employ artillery, close air support or gunships,” according to Foley. As his group got stalled in dense underbrush and his men fell down shot all around him, Foley got “angry as hell” and took matters into his own hands. Accompanied by Pvt. First Class Charles Dean, who carried ammunition belts for him plus a grenade launcher, Foley swooped up an M-60 machine gun and led a charge against the NVA.

The NVA fled the battlefield taking heavy losses and Foley succeeded in rescuing the hemmed-in U.S. troops. He was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade. Foley was awarded the Silver Star and later received the Medal of Honor for his actions, but above all credits his fellow Wolfhounds who followed him into the fray, saying that their “indomitable spirit…made all the difference.”

Courage to Say No

True to its title, the book chronicles the evolution of a young soldier into an effective and capable military leader. Foley shares wise observations about leadership of soldiers that have withstood the test of time throughout military history, such as: “Good leaders make it a habit to get out of the command bunker, walk around the unit area, and be accessible—in the chow line, on the rifle range, in the mess hall, or in the barracks.”

Anyone familiar with the history of war will know that military science is not the science of agreement or passivity; the edifice of war history is etched with instances in which commanders have not agreed with each other—this friction is beneficial. Foley shares insights about military leadership in difficult moments.

“Leaders must also have the courage to say no when the mission has unacceptable risk, when essential resources are not provided, or when following orders is simply not an option,” writes Foley. “A solid background in moral-ethical reasoning is essential for leaders to feel confident in asserting their beliefs.… They can’t walk by the red flags of ethical turmoil and then maintain, during damage recovery, that there were no indicators.”

Standing Tall

Leadership Lessons in the Life of a Soldier
by Robert F. Foley, Casemate Publishers, 2022

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A Look at the Dreyfus Affair: Why Was This Soldier Betrayed?

Jon Guttman — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 18:14:26 +0000

As a housekeeper for the German Embassy in Paris, Marie Bastian had two tasks. She was expected to gather the day’s paper trash twice a week…unless she recognized something worth pocketing to pass to her other employer, Maj. Hubert-Joseph Henry of the Section de Statistiques (“statistics section,” the innocuous-sounding title for French counterintelligence). Making her rounds on Sept. 26, 1894, she noticed a handwritten note in French lying torn up in the wastebasket of German military attaché Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. She wasted no time in taking it to Henry, who passed it to his superior, Lt. Col. Jean Sandherr.

Pieced together, it proved to have only minor military secrets. Far more serious was the evidence of its origin. Someone in the French General Staff was passing secrets to the Germans.

A Spy In Their Midst

It had been 23 years since the Franco-Prussian War, in which the Second Empire of Napoleon III collapsed and the collection of kingdoms and duchies that brought it down united into a single entity called Germany. Peace had reigned since then between the French Third Republic and the German Second Reich, but each power eyed the other suspiciously.

Behind a seeming high point in European civilization, spy games went on as secret agents from all the powers sought out any foreign secrets that might give them an edge, should another war ever break out. Although the French army had recovered from its humiliating defeat, it remained insecure to the brink of paranoia. This new revelation seemed to suggest that the paranoia was warranted.

What became known as “The Dreyfus Affair” exposed discriminatory attitudes in French society. German military attache Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen received intelligence reports from a double agent; Picquart defied his superiors by seeking the truth; Sandherr was determined to rest the blame on Dreyfus.

Sandherr had been aware that someone was leaking information to Schwartzkoppen, but the note was the first solid evidence to fall into his hands. Matching the handwriting against documents among the General Staff, he found at least two specimens that seemed to match. Since the intelligence being passed was a list of new artillery components, including technical details for a hydraulic brake in a new 120mm howitzer and modifications to artillery formations, Sandherr narrowed the search down to an artillery captain on the staff: Alfred Dreyfus.

Soldier and Patriot

A thorough examination of Dreyfus suggested dubious spy material. Born on Oct. 9, 1859 in Mulhouse, Alsace, he was the youngest of nine children whose father had risen from a street peddler to a textile manufacturer. When the Germans seized Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, the Dreyfus family moved to Basel, Switzerland, then to Paris. There Alfred chose to pursue a career in the army, enrolling in the Ecole Polytechnique to study military sciences.

In 1880 he was commissioned a sub-lieutenant and from then until 1882 studied artillery at Fontainebleau before being assigned to the 31st Artillery Regiment at Le Mans and then the 1st Mounted Artillery Battery of the First Cavalry Division in Paris. In 1885 he was promoted to full lieutenant and in 1889 served as adjutant to the director of the Etablissement de Bourges with the rank of captain.

Emile Zola’s editorial “I Accuse” protested his innocence.

Dreyfus married Lucie Eugènie Hadamard on April 18, 1891. Three days later he was admitted into the Ecole Superieure de Guerre (war college), from which he graduated ninth in his class in 1893. He was assigned to the headquarters of the Army General Staff—and ran into the first serious career obstacle stemming from his being the only Jewish officer on the staff.

One of his evaluators, Gen. Pierre de Bonnefond, gave him high marks for his technical acumen but lowered his overall score with a zero rating for “likeability” (what in modern U.S. Army jargon amounted to an “attitude problem”), adding that “Jews were not desired” on his staff. Although admitted to the staff, Dreyfus and some supporters protested Bonnefond’s blatant bias—an act that would be used against him when he came under investigation.

Dreyfus Framed

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Despite two of three examiners expressing doubts as to the similarity between Dreyfus’ writing samples and the handwriting on the note, Sandherr made it the cornerstone of his evidence against the captain. On Oct. 15, Dreyfus was ordered to appear at work in civilian clothes and was questioned by a self-styled handwriting expert, Maj. Armand du Paty de Clam, who, feigning an injured hand, asked Dreyfus to write a letter for him. Dreyfus did, giving no indication that he recognized the message he was transcribing as the same one to Schwartzkoppen. Upon his completing it, Du Paty fleetingly examined both documents and informed Dreyfus he was under arrest.

After four days of a secret court martial, Dreyfus was convicted of treason on Dec. 22 and sentenced to life imprisonment. At a public ceremony on Jan. 5, 1895, he was publicly stripped of every accoutrement on his uniform and had his sword broken before being sent to serve his life imprisonment at the penal colony on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. His last statement before being taken away was: “I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the army. Vive la France! Vive l’Armée!”

