The American Future

by Simon Schama

  None of this did anything to lessen Meigs’s resolve that Arlington House and the 1,000-acre estate around it should be a national military cemetery. In June 1864, three months before John’s death, he had already ordered the first Union bodies buried close to the Lee house. They would be the advance guard, he thought, for thousands of those who had perished because of the infamous treason of the general (whom he still wanted to see tried, judged, executed) along with Davis. But when Meigs went to look over the site, he was displeased to discover that the bodies had been interred in the old slave burial ground of the Lee estate, close by their living quarters. Orders were reissued to the effect that bodies ought to encircle the mansion, coming as close as possible to the Doric portico itself. And this time, Meigs went to Arlington Heights, the site from which he had always imagined Confederate shells raining down on Abraham Lincoln’s house and on his Capitol Dome, and made sure that the shovels struck; that Lee soil was purified with the bones of the blessed dead. By the end of the war there were 16,000 bodies buried on the Lee estate.

  It was some while before he had John taken there and had the perfect bronze of the boy-man made for his memory. By this time Montgomery had come to believe in the story he had rejected in the grieving aftermath of the shooting. Now he wanted John to be the sweetly dauntless patriot more than he wanted a prosecution for murder. So the bronze revolver by his side exposes an empty chamber to indicate the firing of a bullet at his rebel assailant, and Montgomery could go and visit his son on the brow of Arlington Heights and mourn his lost patriot.

  But that was not how the mother felt or what the mother wanted. Not for Louisa her husband’s submission to the ways of Providence. She wanted him back from the grave. “My darling precious John,” she wrote to her sister Ann, the “Nannie” John had loved, “I seem to hear his step in the hall and I see his bright happy face as I last saw him. I crave to be alone, to sit & think of the past, those sweet happy days at West Point how they return and what bright memories they bring of young forms and faces that will never meet there again…Letters from every quarter come to me and Mont to assure us how much he was loved & what a reputation he had already achieved. It seems an increase of agony to know what a brilliant future was before him. All that he was and all that we have lost. I have at the foot of my bed his trunk, his poncho and his camp stool and short cloak he wore that fatal night. The hat and coat are splattered with mud. You know how it rained that evening. The cloak shows where he lay upon the ground and the jacket is pierced through with a bullet just over the heart. These cast-off garments seem to tell me the whole story. I take them out and look at them again and again and kiss and hold in my embrace the dear hat which still retains the perfume of his hair. I seem to feel that I have him here again with me. My darling precious boy…”

  A month later Louisa had made a shrine to John in her own bedroom, framing his drawings, cap and sash hanging over her bed, a trunk filled with his things “the altar where I most love to pray.” A year later Andrew Johnson was president, and there was talk of amnesty for the Confederates, something which still drew bitter reproof from Montgomery. But Louisa could not shake off her grief “which trembles at my heart…and which will terminate only with my own life.” She went about the business of the household, just as Monty continued to manage the quartermaster’s department, demobilizing the troops, standing down the immense machine he had made to save the Union; meeting with his scientific friends in Washington. But when she was by herself Louisa was overwhelmed by loss and wandered the rooms absentmindedly. “He seems to have left his footprints everywhere in this house, traces of his hand in books or work of some kind I encounter every day. He has left such a void, such an aching void in Mont’s heart and mine that we must go down to our graves sorrowing…Mont never dwells on this sorrow, he seldom speaks of our dear boy. I know it pains him to do so but he could not find indulgence for his grief as I do but it has entered his inmost soul, I found him alone in the parlor the other day looking at a bust which he has lately made of Monty & as I came in he said how much he wished he had one of our dear John. ‘As the war is over and as time wears away I seem to miss the boys more & more. I want them,’ he said in such a tone that I could scarcely refrain from bursting into tears.”

  10. Washington, D.C., February 2008

  Montgomery Meigs strode into the room, and it was as though I’d always known him: the good general. Presumptuously, I told him as much. “I’ve been living with your great-great-—how many greats?—uncle.” “Three,” he replied without having to count on his fingers. The Meigses knew their genealogy, and this one had a doctorate in history. He smiled as he said this, and it crossed my mind that the quartermaster would not have been so easy on first introduction. Suddenly, the grungy little green room at NBC Television seemed populated with Meigses: Return Jonathan the guardian of the Cherokee; Josiah the restless professor; Charles the gynecologist; Johnny laid out, eyes to the sky on the Shenandoah road. Was I imagining there was a Meigs look, for the current Monty seemed to wear it? Like his ancestor he held his long-limbed height straight up, a West Point bearing that could be informally unfolded into a chair. Present Monty offered a bright and open face, generously inviting engagement, whereas Past Monty, in the beautiful Mathew Brady portrait photograph, is locked off behind the whiskers of authority, answering the calls of severe contemplation. Full-length, three-quarters profile Meigs stands as if simultaneously present and unavoidably engaged elsewhere with the look, as Brady must have imagined it, of that oxymoronic thing: living history. The upper part of the head was uncannily identical in the two Monties: big fleshy ears, deep-set dark eyes beneath a slightly overhanging brow, the nobly domed cranium whose curvature I suddenly realized I had seen many times that week in Washington, as the Capitol cupola; the American legislature configured as the thought-full skull of Montgomery Meigs, architecture as self-portraiture.

