Would you have what it takes to lead a country into war?
To make a life-or-death decisions that could affect millions of people?
I spoke with historian, Michael Beschloss and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about
the risks and rewards of high stakes decision-making during times of crisis.
I'm David Rubinstein.
All my life, I've been passionate about American history.
I think that by learning from the past, we can better shape the future.
I've spent years interviewing experts to learn more about the US Presidency...
and American power.
In this series.
I revisit these interviews and bring their stories to life.
How does war impact the roles and responsibilities of the Presidency?
And who decides that the United States goes to war - or not?
As Michael Beschloss explains, these are questions that go all the way back to
the very beginnings of our country...
questions that kept our Founding Fathers up at night.
One of the things the Founders were almost obsessed with was, they knew
that the kings and queens and other leaders of Europe oftentimes grabbed
more power by getting their nations involved in not necessary wars.
So, they were always worried that Presidents of the United
States would become dictators.
And the way they tried to stop that was to make sure that in our
systems, decisions about whether to go to war or not were made not
made by Presidents but by Congress.
And we have not had a Congress passing a declaration of war as required
by the constitution since 1942.
Have we had any wars since then?
Well, the Korean War did not have a declaration.
Did not, did not.
The Vietnam War, no declaration.
No.
The Kuwait war, the Iraq war.
No.
Afghanistan, nothing.
The President nowadays, if the President wants to grab more power, the shortcut
to that is getting involved in war.
And it's not terribly hard to stampede Americans to get involved
in a war that maybe unnecessary.
During war time, a President can declare martial law.
Congress will cut the president an awful lot of slack in doing things
that they would not do in peacetime.
So, that's what the founders worried about, and that's why I think they failed.
Take June, 1950 when, communist North Korea, backed by China and the
Soviet Union, invaded South Korea, a nation of capitalism and democracy.
President Harry S Truman hated how communism was spreading...
and decided to take matters into his own hands.
Instead of asking Congress for a War Declaration, he insinuated that he was
acting on behalf of the United Nations.
He gets in touch with his viceroy in Japan, and says, "Please go
and take large numbers of American armed forces to South Korea, and
try to turn back this invasion."
And you'd have a spectacular amphibious invasion that would tear the north
and basically turn back the course of the war in the direction of a
victory for the United Nations.
Did he say, "I better go to Congress and get a declaration of war?"
No, he didn't.
Truman's aids went to him and said, "You know, Mr.
President, when will you be going to Congress to ask for your war declaration?"
And Truman said, "I'm not going.
This was something that was essential for me to do.
If I go to Capitol Hill, and I get involved and asking them
for a war declaration, it's going to be a political mess."
Many historians believe the worst military mess in US history, was the Vietnam War.
Truman feared that tensions there would result in it too
becoming a communist state.
So we sent in a multi-million dollar military aid package.
The US involvement in the conflict would only escalate - it would take 25 years,
the next 4 presidents, and the death of almost 60,000 US service men to resolve.
And every Presidential decision had a complex political motivation.
As Ken Burns explained to me, John F. Kennedy
had experienced some failures of his own since taking office.
And the prospect of winning a war in the Far East offered a chance of redemption...
and a second term in office.
He spoke frankly, to aides saying, "If we don't draw the line in the sand in South
Vietnam, our chances of re-election..."
and Kennedy, who finds himself right smack in the middle of the history
that we tell, is like every other President: the principle, important
decisions about Vietnam are made based on domestic political consideration,
which is, "Will I get re-elected?"
JFK had stopped just short of large-scale military intervention.
But following his assassination, along came President Lyndon B Johnson.
Assigned rather than elected to the top job, LBJ felt pressure to assert his
authority during a turbulent transition...
and things in Vietnam were about to go from bad to worse.
He had an ambitious domestic agenda, but he understood that his overwhelming
weakness was foreign policy.
And he said, "Foreigners aren't like the people I know."
And so, he kept every single one of Kennedy's foreign policy people.
They drove him and he drove with them consciously into the escalation that
would put the boots on the ground.
OK, so Johnson is now President of the United States.
We have 16,000 troops there when he takes over...
What happened was that the beginning of August of 1964, there was an attack
on an American ship by the North Vietnamese and Johnson got word of
this and said, "If it happens once, I'm going to look the other way".
Which it did.
A few days later, he got word from his defense secretary: "There was a
second attack on an American ship, we're still not sure if it was a real
attack or not, but it's leaked to the press.They're saying now there
was a second attack on American ship.
And you, Mr. President are concealing it from the public."
So that night he went on TV saying, "there's been an unprovoked attack."
He knew that whether it was an attack or not was unproven.
But that night, he bombed hell out of the North Vietnamese for
the first time in our history.
Historians always want perfection from Presidents.
We rarely get it.
And in Johnston's case, he let this resolution go on for the next nine years.
The whole Vietnam war was fought on the basis of a resolution
that was voted in response to an incident that never happened.
Escalation is occurring.
And at what point, let's say about '67, '68.
Johnson was getting ready to run for re-election.
How many troops did we have then?
Almost a half a million at that time, we peaked it over a half a million.
As the war dragged on, public opinion had turned against it.
And once Richard Nixon set his sights on the White House, he faced a major
political dilemma - how to spin things to make America look good...
in defeat?
What has happened is that the will of the American people
has changed, against the war.
And the people who not only believe we should have never gotten into Vietnam,
has now a majority of Americans think we should get out of Vietnam right away.
No questions asked.
On the Republican side, Richard Nixon was running for the nomination
and he said he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.
What was that secret plan?
Yeah, he had didn't have a secret plan to do it.
He and his foreign policy advisor knew that this was an unwinnable
war, but they knew they also had a tremendous optics problem we would
say today, which is you're the first president that's lost the war.
But ultimately the peace agreement is signed.
And the peace agreement is signed in late January of '73, I think it
is, and we had also done a little smoke and mirrors saying,
"Well, it's not about all the things we said.
It's about, it's about POW's, you know, it's about getting our soldiers back."
Vietnam is this damning portrait of President after President, and diplomat
after diplomat, making the wrong decision and knowing full well that this was
not going to work out, but saying the exact opposite to the American people.
So it turns out that most Presidents lead during war time with one
eye on the conflict - and another on their political prospects.
But the most effective aren't afraid to make tough decisions when it matters.