As Dreyfus was led away, he faced a barrage of insults, not only from brother officers but crowds stirred up by army provocateurs to undermine any sympathy for the traitor. The emphasis was on his religion, the most common cry being “Death to the Jews!” One Hungarian correspondent covering the event for the Austrian Neue Freie Presse took special notice.

Although he then believed Dreyfus guilty, he commented on the nature of the aftermath in his diary in June 1895: “In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism…above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.” Despairing of his co-religionists ever finding acceptance anywhere in Europe, Theodor Herzl turned his thoughts toward the idea of their finding a homeland of their own.

In Search of Justice

While Dreyfus endured heat, insects, malaria, dysentery and all the horrors that gave Devil’s Island its dreaded reputation, his older brother Mathieu spent all the time, energy and money at his disposal to have Alfred’s case reexamined, seemingly in vain. One appeal after another was rejected. The French army staff, obsessed with maintaining an image of infallibility, was not about to reconsider its rush to justice against the homegrown “foreigner” in its midst.

When Sandherr, promoted to colonel, left the Section de Statistiques to command the 20th Infantry Regiment at Montauban on July 1, 1895, his successor, Lt. Col. Marie-Georges Picquart, was instructed by Assistant Chief of the General Staff Charles-Arthur Gonse to find more incriminating evidence to ensure that Dreyfus stayed right where he was.

Picquart, however, proved to be of different moral fiber. Investigating more on his own than his superiors authorized, the more he found the less the case against Dreyfus rang true to him—especially in March 1896, when he found a telegram from Schwartzkoppen, intercepted before it left the embassy, addressed to the actual author of the note.

Dreyfus is depicted at his trial proceedings. Many of the officials charged with dispensing justice turned out to be biased against him.

That and other handwritten documents revealed a more precise handwriting match than Dreyfus’s. The handwriting was traced to Maj. Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, another staff officer who had served in intelligence from 1877 to 1880. In a scenario common in the world of espionage, Esterhazy had fallen deeply in debt and sought a way out by selling secrets to the Germans. Confronted by Picquart on April 6, he made a full confession. Picquart submitted his revised report, with a recommendation that the Dreyfus case be reexamined.

A Military Cover-Up

The response was hardly what he expected. His demand ran into brick walls at every turn from senior officers like Chief of Staff Gen. Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre and Minister of War Gen. Auguste Mercier, who remained determined that army intelligence not be sullied with having to admit that a mistake led to a miscarriage of justice. In regard to letting the real traitor slip away, Gonse went so far as to say, “If you are silent, no one will know.” “What you say is abominable,” replied an outraged Picquart. “I refuse to carry this secret to my tomb.”

Picquart’s strong sense of justice led to his undergoing a series of transfers “in the interest of the service,” first to a unit in the French Alps and ultimately to command the 4th Tirailleurs Regiment in Sousse, Tunisia. In a further attempt to discredit his findings, Boisdeffre and Gonse ordered Picquart’s deputy in the Section de Statistiques, Maj. Henry, to fortify Dreyfus’ file with more incriminating evidence. This Henry did on Nov. 1 by producing what he declared to be further correspondence between Dreyfus and the Germans. However, when Boisdeffre and Gonse brought the most incriminating letter to then-Minister of War Jean-Baptiste Billot, they realized that it was a forgery clumsily created by Henry himself.

Dreyfus’ innocence was becoming too clear to deny. Yet Billot joined Boisdeffre and Gonse in agreeing that the verdict must stand—and to persecute Picquart, “who did not understand anything.” Henry conjured up an embezzlement charge against his former superior and sent him an accusatory letter. This only brought Picquart back to Paris, armed with a lawyer.

Dreyfus was imprisoned in a tiny cell on Devil’s Island, where he despaired of ever being released. His family never gave up on his cause.

Far from being buried, by mid-1896 the Dreyfus case had grown into a cause célèbre attracting partisans on both sides. Most French journals upheld the guilty verdict and opposed a retrial, reinforcing their arguments with accusations that Jews could only be expected to betray any country they inhabited.

Besides the army, the partisans who came to be called “anti-Dreyfusards” were mainly conservatives, nationalists and traditionalists. The tradition they conserved was hundreds of years of antisemitism that had supposedly ended with the Revolution and the Rights of Man, but which the General Staff tacitly encouraged in its ongoing campaign to keep the brand of traitor on Dreyfus. Among the foremost civilian mouthpieces was Edouard Drumont, whose publication La Libre Parole became an open forum for anyone with bile against Jews in general.

The Spy Escapes

In spite of all this, a growing cross-section of the French intelligentsia began taking up Dreyfus’ case. The first of these “Dreyfusards” was anarchist journalist Bernard Lazare, who after examining the existing evidence published an appeal from Brussels, Belgium. The conflict between of the Revolution’s ideals and the revival of old prejudices in “defense” of a Catholic France came to virtually split the entire country in two, breaking up lifelong friendships even in the world of impressionist art. Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Paul Signac and Camille Pisarro, for example, were Dreyfusards, while Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were anti-Dreyfusards.

With evidence of Esterhazy’s guilt and Dreyfus’ innocence leaking into public scrutiny, the General Staff took a new step to address the matter head-on. On Jan. 10, 1898, it tried Esterhazy before a closed military court, Mathieu and Lucie Dreyfus’ appeals for a civil trial having been denied. The three army-supplied “experts” testified that Esterhazy’s handwriting did not match that on the bordereau. The next day, after three minutes of deliberation, the court acquitted Esterhazy and all officers present cheered. Dreyfusards protested in the streets, to be beaten down by mobs of rioting anti-Dreyfusards and antisemites.

Dreyfus suffered on, but the trial’s real victim was Picquart, who was discredited, subsequently arrested for “violation of professional security” and imprisoned in Fort Mont Valérien.

Having been publicly exonerated, Esterhazy was discretely discharged from the army and exiled to Britain via Brussels. Settling in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, he lived out his life comfortably until 1923.

Esterhazy was proven to have been the real spy. Henry deliberately fabricated evidence against Dreyfus and was found dead in prison. Famed writer Emile Zola led efforts to exonerate Dreyfus with vehement essays but met with an untimely death.

The Dreyfusards swiftly changed tactics, doubling down on Lazare’s use of the press with a vehement 4,500-word open letter to President Félix Faure by novelist and social critic Emile Zola in the Jan. 13, 1898 issue of the newspaper L’Aurore. It was aimed directly at the high command’s perfidy with a title suggested by fellow journalist Georges Clemenceau:“J’Accuse!”