  I had just been watching General Meigs (now retired) speak on cable television with a British brigadier he’d known during his command of the Stabilization Force in Bosnia. Persuading Serbs and Bosnians to communicate across their ancient tribal and religious loathings and terrors had made him canny about what similarly needed to be done in Iraq if American troops were ever to depart with honor. “Have them do their deals as they know how to do them and stay the heck out of the way,” he said of a lesson learned in Bosnia, making light of his skills as an arbitrator of decency. He had learned the hard way the indispensability of social understanding and political acumen to soldiering. “Did they teach you that at West Point?” I asked. “They did not. Something Americans don’t do well,” he added ruefully, “understanding other cultures.”

  Comparative anthropology hadn’t been much on his mind either, not at the start. It had been hard to escape the Meigs tradition and young Monty hadn’t especially wanted to. His father had been a World War II tank commander; grandfather in the navy, great-grandfather ditto. He had been taken to see the model ships at the museum in Annapolis Naval Academy, and there he gazed at the past and saw the future. There had been a time when he’d thought he might be a doctor but at Colgate University, right in the middle of the 1960s, when American history, especially the history of American wars, was deeply unfashionable, somehow ancestral memory and present vocation resolved themselves into clarity. Meigs went to West Point and then on to Vietnam as an infantry officer in the most dangerous outfit of all—reconnaissance. He was a Jeffersonian idealist; there were such types in the rice paddies. “I thought it was important to protect South Vietnam from being conquered by the North…we did nothing wrong; no atrocities” (I hadn’t asked). But then on the summit of Hamburger Hill, with his company taking appalling losses for no particular objective that he could understand, something ugly began to pick at Monty Meigs’s conscience: that the whole war was “a strategic error of horrendous proportions”; a war that should never have been waged. At Georgetown University these days Meigs teaches a course on “Why presidents go to war when th
ey don’t have to.”

  The disenchantment bit deep. For some time he thought he’d get out of the military, but then he couldn’t. “I looked in the mirror and thought, no. I’m a soldier; that’s what I am.” A command position in Europe followed, where, so long as the Cold War continued, so did the rationale for American troops, along with that education in comparative culture. But there were no simple outcomes. Desert Storm in 1991 was justified by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, but in forty minutes at Medina Ridge, Meigs was in the battle that incinerated Iraqi cavalry inside their tanks. The NATO command in Bosnia—trying to separate the sides—was, evidently, altruism meets pragmatism; a dash of Jefferson, a shot of Hamilton. We spoke of those two founders and their respective philosophies of American war. Jefferson had, he thought, the luxury of picking his fights and keeping a skeleton army of professionals; making West Point an academy of engineers, as the young country was without immediate land enemies, and the conquests were of geography and the Natives. There have been moments when the Jeffersonian commitment to fighting only wars that defended liberty were realized—the Civil War; World War II—but since 1945, the military had been Hamiltonian; a vast permanent corporate institution. Every so often the West Point “stars” divided on their allegiance. Omar Bradley had been pure Jefferson; the ex-superintendent Douglas MacArthur, the incarnation of Hamilton. And every so often a general who ought to have been one kind turned out to be another. It had been Dwight Eisenhower, the deepest embodiment of the West Point ethos of command in World War II, who at the end of his presidency had sounded exactly like Thomas Jefferson, warning against the threat posed to American democracy by the “military-industrial complex.” But, Meigs thought, in the end the scale of Cold War preparations had meant that a Hamiltonian mind-set had, for better or worse, prevailed; the self-generating momentum of military preparation dominating serious discussions of the cause for which treasure and blood would be spilled. He lightly rubbed his chin as he said that, not exonerating himself from what had happened.

  It had been “preparedness” that had persuaded the army to train officers and men for a second war in Iraq even though the decision (at least officially) hadn’t been taken or even properly debated. The imperative of offensive preparation had been just another form of self-fulfilling prophecy. Reflexive instinct. You can fight the wrong war with the wrong enemy and inadvertently make new ones, the general said. Another smile, this time of regret, a pause, “This had nothing to do with al-Qaida.” The decision had been taken after he had retired as a four-star general and while he was occupying the most paradoxically, or possibly penitentially, endowed Lyndon Baines Johnson Chair of World Peace at the University of Texas.

