When Washington burned

Conventional wisdom says the country comes together during wartime. But that has not always been the case, says historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. -- not even when the British torched the nation's capital in 1812.

By Jeff Horwitz

Sept. 2, 2004 | In an election where partisans on both sides claim the future of American democracy is on the line, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is entitled to offer some historical advice. Only a few months shy of his 87th birthday, the former advisor to President Kennedy has spent his career defending liberal democracy from Nazism, Communism and its own excesses.

For Americans who see Bush's unilateral foreign policy in apocalyptic terms, Schlesinger's new book, "War and the American Presidency," is a reminder that the executive branch has a history of embroiling the country in global wars under suspect circumstances.

"War customarily expands presidential power," Schlesinger warns. "The imperial presidency has been born again, with its usual cavalier attitude toward due process and individual freedom."

Thomas Jefferson, for example, didn't let his belief in limited executive authority stop him from starting the Barbary War without even informing Congress.

When Schlesinger talks about current events, he usually ends up speaking about American history, and when he talks of the Bush administration, he is worried.

Salon spoke to Schlesinger by phone on Thursday.

A long-standing perception in our country is that after an attack, we come together, dissent stops, and we firmly back the war effort. Does American history support that claim?

Not at all. FDR was a very popular president, but in the midterm congressional elections in 1942, which the interventionists tried to make a "win the war Congress," he lost a lot of seats in the House and some seats in the Senate. And the pre-Pearl Harbor isolationists and America First'ers like Hamilton Fish, in FDR's own district, were returned to office. So it wasn't an antiwar thing, it wasn't a pro-Japanese or pro-German thing, it was anti-Roosevelt.

During the War of 1812, New England states felt they were descendants of Britain, and the trade embargo with the British handicapped them economically. The states joined together in resisting, and very few New England governors assisted the Army by providing it with state militias.

Indeed, even when the British troops invaded Washington, burned the White House, that did not excite the country. People did not fall into line behind the president -- historian Sam Morison said it was the most unpopular war in American history, even including the Vietnam War.

You note in "War and the American President" that the executive branch -- from Jefferson to Kennedy -- has frequently lied to Congress about its military endeavors. Was the Bush administration's use of inflated evidence to make the case for the Iraq war similar?

Yes, and there are plenty of other cases when presidents have done that. Jefferson, for example, sent a naval squadron into the Mediterranean under secret orders to fight pirates in the Barbary War. His administration then misled Congress as to the nature of his orders, he engaged in rearmament without congressional appropriations, withheld information from Congress, and invoked Locke's doctrine of emergency prerogative -- that is to say the law of self preservation -- to justify action beyond congressional authorizations.

Early presidencies did not have a CIA but they dealt in covert action against foreign states and did so without congressional knowledge or authorization. Both Madison and Monroe used covert action to facilitate the annexation of Florida.

But the lead-up to the Iraq war wasn't quite the same, right? This time, there was a chance to debate the war in Congress first, but the opposition was pretty quiet.

I think Congress has an inferiority complex regarding the president's foreign policy, and particularly military affairs. It assumes that the president has superior knowledge and sources of information, and Congress yields its authority to the president because, well, they don't want to be in the line of fire.

And honestly, as Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, the nature of war leads to an increase in executive authority and a surrender of Congress's prerogatives. For example, there hasn't been an official declaration of war made since 1941, though there were unofficial authorizations in the case of the Tonkin Resolution and the first Gulf War. So even though the exclusive authority to declare war was rested by the founding fathers in the Congress, that power has suffered erosion. It has been eaten away.

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