Clemenceau himself was equally accusatory when he declared, “What irony is this, that men should have stormed the Bastille, guillotined the king and promoted a major revolution, only to discover in the end that it had become impossible to get a man tried in accordance with the law.” Others who took up Dreyfus’ cause included Léon Blum, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Sarah Bernhardt and even Mark Twain.

A Forgery discovered

J’Accuse exposed all that was known of the army’s morally corrupt handling of both Dreyfus and Esterhazy and included the General Staff members involved by name. L’Aurore’s circulation was normally 30,000 but it sold 200,000 copies on Jan. 13. The anti-Dreyfusards’ reaction was so violently negative that Zola needed a police escort to walk to and from his home. On Jan. 15 Le Temps called for a new public review of Dreyfus’ case. Minister of War Billot struck back by filing a public complaint against Zola and Alexandre Perrenx, manager of l’Aurore, for defamation of a public authority, which was approved by the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 312 to 22.

Held at the Assises du Seine between Feb. 7 to 23, the trial ended with Zola condemned to the maximum sentence, a year in prison and a 3,000-franc fine. Again, the verdict was accompanied by street riots against Zola and against Jews. After another trial on July 18, Zola took friends’ advice and exiled himself to England for the following year. In the process, so much of the Dreyfus Affair was exposed to public scrutiny that Zola’s two courtroom defeats ultimately amounted to a tide-turning victory.

France got a new minister of war, Godefroy Cavaignac, who was eager to prove Dreyfus’ guilt but was completely in the dark about the high command’s obstruction of justice. He ordered the case files examined and was astonished to find out how much evidence had been withheld from Dreyfus’ defense.

On Aug. 13, 1898 one of his staff, Louis Cuignet, holding a key document before a lamp, noticed that the head and foot were not the same paper as the body copy. The forgery was soon traced to Major—now promoted to lieutenant colonel—Henry.

Alfred Dreyfus, in uniform on right, undergoes a retrial at Rennes in 1899 in which he was still found guilty but had his sentence reduced; he then received a “pardon.” His supporters fought for justice and he was declared innocent in 1906.

A court of inquiry was called for Esterhazy, who admitted his treason and revealed the high command’s collusion in framing Dreyfus. On Aug. 30 the council questioned Henry in the presence of Generals Boisdeffre and Gonse. After an hour of interrogation from Cavaignac himself, Henry broke down and confessed to having falsified the evidence. He was promptly arrested and imprisoned in the Fort Mont Valérien. The next day he was found with his throat cut. Nobody found a straight razor on his person when he entered his cell. How it got there—and whether his death was suicide or murder—remains a mystery.

With the news reports of Henry’s act of deceit, the anti-Dreyfusards declared him a martyr. Lucie Dreyfus pressed for a retrial. Cavaignac still refused, but the president of the council, Henri Brisson, forced him to resign. Boisdeffre also resigned and Gonse was discredited. While the partisans continued to struggle, sometimes violently, new revelations were gradually shifting the political landscape. A growing number of French Republicans recognized the injustice that hid behind the military’s veneer of “patriotism.”

Pardoned?

On June 3, 1899, the Supreme Court overturned Dreyfus’ verdict and sentence. Dreyfus himself had little or no access to news of the maelstrom brewing in the wake of his arrest. It was days later that he learned that he was being summoned back to France.

On June 9 Dreyfus departed Devil’s Island—only to be arrested again on July 1 and imprisoned at Rennes, where he was to undergo his retrial. This began on Aug. 7, presided over by Gen. Mercier, who was still determined to maintain the guilty verdict, and attended by as much popular rancor as before. On Aug. 14 one of Dreyfus’ lawyers, Fernand Labori, was shot in the back by an assailant who was never identified. As the original case against him crumbled, the president of the council, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, sought a compromise.

Although five of the seven court members upheld the original verdict, on Sept. 9 Waldeck-Rousseau declared Dreyfus guilty of treason “with extenuating circumstances” and reduced his life sentence to 10 years. The next day Dreyfus appealed for another retrial. Eager to put the “affair” behind France, Waldeck-Rousseau offered a pardon. Exhausted from his time on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus accepted those terms on Sept. 19 and was released on Sept. 21. Still, being pardoned implies guilt. Dreyfus’ supporters remained unsatisfied with anything short of exoneration. Beyond France, protest marches broke out in 20 foreign capitals.

Not Guilty

Among other literary responses, Zola added to his previous essays, L’Affaire and J’Accuse! with a third, Verité (truth). On Sept. 29, 1902, however, Zola died, asphyxiated by chimney fumes from which his wife, Alexandrine, narrowly escaped. In 1953, the newspaper Liberation published the dying confession by a Paris roofer that he had blocked the chimney. Dreyfusards like socialist leader Jean Jaurès kept up the pressure for the next several years.

Dreyfus, facing left, later served in World War I and fought on the Western Front.

On April 7, 1903 Dreyfus’ case was investigated once more—and eventually its conclusion was finally reversed. On July 13, 1906 he was declared innocent. He accepted reinstatement in the army with the rank of major, backdated to July 10, 1903, and was also made a chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He commanded the artillery depot at Fort Neuf de Vincennes until June 1907, when he retired into the Reserve. Also exonerated was Georges Picquart, who rejoined the ranks, was promoted to brigadier general and served as Minister of War from 1906 to 1909. He died in a riding accident on Jan. 19, 1914.

On June 4, 1908 Dreyfus found himself literally the target of residual antisemitic hatred. As he attended the transfer of Emile Zola’s ashes to the Pantheon, journalist Louis Grégory fired two revolver shots, slightly wounding him in the arm. Although apprehended, Grégory was acquitted in court.

The question of Dreyfus’ loyalty to his country got a final test when World War I broke out. Returning from the reserves at age 55, he commanded an artillery depot and a supply column in Paris but as the French army suffered heavy attrition in the field, in 1917 he transferred to take up an artillery command on the Western Front, fighting at Chemin des Dames and Verdun. His son, Pierre, also served as an artillery officer, being awarded the Croix de Guerre. Two nephews also became artillery officers but were both killed in action. The only other major player in the Dreyfus Affair to see combat during the war was Armand du Paty de Clam.