  Knowing your true enemy; that’s what the quartermaster general had done. Did the general ever think of his great-great-great-uncle? He did. He understood perfectly the importance of being a pain in the neck. He knew exactly what it had been like for Montgomery to have faced down the kickback artists and the array of businessmen who had not expected to have to bid for their contracts. When he had run the Joint Task Force on Improvised Explosive Devices (road bombs), and, like the good engineering Meigs that he was, was concentrating on what could be done to defeat them, both politically as well as technically, he discovered that “there are still people in town interested in noncompetitive contracts. It makes you draw a line and say no, we’re not going to do that.” Could that be said for whole wars? It had better be, he thought. You couldn’t miss the Meigs inheritance. He told the top brass what they didn’t want to hear, namely that they were going after effect when they should be going after the cause, identifying and penetrating the networks that produced the IEDs rather than just catching up with the latest cell-phone detonators after the fact. But he was warned off. This was politics. This was none of Meigs’s business. The commander of Central Command, John Abizaid, felt moved to remind Meigs that he was officially retired. “Look, Monty, you’re not helping, the way you’re going about things.” Meigs persisted; Meigses always do. “HEY, look,” Abizaid exploded, “this is not your fucking war to fight.” Meigs declined to retreat; Meigses seldom back off. “You know the family has a characteristic of that flinty obdurate nature,” he remarked, looking sunny as he said it. “I don’t see it in you,” I said cheekily, thinking this is one of the most decent men I have met in a long time. “Oh it’s there,” he replied, looking back at me with a straight face. “You can’t see it, but it’s there.”

  11. Hamilton resurrexit

  On 11 March 2006, General Montgomery Meigs walked into a briefing room in the White House. It was breakfast time. On a side table were coffee, bagels, the usual. On the long table in the middle of the room was an array of Improvised Explosive Devices. The horrifying casualty rate in Iraq from these bombs and mines was proving a textbook case in asymmetric warfare. On the other side of the table were President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, all of whom wanted some good news. From Monty Meigs, though, they got the tough truth that so many people didn’t want to hear. There was no magic shield that dollars could buy. The answer lay in attacking the insurgent networks from within. Two days later Bush spoke about the problem and put a brave face on it. It was a big problem, no doubt. But “we’re putting the best minds in America on it.”

  The room where Meigs had briefed the president is called the Theodore Roosevelt Room. On one wall hangs a portrait of the Rough Rider president, who believed a nice little war was just the moxie to revivify an America enervated by its foul cities: filthy lucre, even filthier slums, polluted air, and corrupt plutocrats. Americans needed to restore the national manhood by getting out more and taking potshots at their enemies. In 1906 the president who had declared with his customary candor that “no triumph of peace is quite so great as the triumph of war,” received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. The immediate reason for this improbable act of recognition was that at a conference in New Hampshire, TR had negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Perhaps when the presenting orator, Gunnar Knudsen, said that “the United States of America was among the first to infuse the ideal of peace in political practice,” he was thinking of Thomas Jefferson, who had indeed wanted it to be so (even if he found himself at war with the Barbary States on the Maghreb). But at the moment that he received the prize, Roosevelt’s administration was trying to suppress a lengthy and brutal guerrilla insurgency in the Philippines. The president had claimed in 1902 that war was over, but it would not be until 1907 at least, and after 4,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Filipinos died, that the rebellion was pacified. For Mr. Knudsen to have asked the American ambassador to convey to President Roosevelt the gratitude of the Norwegian people for “all he has done in the cause of peace” must have called on all his skills at producing a Scandinavian straight face.

  Every chance he got, Teddy Roosevelt sounded off about the tonic invigoration of belligerence. “All the great masterful races” (among which he meant Americans to number), he boomed, “have been fighting races.” If Jefferson and Hamilton had pointed the United States in alternative directions of destiny as a world power, there was no question where Roosevelt’s preference lay. Jefferson he despised as a remote intellectual and a weakling in matters of war and peace, one of the very worst of presidents. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, he revered for his frank passion for power, his vision of strong central government, and his unapologetic determination to make the United States a player on the world scene, admired and feared for its military prowess. So it was no accident that it was at the Hamilton Club in Chicago in April 1899, during the first year of the war against the Filipino resistance and with an election not far away, that the then vice president spoke of “the Strenuous Life.”

  Even by TR’s standards the speech was an astonishing performance, a warning that if the United States did not wish to become another China “and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders,” it had better embrace strife and battle. “When men fear work or fear righteous war…t
hey tremble on the brink of doom…thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat.” The enemy within was “the timid man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man who has lost the great, fighting, masterful virtues…the man of dull mind whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills ‘stern men with empires in their brains’—all these of course shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors have driven the Spanish flag…” What would the enemies of this war have the government do? Deliver the Philippines to people who “are utterly unfit for self-government?” “I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines…or [who] shrink from it because of the expense and trouble.” But Roosevelt had even less patience for those who “cant about ‘liberty’ and ‘the consent of the governed’ in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.” Let the naysayers in Congress be warned. Should any disaster befall the troops, it will have been the fault of those weak-kneed, lily-livered legislators!