“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy,” Warren Harding declared during his successful presidential bid of 1920. No entangling alliances for him either.
World War II
“If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca,” Bogie’s character asks his piano player Sam, “what time is it in New York? I bet they’re asleep in New York. I’ll bet they’re asleep all over America.”
But not for long. Thanks to the sneak Japanese attack on our Hawaiian naval base at Pearl Harbor, America was about to “get involved” in World War II. Like the coiled rattlesnake of the American Revolution we were about to strike back with vengeance.
In a wild coincidence, Casablanca was released in the same month, November 1942, that the real city of Casablanca was being liberated by American troops. The following February, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met there to map out plans for the invasion of France.
Roosevelt and Churchill would also forge an alliance with the “Free French” forces of General Charles de Gaulle. Until then, President Roosevelt had maintained relations with the collaborationist French regime in hopes that its troops in North Africa would join with the Allies. This pretense died that same November 1942 when Vichy forces in North Africa offered resistance to the Allied invasion.
Casablanca ends with the start of a “beautiful friendship” between the American Rick Blaine and the French police chief played by Claude Rains (who also played Senator Paine in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). Both of them have now joined the fight. It’s hard not be struck by the real-life parallel. As a result of the Casablanca Conference, the United States and France renewed an alliance that began in the American Revolution and lives to this day.
Writing about Casablanca and the character of Rick Blaine in America in the Movies, the critic Michael Wood notes the connection between Rick’s desire to steer clear of World War II with the warnings of both Washington and Jefferson: “I want to suggest that there is in America a dream of freedom which appears in many places and many forms, which lies somewhere at the back of several varieties of isolationism and behind whatever we mean by individualism, which converts selfishness from something of a vice into something of a virtue, and which confers a peculiar, gleaming prestige on loneliness. It is a dream of freedom from others; it is a fear, to use a sanctioned and favorite word, of entanglement. It is what we mean when we say, in our familiar phrase, that we don’t want to get involved.”
Casablanca would reclaim its hold on Americans, especially young Americans, during the 1960s. Faced with the war in Vietnam and the draft, college students identified with Bogart’s Rick Blaine, the guy who refused to fight unless something truly important was at stake. Many college students didn’t think Vietnam met that test. Starting at Harvard Square’s Brattle Theatre, a cult was born.
Popular culture-watcher Henry Allen has sought to explain it. “It might not have acquired its cult status if it hadn’t been for the assassination of Kennedy, with his witty tough-guy appeal, and the Vietnam War, which made us hunger for a time when there were things worth dying for.”
The Powell Doctrine
The catastrophe of Vietnam led to the desire to avoid future American military interventions that lacked strong popular support, a winnable mission and an “exit strategy.”
But before new rules of American engagement could be codified, the United States would suffer one more military humiliation.
In 1983, a car bomber slaughtered 241 Marines stationed in Beirut. Most of the victims died in their sleep. Aghast at the carnage, Americans asked how a contingent of troops sent in as “peacemakers” had become targets and belligerents.
One explanation for the disaster was that Ronald Reagan, then the Commander in Chief, had accepted bad advice. He had been sold the idea that American troops could be seen as neutral in a conflict that had our ally Israel on one side and Lebanese militants on the other. Sent in as a “peacekeeping” force, our Marines were given the in-your-face job of policing Beirut International Airport, which made them irresistible targets. Fired on, they were forced to fire back, which had the effect of making them despised throughout the Arab world.
What would become known as the “Powell Doctrine” arose in response to the disaster in Beirut. With memories of the Vietnam horror still painful, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his chief military assistant General Colin Powell drafted new criteria for overseas military involvement. War, they agreed, should be a last resort. It should be undertaken only in the presence of precise political and military goals with clear popular support from the American public and the Congress. There must be a clear exit strategy, and an unhesitating will to deploy overwhelming force.
The Powell Doctrine reconciled America’s new status as the lone superpower with its reluctant-warrior past.
“War should be the politics of last resort,” Powell wrote in his autobiography. “And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support; we should mobilize the country’s resources to fulfill that mission and then go in to win. In Vietnam, we had entered into a halfhearted half-war, with much of the nation opposed or indifferent, while a small fraction carried the burden.”
