ABUSING OUR MILITARY IS A POLITICAL BRIDGE TOO FAR

All nations love, revere and mythologize their military heroes, and the United States has not deviated from this norm. George Washington was our first military commander and hero and the one individual most associated with our successful war of independence. Subsequently, nine of our presidents were war heroes, seven of them generals and two who served as lieutenants in WWII: John F Kennedy and George Herbert Walker Bush.

Yet, unlike our European allies, we do not beatify our military heroes. We have no Bonaparte or DeGaulle, no Ludendorff, Lord Wellington or Admiral Nelson. Statues of generals past abound in our urban parks, yet more often than not we have no idea whom they honor—and the explanatory plaques help only a little to provide their context.

Our generals are foremost citizens and public servants. They fight not for king, president, party or flag, but for our nation's citizens, ideals and way of life. So our admiration for the military and for war heroes is owed not just to their victories and service, but to their political restraint. George Washington started this tradition when he accepted the presidency reluctantly and refused the regal prerogative his peers offered him to hold high office for life.

Perhaps because the military has maintained its non-partisan role as the defender of the United States and our constitution, it remains even now one of the most respected institutions in the U.S. According to the Gallup poll, in 2019, 36% of the population had confidence in organized religion, 38% in the Supreme Court and the presidency, 29% in organized labor, 23% in big business and newspapers, 11% in Congress, but 73% expressed confidence in our military.

This is why President Trump may have made his biggest political blunder to date when he attempted to misuse the military on the week of June 1, 2020 to quell the Black Lives Matter demonstration at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.

Demagogues have messed with the State Department and fought with the press, but nobody has hassled the military and gotten away with it.

When General Mark Milley, The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, realized that President Trump had exploited him in the infamous photo opportunity at St. John’s Church on June 1 after protesters were tear-gassed from the adjacent park, the highest ranking military officer issued a trenchant apology.

General Milley realized the implications of his flanking the president while the latter was making a political statement. He understood that as the highest ranking military officer, he was besmirching the non-partisan integrity of the armed forces, on which the American people depend.

It is unclear now what effect this moment will have on the ongoing relationship of this president with the military. Have General Milley and his colleagues interpreted the president’s attempt to subordinate him and the armed services to his political ambitions as a gross breach of trust? Will they henceforth regard this president as an enemy? If so, Donald J. Trump went a political stunt too far. Because one lesson to be derived from recent political history is this: a politician can abuse Congress and try the patience of the Courts, but the military is a political force he cannot match and ought not to engage.

The most conspicuous figure to suffer political defeat at the hands of the military was Joseph McCarthy, the notorious red-hunter of the 1950s. The junior senator from Wisconsin conducted his anti-Communist inquisition from 1950 to 1954, and most people in and out of government were petrified to cross him. Even President Eisenhower, a military hero and five-star general who was elected by a landslide, stayed largely quiet as McCarthy presided over his reign of terror. 

But then McCarthy went too far. McCarthy aimed his red-baiting flame-throwing megaphone at the U.S. Army, claiming there were communists lurking in uniform. It all started because an army dentist, who had belonged to the American Labor Party, was promoted to major, pro forma, before being honorably discharged. McCarthy smelled a conspiracy.

McCarthy called hearings to investigate the matter of the left-leaning army dentist, during which the senator reviled the suspicious fellow's base commander, a hero of the Battle of the Bulge, as "not fit to wear the uniform" and not having "the brains of a five-year-old child." This was too much. The Army leaked to Congress and the press that McCarthy's counsel, Roy Cohn, wished out of petulance, to "wreck the army" in order to settle a personal grievance.

In the past, McCarthy's charges had made his targets quake and give ground, but this time was different. He had attacked the Army and officers who served with valor, which prompted one of McCarthy's Republican colleagues in the Senate, Ralph Flanders, to upbraid him and another senator to second the rebuke. Even President Eisenhower wrote a letter commending Flanders, in which he remarked, "America needs to hear more Republican voices like yours."

Then it was Joseph McCarthy's turn to be investigated. Senate hearings were called to air all sides of the Army kerfuffle. In these months-long hearings, McCarthy and his aide, the brilliant and vindictive Roy Cohn, met their match in the Army’s pro bono attorney, Joseph N. Welch.

Welch, a proper, unprepossessing and witty litigator from an elite Boston law firm, challenged McCarthy and his aides, Cohn and Shine, to produce evidence of communist subversion in the army. Finally, with his own steady and relentless counter-attack, Welch induced McCarthy to make a blunder before a massive TV audience. When McCarthy accused a junior attorney at Welch’s Boston blue chip firm of having been a member of a “leftist” legal organization, Welch responded to this vindictive innuendo by asking McCarthy rhetorically, “Have you no sense of decency?”

The end was near for McCarthy. He tried to mount further investigations to ferret out suspected communists in government but they were summarily nullified. Months after the Army hearings, McCarthy was censured by his Senate colleagues.

Americans do not like the draft and we have a general distaste for going to war and meddling with other nations’ conflicts overseas. Yet, while we are reluctant to deploy our armed services, we believe our military to be effective and incorruptible, and hold it in high esteem. For this reason, we despise any political figure who abuses, accuses, misuses or tries to corrupt it.

Donald Trump ought to have at least read a comic book on Joseph McCarthy’s U.S. Army Waterloo before he attempted to inveigle the U.S. Army into quelling the Black Lives Matters protests. The U.S. military does not consider itself to be among the president’s “vicious dogs.” Trying to induce “his army” to counteract benign civil protests comprised an abuse of the armed services that prompted General James Mattis, a highly respected figure, to issue his acerbic rebuke of the president, and General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to apologize for the appearance of an inappropriate political alignment. 

We expect our military to steer clear of politics because we understand implicitly that democracy is governance by persuasion, not intimidation. When we see soldiers in our streets, our world seems out of kilter; we sense the body politic is ill. Indeed, our fight for independence was a bold and visceral response to military intrusion in civilian life. Democracy cannot tolerate military intervention. And no one is more cognizant of that than the generals, themselves.

Although President Trump’s misuse of the military in the protests against police violence has now receded to the back pages of our minds, it will always be on the table like a pack of cards that is still strewn face up where the players left them. The military should be non-partisan and apolitical, but everything in a democracy is ultimately subject to politics, and the military is part of the game.

Meanwhile, civilian voters and the armed services alike have been warned that this president does not see boundaries between soldier and civilian any better than he sees them between himself and his office, or his office and the other parts of government.

This commander-in-chief may not see the appropriate lines, but our military leaders apparently do. It remains to be seen what will occur if or when the president attempts to cross that line again and tries to play toy soldiers with his armed forces.