In 1919 Dreyfus’ honors were upgraded to Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. He died on July 12, 1935, aged 75, and was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. For all the French military’s efforts to make it go away, the Dreyfus Affair long outlived its namesake, leaving behind a number of political, legal and social aftereffects. In France it held up a mirror that showed two psyches—which would recur five years after Dreyfus’ death with new evocative names, such as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Laval. Sadly, it still hasn’t gone away.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Lincoln in His Own Words: The 16th President’s Musings About ‘negro equality’

Ross E. Heller — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Capt. James N. Brown

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln casually and unknowingly created a time capsule of his contemporary mindset on both slavery and race relations—not hidden in a cornerstone but taking the form of a 3.25- by 5.78-inch black campaign notebook shared with Capt. James N. Brown, a longtime friend and fellow campaigner.

It was the waning days of Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and Brown was running for Illinois state legislature, partly at Lincoln’s encouragement. Brown, however, was assailed for his ties to Lincoln. Virulent opponents said that Lincoln—and therefore Brown, by association—supported and wanted to bring about social and political Negro equality.

Brown beseeched Lincoln for a clear statement on that Negro equality, what Brown referred to as the “paramount issue” of the day. Lincoln acceded, annotating what he called a “scrapbook” with news clips of his speeches on the subject, and a definitive 8-page letter, transcribed here.

Brown used the notebook from Lincoln during his campaign’s waning days. It didn’t help. He lost the election.

The scrapbook was cherished by Brown and, after his 1868 death, by his sons William and Benjamin. Eventually they sold it to New York rare-book dealer George D. Smith, who found a customer in Philadelphia Lincoln collector William H. Lambert, who believed Lincoln’s words warranted wider distribution and published a version of the notebook in 1901 as Abraham Lincoln: His Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original with an Explanatory Note by J. McCan Davis.

After Lambert’s death the ‘scrapbook’ was auctioned in 1914; and purchased for Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino, California library.

In his career Ross E. Heller, holder of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has been a journalist, U.S. Senatorial press secretary, lobbyist, association executive, entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and now, editor/author. Researching this book, he is also discoverer of new facts of America’s most-storied life; a life about which no one could imagine anything new could ever be found.

This article is an excerpt from By Abraham Lincoln: His 1858 Time Capsule, edited by Ross E. Heller and published by CustomNEWS, Seaside Books.

The Great Debates. Lincoln gained great fame for his deft verbal jousting with Stephen Douglas in their 1858 Illinois debates.

Abraham Lincoln’s note.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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A Requiem for Daniel Ellsberg

Larry Porges — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 15:17:35 +0000

Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaked “Pentagon Papers” revealed to the world in 1971 the U.S. government’s closely guarded overview of the Vietnam War, died of pancreatic cancer on June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif., at age 92.

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Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated former Marine, was an analyst for the RAND Corporation before becoming an adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1964. He spent two years in Vietnam for the DoD assessing the war and spent significant time accompany counterinsurgency sorties in the field.

It was there that his formerly pro-war stance began to change, as the brutality and likely futility of the fighting slowly turned him against American policy. In 1967, he joined three dozen others in compiling what would later be called the Pentagon Papers—a 7,000-page study commissioned by McNamara—detailing the history of the conflict in Southeast Asia and revealing that four successive presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson had expanded the war illegally, misleading Congress and the American public while doing so.

Ellsberg’s work on the document led him to believe the war was unwinnable. In 1971, he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, and later the Washington Post, who published them wholesale after court battles debating the limits of the First Amendment.

Ironically, it became the next president in the series, Richard M. Nixon, to take the fall. Nixon ordered a series of aggressive countermoves, including illegal wiretaps and a break-in of Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist’s office to dig up dirt, that ultimately led to the Watergate scandal and the subsequent resignation of the president.

Ellsberg was charged with espionage, conspiracy, and other crimes that could have seen him spend decades in prison, but his case was thrown out in 1974 when the level of the government’s misconduct came to light. Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser, John Ehrlichman, even offered the trial judge the directorship of the F.B.I. as the court case was proceeding. Ehrlichman later went to prison.

Ellsberg continued his antiwar activism and in later years became a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament. In 2018 he was awarded Sweden’s Olof Palme Prize, which noted how his “moral courage” to leak the report led to an “untold number of saved lives.” He is survived by his second wife, children, and extended family.

The Time Ecuador and Peru Fought a 34-Day War Over a Patch of Amazonian Jungle

Jerome Long — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:30:00 +0000

There it was again. He was sure of it now. Muffled by the dense Amazonian undergrowth came the low rumbling of a vehicle moving at barely a crawl. Ecuadorian Corporal 1st Class José Maria Marasco froze stock-still in his outpost as he tried to determine the vehicle’s direction of movement. It seemed closer now, and he could hear the snapping of branches beneath the vehicle’s tires. Then he heard their muted voices—the hated Peruvians. An officer giving orders. A sergeant giving directions. And they were all coming toward him. The war he knew was coming had arrived in the Cenepa Valley.

Marasco whispered what he heard and saw into the mouthpiece of his landline and then silently made his way back to his unit.

Ecuadorian and Peruvian units had patrolled the disputed valley for years without incident, despite their mutual hatred. Sometimes their officers even got together for talks. Then, in 1995, Peruvian forces invaded the disputed area, seeking to evict the Ecuadorian troops dug in on the high ground overlooking the river basin.

Ecuador opened hostilities in the Cenepa River basin in 1995 when its troops seized Peruvian outposts in the Cordillera del Cóndor range.

The Cenepa War, a fierce little fight of 34 days, was the latest in a series of wars between the South American neighbors over their disputed boundary. The two had most recently come to blows in 1941 and 1981. Ecuador had not defeated Peru since the 1829 Battle of Tarqui.

Bolívar’s Role

Though Simón Bolívar is memorialized as the “Liberator” who freed what would become Peru and Ecuador from Spanish colonial rule, he ironically sowed the seeds of the Cenepa War via territorial claims when carving out his idealistic united state of Gran Colombia in 1819.

Simón Bolívar.

The dispute was a complex one, dating from Spain’s colonial rule, when Madrid oversaw most of Latin America through its Viceroyalties of Peru and New Granada and many smaller political units. Spain frequently changed the borders and responsibilities of the viceroyalties to ease the administration of its colonies and deal with Portuguese incursions along the Amazon River. One such change occurred in 1802 when a royal decree transferred much of what comprises present-day Ecuador to the jurisdiction of Peru. In 1803 another royal decree transferred jurisdiction of the province of Guayaquil to Peru. Based on these decrees, Peru claimed the disputed lands on the legal principle of uti possidetis (as you possess, so shall you possess). However, in 1819 the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, through the Congress of Angostura, claimed the province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) and parts of Jaén and Maynas provinces (in present-day Peru) for his Gran Colombia.