Powell condemned the ambiguous mission objectives that led to the 1983 Lebanon fiasco:
When the political objective is important, clearly defined and understood, when the risks are acceptable, and when the use of force can be effectively combined with diplomatic and economic policies, then clear and unambiguous objectives must be given to armed forces. These objectives must be firmly linked with the political objectives. We must not, for example, send military forces into a crisis with an unclear mission they cannot accomplish—such as we did when we sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon in 1983. We inserted those proud warriors into the middle of a five-faction civil war complete with terrorists, hostage-takers and a dozen spies in every camp, and said, “Gentlemen, be a buffer.” . . . When we use force we should not be equivocal; we should win and win decisively.
The great danger lies in sending American troops for a narrowly defined mission, only to see their role expand once in the field. The term is “mission creep.” It is among the hazards of foreign intervention the Powell Doctrine was meant to prevent.
A career soldier, Colin Powell was born in Harlem, raised in the South Bronx, and attended the City College of New York, where he enlisted in the ROTC. Twice sent to Vietnam, he was wounded in his first tour, then received the Soldier’s Medal for bravery in his second for pulling men from a burning helicopter.
Powell’s big break came with his selection to be a White House Fellow during the Nixon administration. This brought him to the Office of Management and Budget and to the attention of a powerful Republican pair: budget director Cap Weinberger and his deputy Frank Carlucci. After serving as Weinberger’s aide through the early ’80s and later commanding troops in Europe. Powell became Carlucci’s deputy and eventually his replacement as director of the National Security Council.
In 1989, General Powell’s new Commander-in-Chief, George H.W. Bush, promoted him to the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In his first year as chairman, Powell won credit for carrying out the raid on Panama that captured the drug-dealing strongman Manuel Noriega. In the years 1990–91, Powell oversaw the deft planning and lightning execution of the Persian Gulf War to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In October 1993, however, U.S. forces found themselves in yet another quagmire overseas. This time the place was Mogadishu, Somalia. Faced with heart-wrenching televised images of starving Africans, President George Bush had sent a contingent of U.S. forces to deliver food to that Horn of Africa nation. But, as the months passed, and the Clinton administration came into office, we Americans took upon ourselves the fateful task of separating the good guys from the bad over there in that remote corner of a continent where we were far from home.
One of the villains was th
e warlord Farah Aidid, whose capture soon was a U.S. priority. A humanitarian mission had turned into something far different. In a crazed firefight in downtown Mogadishu, under fire from thousands of armed Somalis, eighteen Americans were killed and eighty-four others were wounded. One American’s body was dragged through the streets to the delight of the crowd, the voyeuristic gaze of the international media, and the blood-curdling outrage of millions of Americans.
Thomas Jefferson could have predicted it. The readiness of the United States to entangle itself in a civil war on the other side of the globe had cost us lives and dignity. Following the massacre in Mogadishu, the “Powell Doctrine” struck the American people—and especially our military—with a new force.
The Reluctant Warrior Today
In the months after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, America was called to arms. The Congress immediately gave President George W. Bush the authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks . . . or harbored such organizations or persons.”
Speaking to Congress, Bush was, indeed, the consummate rattlesnake. “The nation is peaceful but fierce when stirred to anger.”
Sadly, a campaign focused on eradicating the terrorist network behind September 11 soon began to show undeniable signs of mission creep. From a war to destroy Al Qaeda, our target expanded to any international terrorist group.
“We will direct every resource at our command,” Bush said, “every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.”
In his 2002 State of the Union speech, Bush pushed the envelope further. He branded three countries—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—the “axis of evil.” He went on, “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.”
Just a few weeks later, a high-ranking State Department official appended the names of three other countries—Libya, Syria and Cuba—to the “axis.” Sudan and Somalia were soon added to the list of Bush administration targets. From the terrorists of September 11, the list had grown, first, to all terrorists, then to all countries who aid terrorists, then to all those thought to be acquiring biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons who might give them to the terrorists.
The list would grow further still. In June 2002, the president proposed to the West Point graduating class that military force might be employed against any country on any continent ruled by “tyrants,” that denies “human liberty,” that is not “free and open.”
Deterrence forgotten, America would now stand ready to take preemptive action. This was mission creep with a vengeance.
Myself, I worry that this change in course threatens us with dangerous consequences. Will America still be guided by its role as a reluctant warrior in this new century? Or will the reality of America’s colossal military power overwhelm the fine instincts of its history?
CHAPTER 4
Action
Shift that fat ass, Harry. But slowly, or you’ll swamp the damned boat.
GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON TO COLONEL
HENRY KNOX, DECEMBER 25, 1776
Americans trust brainpower only so far. Our admiration runs most naturally to the activist, the person who’s out there showing not just what he thinks but what he can do.
