No Men on Horseback

GENERALS IN THE WHITE HOUSE --Dorofhy B. Goebel and Julius Goebel Jr.--Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies . . .

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the civil power.

These words, from the Declaration of Independence, were more than an indictment of George Ill's tyranny. They represent a deeprooted, continuing, and well-founded U.S. fear of the military dictatorship which may result from a large standing army. After this war, the U.S. is virtually certain to have such an army for the first time in its history. With the possibility by no means remote that a military hero may be elected President in 1948, it is none too soon for patriots to begin reconsidering this danger. An examination of the nine generals who have occupied the White House is inconclusive but reassuring.

The Best & the Worst. Julius Goebel, Columbia University law professor, and his wife Dorothy, Hunter College history professor, present such an examination in Generals in the White House, an able, scholarly, cautious study of nine very different Presidents. As an analysis of the would-be military dictator in the office of Chief Executive, it fails through simple lack of subject matter. The U.S. has produced no Caesars, Napoleons or Cromwells.

The record is equally inconclusive about whether a military commander necessarily makes either a good or bad President.

The nine U.S. general-Presidents have included some of the best and some of the worst. They have been called butchers, tyrants, militarists, imperialists, but so have the lawyers, the statesmen, and the politicians who got to the White House.

Presidents Hayes, Garfield and Benjamin Harrison have virtually no claim to consideration as generals. Lawyer-politicians, they achieved their rank in the emergency of the Civil War, promptly relinquished it afterward.

Zachary Taylor was a professional soldier, trained in Indian fighting, who commanded his troops "in a straw hat, checked gingham coat and a pair of blue trousers without braid ... a plain American leading a lot of other plain Americans." An able but limited general, his appeal was that of a rustic hero, a fighting frontiersman.

Triumph of a Personality. Andrew Jackson's career as a general lasted only 18 months. His success was more one of personality than of military skill. Irascible and impatient, he won his soldiers' admiration by a steady display of fire and courage. He did not hesitate to call his superiors in the War Department "intermeddling pimps and spies." His emergence as a popular hero was the result less of tactical victories over the British, Spanish and Indians than of his highhanded triumphs over entrenched officialdom and political chicanery.

Jackson's Presidency was "a series of battles in which he exhibited the same qualities that had distinguished his military career. In his own view he fought for the people and the Union as before he had battled for the Republic." He left a profound impress on the office of the Presidency, but it was one of his own reckless and insurgent personality, not that of his incidental profession.

The success of "Old Hickory" as candidate and President was a bright lure to political manipulators. In 1840, nearly 30 years after fighting an insignificant Indian battle at Tippecanoe Creek, William Henry Harrison was swept into the White House on a wave of manufactured political hysteria that somehow mistook an "urbane and cultivated" Virginia planter for a log-cabin frontiersman. "Young Hickory" was the name bestowed for election purposes on a small-town lawyer from New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce. Pierce's military career, in the Mexican War, lasted just under a year, and was chiefly distinguished by such mishaps as persistent dysentery and injuries sustained in a fall from a rearing horse.

The great general is perhaps one who is born to command, to inspire instant obedience. The successful politician is certainly one who can coax and conciliate. Yet in the history of the U.S. a general's success has often depended as much, if not more, on the latter ability as on the former. George Washington's first task as Commander in Chief was to make soldiers out of a fiercely independent militia. As Steuben wrote to a friend abroad, "You say to your soldier 'Do this' and he doeth it, but I am obliged to say 'This is the reason why you ought to do that' and then he does it." To proud soldiers, to a cantankerous and distrustful Congress, to politicians and subordinates on all sides, General Washington was forced time & again to say patiently, "This is the reason why you ought to do that." As general and as President, he commanded not soldiers or subjects, but simple confidence.

Figure of Pathos. The only other soldier to rise to the Presidency at the end of a major war in which he had been the supreme field commander was Ulysses Simpson Grant. A great general, perhaps America's greatest, Grant was a professional soldier. But as President he was and has ever since been damned as a tragic incompetent. More than any other, Grant proves that a thoroughgoing soldier in the White House is a figure not of terror but of pathos.

In 1862 Grant wrote, "So long as I hold a commission in the army I have no views of my own. . . . Whatever may be the orders of my superiors and law I will execute." As President he confidently awaited the orders of Congress and the people. Lost in the complexities and intrigues of politics, "his honesty made him vulnerable . . . incapable of suspecting a fraud" or of stemming the tidal wave of scandal that engulfed him.

At the end of his second term the Union's greatest Civil War hero left the White House with this apology: "It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without any previous political training.... Under such circumstances it is but reasonable to suppose that . . . mistakes have been made . . . but . . . failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent." His bid for a third term three years later was roundly rejected.

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