Ten years later an army under Marshal José de la Mar, president of a newly independent Peru, attempted to seize southern Ecuador. However, a Gran Colombian army under Grand Marshal Antonio José de Sucre beat back the Peruvians at the Battle of Tarqui and forced de la Mar to sign the Treaty of Girón, by which Peru recognized the boundary as it had existed in 1810. That treaty, however, did not resolve the dispute.

Over the next century Ecuador and Peru argued and sometimes battled one another for control of the disputed lands. At one point Peru seized the port of Guayaquil in retaliation for Ecuadorian incursions. Each sought to exploit the other’s internal political problems. On several occasions the parties asked the king of Spain to arbitrate. In 1936 the United States offered to arbitrate the dispute. Those efforts came to naught, and in 1938 Peruvian and Ecuadorian troops again engaged in border skirmishes.

In July 1941, taking advantage of the world situation and the United States’ distraction with events in Europe, Peru marched against Ecuadorian outposts in Casitas, Cero del Concho and elsewhere. The Peruvian commander, Brig. Gen. Eloy G. Ureta, was so insistent on an offensive operation that he’d threatened to march his troops against his own government were he not permitted to attack the Ecuadorians.

Peru greatly overmatched Ecuador in military might. It had modernized and reorganized its army, while Ecuador had not. Within weeks the Ecuadorian army was a fantasy. Although Peru suspended its operations to capture Guayaquil, abiding by the terms of a July 31 cease-fire between the belligerents, it nevertheless managed to seize the Ecuadorian province of El Oro.

Ecuadorian President Sixto Durán-Ballén made no apologies for his nation’s incursion into the disputed territory, its victory erasing decades of humiliating losses to Peru.

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was caught between fighting Shining Path rebels and Ecuadorian troops.

In January 1942 the foreign ministers of Peru and Ecuador, together with representatives from the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, hammered out the Rio de Janeiro Protocol, under the terms of which Peru evacuated El Oro province but retained control of Jaén, Maynas and Tumbes provinces.

That remained the status quo until Jan. 22, 1981, when Ecuadorian troops in the Cordillera del Cóndor of the Andes Mountains fired on a Peruvian reconnaissance helicopter. A day later they fired on another Peruvian reconnaissance chopper. Meanwhile, in the Cenepa Valley, Ecuadorian troops occupied three abandoned Peruvian outposts.

Ecuador justified its presence and actions, arguing that though the Rio Protocol had called for demarcation of their respective borders, that process remained incomplete, and unaccounted terrain features made what had been surveyed inaccurate. Thus, it argued, the 1942 agreement was invalid. Peru insisted the agreement did remain valid, and Ecuador had no legitimate complaint.

Ecuadorian air assets included the Kfir C.2 (at far left, top) and Mirage F1 (at left), here following a SEPECAT Jaguar.

Peru also lost an A-37B Dragonfly light attack aircraft.

Peru, still militarily superior to Ecuador, resolved to retake its outposts and evict the Ecuadorians from the valley. Ever since its 1932–33 drubbing by Colombia over territory in the Amazon rainforest, Peru paid particular attention to its military: rebuilding it, retraining it, rearming it, and obtaining professional military advice from such European powers as France and Italy. In contrast, Ecuador used its military primarily to suppress internal unrest and failed to heed the threat posed by its historical enemy. In short, Peru prepared for war, Ecuador did not.

The results were painfully predictable and humiliating for Ecuador. At the outset of what became known as the Paquisha War, Peru twice attempted to assault the namesake Ecuadorian-held outpost before abandoning its efforts. On the third attempt, however, a Peruvian helicopter armed with rockets destroyed an Ecuadorian anti-aircraft battery, allowing helicopter-borne Peruvian soldiers to land and engage the Ecuadorians, driving them off after a short but intense firefight. A day later, on January 30, the Peruvians assaulted a second Ecuadorian outpost using attack helicopters and fighter-bombers. Landing air assault troops, the Peruvians quickly drove off the Ecuadorians. On February 1 the Peruvians recovered the third outpost.

The same scenario applied when the Peruvians attacked three more outposts occupied by Ecuadorian troops in the interim. Ecuador, lacking air support, was unable to respond and forced to abandon its positions and much of its equipment. Each side lost more than a dozen killed and two dozen wounded.

Ecuador had learned its lesson. When it instigated the next war, in 1995, it came prepared. In early January Ecuadorians seized the high ground in the Cenepa Valley and dug in. They had modern weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles and significant modern air assets, including French-built Dassault Mirage F1JA and F1JE fighters with air-to-air missiles and Israel Aircraft Industries Kfir C.2 and TC.2 fighters. They changed their tactics as well. Instead of directly confronting the Peruvians, as they had in the past, the Ecuadorians employed ambush and hit-and-run tactics, which one authority likened to tactics utilized by the Viet Cong in Vietnam. The Ecuadorian strategy was the same as in previous encounters in the disputed region: occupy positions Peru had abandoned in order to fight the Maoist Shining Path insurgency elsewhere. Ecuador would thus present a fait accompli to anyone interested, especially Peru. The challenge to Ecuador was to hold those positions.

Peru ordered more than a dozen Soviet-built Mil Mi-25D helicopters in the wake of the 1981 Paquisha War with Ecuador, but it lost one of those in the 1995 Cenepa War.

The disputed area is roughly the size of the District of Columbia, less than 60 square miles, and lies approximately 50 miles east of the Ecuadorian city of Loja and 60 miles southeast of Cuenca. The Peruvian capital of Lima is about 600 miles to the south. The Cenepa River drains its watershed and ultimately sends its flow to the Amazon. The Cenepa basin is ringed by mountains, notably the Cordillera del Cóndor to the west. The very northern tip of the disputed area is a salient flanked by undisputed Ecuadorian territory. It is blanketed in dense jungle, some of which had never seen a human footprint other than those of the indigenous peoples. Indeed, many of those killed in the conflict weren’t found until years later, while others remain missing. Ecuador chose to begin offensive operations in this seemingly impenetrable salient.

Aided by Israeli advisers, Ecuadorian special forces units infiltrated and seized the Peruvian outposts at Tiwintza, Base Sur and Cueva de los Tayos, which were little more than clearings in the jungle large enough to accommodate a helicopter and a small garrison.

