History Buff's Guide to the Presidents (39 page)

To accomplish this, he gave the CIA exceptional latitude in determining who the freedom fighters were and in what ways they could be best assisted. By Reagan’s second term, the CIA was involved in granting a combination of funds, weapons, communications equipment, military training, and intelligence to a number of “anticommunist” groups and regimes. Public pressure and the I
RAN
-C
ONTRA
scandal forced him to reduce activity in Nicaragua, but clandestine activities continued in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Chad, Ethiopia, Iran, Liberia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and the Sudan.
²¹

In 1986, the Reagan administration gave the Islamic Mujahedeen of Afghanistan more than five hundred million dollars in weapons and supplies to fight the Soviet invasion. In 1951, the Truman government gave the same amount to rebuild Germany under the Marshall Plan.

10
. BUSH DOCTRINE (2001)

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,” wrote a beleaguered congressman to a hawkish friend, “and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” Representative Abraham Lincoln had no luck in dissuading his associate from backing a preemptive assault on Mexico in 1846. A minority of legislators were just as unsuccessful in trying to stop the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
²²

George W. Bush first justified his doctrine of “first strike” a week after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. In the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the congressionally approved measure empowered the president to launch offensive operations to “deter and prevent any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States.” The statute did not define terrorism. Nor did it require anyone but the president to determine what group or country constituted a threat. Public support for the bill was overwhelming, and Bush’s approval rating reached 90 percent.
²³

In hindsight, the bill was not intended for use against Afghanistan, the suspected base of operations of the al-Qaeda cell that orchestrated the 9/11 suicide missions. That attack had already taken place. In addition, international law already permitted the use of defensive force, so long as an unprovoked assault could be proven as imminent.
²⁴

In 2002, a year almost to the day, Bush augmented the doctrine with the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq. Containing false assumptions that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and was harboring active terrorists, the joint resolution passed the House of Representatives by a comfortable 296–133 and the Senate by 77–23.

Bush would later add that the main aims of the ensuing offensives in Afghanistan and Iraq were to spread and defend democracy in the Middle East. In this endeavor, Bush was following a long tradition in American foreign policy. McKinley stated a similar goal in Cuba, as did Wilson with Imperial Germany, Truman in Turkey, Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, Ford in Angola, Carter in Iran, and Reagan in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. One consistency among all of these operations: they were ultimately unsuccessful.

The last time the United States officially declared war on any nation was June 5, 1942 (against Third Reich allies Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania).

As head of state, the president is the first citizen, the country’s lead representative within the global community. While everyone from congressmen to town councils can claim jurisdiction in domestic affairs, there is the general consensus that it is the president who takes the lead in all things external, and several leaders have made their reputation almost exclusively on what they achieved beyond the borders of the United States.

Remarkably, the Constitution provides few duties and little latitude in international affairs, and any politician who claims to favor a strict interpretation of the document is either bending the truth or has never read article 2: “He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls.” Nothing more is said of executive authority in foreign relations, aside from war powers.

Naturally, the vital art of diplomacy demands far more than just creating treaties and making appointments, and through the years the second branch of government has employed a workshop of methods to mend fences and make deals. The most notable of these have gone far beyond the strict limits of article 2, and several have directly infringed upon the Constitution.

The best have brought prosperity when catastrophe seemed inevitable. Collected here in chronological order are the finest achievements in international diplomacy in which presidents were directly involved. They stand as monuments to skillful negotiation, where human reason engineered stability out of turmoil. Poetically, many were initially viewed as minor acts, and a few were dismissed as outright failures.

1
. GEORGE WASHINGTON’S ATLANTIC WALL

PROCLAMATION OF NEUTRALITY (APRIL 22, 1793)

Washington was preparing to begin his second term when he received word that democratic radicals had guillotined the monarch of France. Weeks later, ships from Europe were bringing news of French revolutionaries marching against the royal houses of Austria, Britain, Holland, Prussia, and Spain. In response, Washington ordered an emergency cabinet meeting in Philadelphia. The crisis was clear. Britain was the nation’s primary trading partner, but the United States was legally bound to fight alongside France, having signed a treaty of “perpetual friendship and alliance” with them during the American Revolution.
²⁵

Washington’s cabinet and his country were passionately divided. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and his followers were fond of stable Britain, while Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and like-minded Republicans backed France. Adding to the crisis, Washington had no Senate to consult. Congress would not be in session for another eight months. As the fighting escalated in Europe and began to lurk westward across the high seas, the president put forth a radical idea of his own: absolute neutrality—no aid to France, no arming of merchant ships, no trade in weapons, not even a foreign legion for either side. His cabinet unanimously agreed.
²⁶