Ernest Hemingway
When we think of American novelists, Ernest Hemingway dominates the landscape. Who else inspires annual contests to ape his writing style? Every summer American college students still head to the Left Bank cafés the great man frequented, and even jaded businessmen traveling to Paris peep into the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz Hotel. People go to their first bullfight because Hemingway wrote so vividly about the corridas. They head to Africa for safaris because he once did.
Because of him, they often dare to dream of trying their hand at that great American novel.
Why are we so drawn to Hemingway?
Because his genius was to live it, then to write it. He made his readers feel they had done something truly adventurous just by reading his books. This may seem old hat now—but it wasn’t back then. There was, in fact, a movie entitled Wrestling Ernest Hemingway about a dying old man whose great bragging right was that he had once actually wrestled Papa Hemingway.
Hemingway always had a vision of the life he’d lead. Adventure was the magnet. “I desire to do pioneering or exploring work in the three last great frontiers,” he wrote at the tender age of fifteen, “Africa, Southern Central South America or the country around and north of Hudson’s Bay.”
Not long after, he had his first job as a reporter, covering crime, fires, labor strikes. Using the stylebook of his paper, the Kansas City Star, he taught himself to write the short, declarative sentences that he would make his literary trademark.
In World War I, Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver. While delivering supplies to the front he was hit by a mortar, taking over twenty fragments of shrapnel in his legs. Then, carrying a more seriously wounded man to the rear, he was sprayed by machine gun bullets. As he lay convalescing in a Red Cross hospital, he was nominated for the Italian medal of honor and was trumpeted in headlines back home as the first American casualty in Italy.
While recuperating—and enjoying himself immensely in the process—Hemingway fell in love with his nurse. Agnes von Kurowsky was twenty-six and the dream girl of every wounded soldier in the ward. Hemingway had just turned nineteen. Though she would ultimately reject his attentions—“I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy”—the young man from Illinois had gotten what he needed from the experience.
Hemingway returned home, a writer with a story to tell.
Like Teddy Roosevelt, another great American man of action, Ernest Hemingway was his own best biographer. Though only in his teens, he was able to describe what it felt like to be wounded in combat. “Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died.”
What other writers tried to imagine Hemingway made sure he knew first hand.
Thanks to his war service, Hemingway won a job working in Paris for the Toronto Star. He joined the tight-knit community of expatriate writers living on the Left Bank. It turned out to be the right move. “If he hadn’t been in Paris when he was,” argues biographer Michael Reynolds. “I’m not sure he would have turned out to be the Hemingway we know.”
In a short two years, he began to morph into the figure of literary legend.
He saw his first bullfight in 1923—but it was far from his last. His greatest novel, The Sun Also Rises, and, years later, his best work of nonfiction, Death in the Afternoon, were the result of his immersion in the glamorous but deadly world of the matador.
Hemingway had craved to know fully the people and places he wrote about. It was his competitive edge and he kept it sharp. He never stopped living right up against the characters he wrote about. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway revealed:
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. . . . The only place where you see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study
it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
His friend Malcolm Cowley observed that, after the publication of the The Sun Also Rises in 1926, young Americans “drank like his heroes and heroines, cultivated a hard-boiled melancholy and talked in page after page of Hemingway dialogue.” A first generation of disciples had been created.
Next came Africa. In 1933, Hemingway took a ten-week safari to what was then Tanganyika. Sleeping under the immense Africa sky, hunting lion and rhino, he discovered the magic of the Serengeti. Always restless to prove himself in a new and dangerous terrain, Hemingway now had a continent under his belt.
Three years later, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, Hemingway supported the left-wing Loyalists against the rightist forces of General Francisco Franco. With Stalin backing the Loyalist cause and Hitler and Mussolini backing Franco, the war served as a stark prelude to World War II. Traveling with an American volunteer brigade committed to the elected government, Hemingway crafted For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Living in Cuba in the 1950s, he wrote the story of an old peasant who struggles with a gargantuan swordfish for four days and nights only to lose him to the sharks. Hemingway called The Old Man and the Sea “the best I can write ever for all of my life.” It was, he said, “an epilogue to all my writing and what I have learned, or tried to learn, while writing and trying to live. It will kill the school of criticism that claims I can write about nothing except myself and my own experiences.” Indeed, the book won the Pulitzer Prize and helped him gain the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 169