The Ecuadorians took position on high ground in the 6,500-foot Cóndor range. There they placed artillery that could effectively sweep the basin below and laid land mines to solidify their positions. They also made good use of the jungle canopy, which provided cover and concealment from Peruvian aircraft. The prevailing weather was also on their side. Cloud cover and rain often prevented effective use of the numerically superior Peruvian air assets. The Ecuadorians exploited their interior lines for good communication. They also used GPS to pinpoint targets and took a page from the U.S. Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine. Utilizing roads through the Cóndor mountains, the Ecuadorians made excellent use of their logistical support system. The Peruvians were limited to long-distance helicopter airlifts.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Ecuador quickly established air superiority. Peru would lose a reported seven aircraft altogether: one medium bomber, two fighter-bombers, one light attack aircraft and at least three helicopters. The Ecuadorian air force suffered only damage to one light attack aircraft.

Peru’s military resources were numerically superior in almost every respect. But after more than 15 years of fighting Shining Path guerrillas, its army was worn down and dispirited. Once thought to be the most potent air force in Latin America, the Peruvian air force was a shell of its former self. It suffered from poor maintenance and a dearth of spare parts. Further, the Peruvian economy was in shambles, still reeling from long-term hyperinflation.

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was keenly aware his military was in poor shape to fight anyone. Indeed, he met with Ecuadorian President Sixto Durán-Ballén to advise him Peru would be withdrawing some of its forces in the Cenepa basin to commit them to the fight against the Shining Path. He expressed his hope Ecuador would understand and not take advantage of the situation but maintain the peace. Unfortunately for Fujimori, Ecuador did take advantage of the situation. It would suffer no further humiliation. As one regional expert put it, Ecuador’s 1941 loss of access to the Amazon “went against the Ecuadorian soul.”

Despite their setbacks, the Peruvians were able to muster a task force of 2,500 men to recapture the outposts. By late January, supported by Soviet-built T-55 tanks and artillery, they launched a counteroffensive against the Ecuadorian positions. Again the Ecuadorians avoided direct conflict by using ambush and hit-and-run tactics. By mid-February Peru had recaptured the outposts at Base Sur and Cueva de los Tayos, but they were unable to recapture Tiwintza. The Ecuadorians, aided by their artillery high in the Cóndor range, refused to yield.

An Ecuadorian mortar crew prepares to drop a round on a Peruvian position in the Cenepa River basin.

Despite its maintenance issues and lack of spare parts, the Peruvian air force flew as many as 16 sorties per day against Ecuadorian positions, but at a price. Ecuadorians armed with ground-based weapons, including the British-made Blowpipe shoulder-fired missile, shot down several Peruvian helicopters and attack aircraft. On February 6 a Peruvian English Electric Canberra B.68 bomber was lost with all aboard when it flew into the side of a mountain, apparently due to poor weather conditions. In an air-to-air battle on February 10 two Ecuadorian Kfir C.2s intercepted several Peruvian U.S.-built Cessna A-37B Dragonfly light attack aircraft and downed one, while two Ecuadorian Mirage F1JAs shot down two Peruvian Sukhoi Su-22M attack aircraft, though Peru denied the latter two were combat losses.

A problem faced by ground-attack aircraft of both air forces was the asymmetrical nature of the battlefield. Peruvian pilots in particular had difficulty distinguishing between friendly and enemy positions. For the most part the war was fought by platoon-sized elements. There were no “front lines.” A Peruvian unit might have an Ecuadorian platoon to its rear or vice versa. When the combatants finally agreed on a cease-fire and their respective armies were to disengage, the effort took more than two months due to the battlefield asymmetry.

“Clearly, Ecuador holds the key terrain,” one military analyst noted. “I know they have sufficient firepower, so that if they really wanted to take out the Peruvians, they could do so.…Ecuador can hold out for a long time.”

It didn’t have to. By early March both sides had agreed to a U.N.-brokered cease-fire calling for the separation of the combatants, demobilization of their armies, substantive negotiations and a normalization of diplomatic relations.

The butcher’s bill for the conflict came to a reported 34 killed for Ecuador and 60 for Peru. The war was estimated to have cost $1 billion.

The war on the ground raged over dense jungle that had seen few human footprints. Peruvians were able to quickly recover two of the outposts seized by Ecuadorian troops.

Though sporadic fighting broke out, generally the cease-fire held. Not until 1998 did the four original guarantors of the 1942 Rio de Janeiro Protocol—Chile, Brazil, Argentina and the United States—hammer out a permanent solution. Even then, the agreement was only possible because both Ecuador and Peru had significantly altered their long-held positions. Ecuador, in a massive sea change, agreed to work within the parameters of the Rio Protocol. Likewise, Peru reversed its long-held position there was no legitimate dispute.

The negotiations almost came to an abrupt halt when Ecuador buried its war dead in a cemetery it had created within the disputed zone. After months of negotiation on that issue alone, the guarantors devised a compromise by which the cemetery was deemed owned by Ecuador but under Peruvian sovereignty. Peru, in turn, agreed to give up any right to confiscate Ecuadorian property. The parties also agreed the area should be a demilitarized zone, and peacekeeping troops from the guarantor nations were to deploy in the zone as observers. Finally, Peru agreed to Ecuador’s unfettered access to the Amazon River. Both parties signed the Brasilia Presidential Act on Oct. 26, 1998, thus putting a definitive end to a more than 150 years of dispute.

Ecuador emerged the victor. Some commentators call it a stalemate, but the fact remains Ecuador was not, as the Peruvians had long intended, ejected from the Cenepa basin, but left of its own accord under the cease-fire protocol. It had prevailed by careful planning, improved logistics, shrewd choice of terrain and the use of modern technology, and after having revamped and rearmed its military. As Ecuadorian President Durán-Ballén stated, the victory was due to 14 years of military preparation since the 1981 debacle.

The Cenepa War has changed international thinking in several ways. First, it dispelled the long-held view that democracies don’t war with other democracies. Clearly, they can and do if the circumstances and national interests are right. Second, Ecuador’s successful use of modern technology proves a small state can fight a larger one on equal terms, thus presenting a real deterrent to its larger neighbor. Third, the war destroyed the notion Latin America has become a generally peaceful region not requiring close attention by third parties, such as the United States. U.S. foreign policy ignores Latin America at its peril.

Durán-Ballén emerged as one of Ecuador’s most popular presidents and elder statesmen, though scholars debate the legacy of his presidency. He died, much revered by the Ecuadorian public, at age 95 in 2016.

Though Fujimori defeated the Shining Path, improved Peru’s economy and won re-election as president, he was convicted in 2009 of human rights violations and remains in prison.