On April 22, 1793, Washington issued a brief declaration, aimed mostly at his own countrymen, forbidding them from actively taking sides in any way. For this strict and unilateral decision, he was instantly attacked…by his own people. Pro-London merchants demanded a crushing blow against the Jacobin uprising. Francophiles accused Washington of abandoning a republic and a loyal ally. Both sides contended he had no constitutional authority to declare neutrality, just as he had no right to declare war.
²⁷

Deeply hurt by his assailants, the aging and exhausted Washington began to vent his anger through spontaneous rages. Secretary of War Henry Knox started to worry for the man’s health. “He had rather be on his farm than be emperor of the world,” said Knox, “and yet they were charging him with wanting to be a king.” Thomas Jefferson was less sympathetic, suggesting the soon-to-retire president was “fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag.”
²⁸

But in establishing the precedent of neutrality, the reluctant warrior gave his infantile nation precious time to mature, to build its tiny army, to allow its commerce to take root, and to keep redcoats and radicals from once again battling on his continent. Though widely hated, the plan worked. Not until 1812 would the United States openly enter into a war. By then, its fledgling navy was strong enough to fight on its own. But as Washington predicted, the consequences of fighting Europe again were brutal.

Due to the unpopularity of the Neutrality Proclamation, Vice President John Adams requested weapons from the War Department to protect his own house.

2
. THOMAS JEFFERSON’S “EMPIRE FOR LIBERTY”

LOUISIANA PURCHASE (OCTOBER 20, 1803)

It was the very definition of diplomatic success—going from the brink of war with Napoleon Bonaparte to peacefully doubling the size of one’s own country for a measly three cents an acre. To be sure, Thomas Jefferson benefited immensely from extenuating circumstances. But he knew when to suspend his ideals in the face of a great opportunity, one so massive that even his great mind could barely imagine its consequences.

The heart of the matter was New Orleans. Without it, the Mississippi River was simply the West Coast of the United States from which no vessel could sail. Jefferson was entering his first term as president when he learned that the delta, previously owned by a rather agreeable Spain, had been secretly ceded to France and its thirty-two-year-old dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte.

On the verge of panic, Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison contemplated an alliance with Britain and a declaration of war against France. A quick strike might take New Orleans before the French generalissimo could establish a foothold.
²⁹

Cost of the Louisiana Purchase: three cents an acre. Budget for the Lewis and Clark expedition into the territory: $2,500. Avoiding war with Napoleonic France: très bien.

Unbeknownst to the president and his secretary, Napoleon had already rethought his plans for the Americas. In 1801, he had sent a seemingly insurmountable twenty-thousand-man army to destroy an uprising in Saint Domingue (Santo Domingo), his one major staging area in the Caribbean. Within a year, his grand army was down to four thousand survivors, the rest having died from rebel attacks and yellow fever.

In contrast, the war option was still open for Jefferson when he instructed his emissary in France, Robert Livingston, to offer a buyout of the mouth of the Mississippi, plus any land on the Gulf Coast that France might be willing to sell for two million dollars. When negotiations stalled, Jefferson sent his close friend James Monroe to Paris on orders to threaten the French with an Anglo-American alliance if they did not cooperate. Surprising them all, the beleaguered Napoleon offered all of the Louisiana Territory, a massive and largely unknown expanse more than three times the size of France itself, for fifteen million dollars.
³⁰

Quite suddenly, Jefferson had inherited a wonderful problem. He had always been the champion of small government, the elimination of the national debt, and a strict interpretation of the Constitution. But to accept the offer would nearly double the federal debt, and he had no executive authority whatsoever to acquire territories. Yet to reject the offer would mean letting go of the greatest land deal in history. Fortunately for Jefferson, his emissaries had already agreed to the proposal, leaving to their president the awkward task of explaining the greatness of the deal to the American public and begging Congress for the phenomenal sum to cover the balance.
³¹

Opposition was strong, but in the minority. Critics openly questioned the expense and the presidential right to make such a decision. Jefferson himself never stopped wondering if what he had done was legal. But the end result turned the United States from a coastal plot to a continental presence. Ever the democratic philosopher, Jefferson eventually rationalized the purchase on the grounds that it would serve as a great leap forward for representative government, step one in what he hoped would become an “empire for liberty.”
³²