Although his administration defeated the Shining Path insurgency, significantly improved the economy and won re-election in April 1995 by a wide margin, President Fujimori became increasingly authoritarian. Facing charges of corruption and human rights abuses in 2000, he fled to Japan. Then, on a 2005 visit to Chile, he was arrested and later extradited to Peru. In 2007 Fujimori was convicted of illegal search and seizure, and two years later he was convicted of embezzlement, bribery and human rights violations, including the use or approval of death squads and torture. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence. Fujimori’s son, Kenji, served as a member of the Peruvian Congress from 2011 to 2018. His daughter, Keiko, ran for the presidency in 2011, 2016 and 2021, but was defeated each time.

Jerome Long is a former instructor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Officers’ Course who taught classes on such topics as military intelligence, operational warfare and military history. For further reading he recommends Latin America’s Wars, Vol. II: The Age of the Professional Soldier, 1900–2001, by Robert L. Sheina, and Air Wars Between Ecuador and Peru, Vol. 3: Aerial Operations Over the Cenepa River Valley, by Amaru Tincopa.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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No One Wants to Grow Up and Be Vice President: The Worst Job in American Politics

Richard Brookhiser — Tue, 30 May 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Poor Kamala Harris. The vice president took office in January 2021 trailing a cloud of firsts: first woman to hold the job, first African American (thanks to her Jamaican father), first Asian-American (thanks to her Indian mother). But the job itself has been a cavalcade of vexations. President Joe Biden saddled her with an unattractive assignment—managing and explaining the migrant mess at the southern border. She is reputed to be hard on her staff in private, and she is often tongue-tied in public. Even media outlets friendly to the administration have run hit pieces on her. According to The New York Times, “dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation” said (anonymously) that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”

The office of vice president was devised in the home stretch of the Constitutional Convention as a flywheel in the machinery for picking an executive, and a successor in case the president died or was removed from office. Along the way, Elbridge Gerry worried that veeps would be too closely allied to the presidents alongside whom they served, which provoked a snort from Gouverneur Morris: “the vice president will then be the first heir apparent that ever loved his father.” Initially the vice presidency went to the runner-up in the Electoral College’s vote for president; the 12th amendment (1804) ensured that the veep would be the running mate of the winning presidential candidate.

The office got off to a rough start. John Adams, first vice president under George Washington, was the first (though not the last) to feel that he had nothing to do. Thomas Jefferson, second vice president under Adams, spent his term undermining his old friend and plotting to supplant him. Aaron Burr, third vice president under Jefferson, was shut out of all patronage, denied renomination when Jefferson ran again, and spent his post–vice presidential years plotting to break up the United States.

Most modern vice presidents, beginning with Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s number two, have been given substantive responsibilities, and have worked well with their number ones. Four of them—Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Joe Biden—have run for president themselves, two—Bush and Biden—successfully. But two vice presidents of an earlier era anticipated the problems bedeviling Harris today.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

Henry Wallace was the scion of an Iowa family of farmer/journalists (they published a magazine called Wallace’s Farmer). His father served as secretary of Agriculture under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge; Henry, crossing party lines, held the same job for FDR. In addition to his interests in crop cycles and new plant strains, Wallace had a passion for oddball religions. In the 1920s he came under the spell of Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré painter and seer who dressed in Tibetan robes and claimed to be the reincarnation of a Chinese emperor. Wallace and Roerich exchanged hundreds of letters, in which they referred to each other and to famous acquaintances in mystical code: Roerich was the Guru, Wallace was Parsifal or Galahad, FDR was the Flaming One, or the Wavering One, whenever Wallace felt disappointed in him.

In 1934 Wallace got Roerich attached to an Agriculture Department expedition to Mongolia seeking drought-resistant grasses. Roerich was also seeking the Holy Grail on the side. American diplomats reported that he was traveling the steppes with a bodyguard of White Russian Cossacks, trying to set up a Central Asian Buddhist kingdom. Wallace, embarrassed, cut ties with him.

The Flaming One, tired of his crusty Texan veep John Nance Garner, tapped Wallace to be his running mate when he sought a third term in 1940. FDR wanted a man of liberal views, and Wallace fit the bill. One potential landmine threatened the new ticket. The Republican National Committee had procured copies of 120 Guru letters. The GOP candidate Wendell Willkie nixed using them, however, afraid that the Democrats would expose his long-running extramarital affair with a prominent New York journalist. Roosevelt and Wallace cruised to victory.

Wallace found new soul mates post-Roerich—American Communists, whose designs he naively failed to penetrate. The Soviet Union was a wartime ally, and Communists were billing themselves as liberals in a hurry. Alarmed Democratic bosses told FDR in 1944 that he must dump Wallace, so the nod for his fourth run went to Missouri Senator Harry Truman, who became president when Roosevelt died three months into his last term. When Wallace ran for president himself in 1948 as candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party, the Guru letters finally hit the papers. Wallace won a meager 2.4 percent of the popular vote, and carried no states. Repenting of his pro-Soviet backers, he lived until 1965.

Stepping Out on His Own. Henry Wallace campaigns as president in Philadelphia in 1948. He ran as a candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party.

Richard Nixon was tied to Dwight Eisenhower politically and personally. He served as Eisenhower’s veep for two terms, 1953–1961. After Nixon won the White House himself in 1968, his daughter Julie married Ike’s grandson, David Eisenhower. Yet his relationship with Ike was always fraught.

Nixon had been put on the ticket in 1952 as a sop to the conservative wing of the GOP that Ike had defeated in winning the nomination. The two barely knew each other, however. There was a 23-year age gap between them. In September, the press revealed that Nixon had a campaign expense account, characterized in headlines as SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND. Ike’s advisers, fearful of any taint on the war-winning hero, pressured Nixon to resign from the ticket. Instead he made a half-hour television speech, defending his innocence (the account was legal), attacking Democrats (Ike’s rival, Adlai Stevenson, had his own campaign account), and pledging to keep Checkers, a cocker spaniel that a supporter had given Nixon’s daughters. The Republican National Committee got millions of letters, telegrams, and phone calls praising the put-upon Nixon. Ike embraced his feisty running mate.

But their relations never warmed. Nixon was intelligent and hard-working, but too political and ambitious for his old boss. In August 1960, at the end of Eisenhower’s second term and the start of Nixon’s first presidential run, against Sen. John F. Kennedy, the president was asked at a press conference what role Nixon had played in his administration. Had the vice president offered any “major idea” that Ike had subsequently adopted? “If you give me a week,” Eisenhower answered, “I might think of one. I don’t remember.” The Kennedy campaign gleefully used the line in an attack ad. Had Ike meant it as a flat-out diss? Probably not. But he hadn’t made a ringing endorsement either. The 1960 race was razor thin. Could a love-bombing Eisenhower have pulled Nixon over the line? Nixon would have to wait eight more years for a second shot.

The Vice President is a constitutional fixture and a political anomaly—a high official with hardly any defined role; a successor whom the president picks but cannot fire until and unless he runs again. Wallace was a deficient veep whom the president—and almost only the president—liked. Nixon was a work horse the president never truly admired. Kamala Harris seems to enjoy the worst of both worlds: low achievement, low esteem. With Biden determined to run again, will she be replaced a la Wallace, or retained a la Nixon? All the political termites of D.C. will be gnawing on that question.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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How the Debt Ceiling Went From Boring Economics to Apocalyptic Politics

Claire Barrett — Tue, 23 May 2023 20:03:18 +0000

The Biden administration remains in a tense standoff with congressional Republicans over the national debt ceiling. On June 1, the U.S. will default on its obligations for the first time in history if the two parties are unable to come to an agreement on lifting the debt ceiling.

Indeed, there are perilous repercussions if the Treasury Department cannot avert an unprecedented U.S. default.

If the specific deadline, known as “X-date,” is missed, the “cascading impacts of default would probably compound — a pause in federal payments would hurt the economy, which would hurt the stock market, which would in turn hurt the economy even more, and so on. The interactions between collapsing home values, rising interest rates and a destabilized global financial system are hard to calculate. Some estimates suggest that more than 8 million jobs could be wiped out. Mortgage rates might soar by more than 20 percent, according to some projections, and the economy would contract by as much as it did during the 2008 Great Recession,” according to the Washington Post.

Such consequences are terrifyingly grim, yet this is not the first, nor — unfortunately — most likely the last time in U.S. history that the nation has come dangerously close to not raising the debt ceiling.

Since 1917, when lawmakers instituted the first debt ceiling, Congress has since raised that number 78 times — 49 times under Republican presidents, and 29 times under Democratic administrations, according to NPR.

Except for the year 1835, when President Andrew Jackson became the first and last president to pay off the entirety of the national debt, the U.S. Treasury has never experienced zero debt, with the need to accrue more debt beginning in earnest at the start of the U.S. entry into World War I.

As of today, the debt currently stands at $31.4 trillion.

Below is a brief history of the debt ceiling to provide some context to the current political battle waging in the capital city.

The Good News First: Has the U.S. ever defaulted before?

No, the U.S. has never defaulted on its debt over failure to raise the debt ceiling. Congress missed payments, but they were unrelated to the debt ceiling.

Why Was the Debt Ceiling Created?

According to Kathleen Day, aJohns Hopkins University financial history professor, the national debt ceiling was created in the 20th century due to the first World War. “Congress needs to approve every time the government had to borrow money,” Day told NPR. “But then with World War I, they had to do it so often, they just said, enough of this. Let’s just give you the authority to do — to borrow money up to a certain limit. And so ever after, we’ve had these debt limits. So Treasury can borrow up to a certain amount. And then when it hits that amount, it has to go back to Congress and get authorization.”

Since entering World War II, the U.S. has raised the debt limit every year, and, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, “By the end of the war, in June 1946, the debt limit [wa]s lowered to $275 billion as war costs dissipate[d] and the federal government beg[an] to run three years of surpluses. The federal debt limit remain[ed] unchanged at this level for eight consecutive years – the longest such period since its inception.”

With the decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tax cuts, emergency responses such as Katrina and expanded federal spending, the U.S. has added $25 trillion in debt, writes TIME.

How Did the Founding Fathers View Debt?

The topic of debt became a classic debate that contributed to the split between Jeffersonian and Hamilton followers. Jefferson understood the utility of debt but believed there were more downside to it. Hamilton recognized such downfalls but regarded debt as necessary to grow industry, and, in turn, the economy.

“There’s good debt and bad debt,” said Day. “Debt is just debt. It’s the people that either use it wisely or don’t.”

Andrew Jackson famously became the only U.S. president to get rid of the national debt, however,his actions, “zeroing out of the US debt contributed to the Panic of 1837, one of the worst recessions in American history,” writes NPR.

How Do Elections Play Into the Debt Crisis?

Oftentimes, debt-limit crises loom when an election produces a shift in who controls Congress. The debt ceiling crises of 1995 and 2011 are no exception.

During President Bill Clinton’s first midterms in 1994, the Republicans flipped both the Senate and House Chambers.

“GOP lawmakers pledged to pass a balanced budget as part of what they named their “Contract with America,” according to U.S. News and World Report. “House Republicans sent Clinton a budget that cut spending on domestic programs, which he vetoed. This in turn led to a five-day shutdown of the federal government.”

In response, House Speaker Newt Gingrich threatened to not increase the debt limit.

After a second Clinton veto of the GOP’s budget offer and a 21-day standoff, the Republicans passed a budget offered by Clinton and also lifted the debt ceiling.

Under President Barack Obama, the 2010 midterm elections saw Republicans gain seven Senate seats — although not a majority — and win a GOP majority in the House.

Following the election, the House refused to raise the debt limit without cuts to federal spending.

An 11th-hour agreement came on July 31, 2011, only two days before the U.S. government ran out of money. But creditors were spooked, with “the credit markets downgrad[ing] the nation’s credit ranking for the first time, upping the costs of future borrowing,” per the Associated Press.

What is the role of the 14th Amendment?

The 14th Amendment states that “the validity of the public debt, authorized by law…shall not be questioned.”

According to TIME, “the controversial legal theory, which previous administrations had ruled out, builds on Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to argue that it would be unconstitutional for the U.S. to fail to make payments even if the debt limit isn’t raised, effectively challenging the debt limit on legal grounds.”

As talks between Democrats and Republicans stall, Biden stated that he was “considering” invoking the 14th Amendment on his own without an act of Congress but went on to say that he recognized the potential pitfalls in doing so. “The problem is it would have to be litigated, and without an extension it would end up in the same place.”

What Does This Mean Going Forward?

While invoking the 14th Amendment may be a constitutionally tenable option as the June 1st date looms, let’s hope for history’s sake — and the economy’s — that a deal is brokered long before that pinch point.

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