Waging War by David J. Barron

Author:David J. Barron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Part 4

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COLD WAR AND BEYOND

14

KOREA AND ABSOLUTE WAR POWERS

“The whole business of trying to prescribe by law the movements of military forces which are carried out in order to build up a force to prevent war is not a sensible thing to do.”

The end of World War II marked the start of the atomic age. It also sparked a Cold War. Together, these developments put great pressure on traditional understandings of separation of powers—and called into question whether the age-old respect for the “forms” of constitutionalism continued to make any sense. The task of adjusting to this new world—and deciding whether those forms were worth honoring, especially if reality suggested the chief executive had to be free to protect the national security in a way he had never been free before—initially fell to a leader who seemed wholly unprepared to handle it.

Harry Truman was an accidental president. He hailed from a small Missouri town. He went on to become a popular but hardly dynamic senator. Franklin Roosevelt then plucked him from Congress to serve as his running mate in the race for the president’s fourth and final term. But though Truman had risen to vice president, he was never invited into the White House’s inner circle. His involvement in the great man’s wartime decisions was embarrassingly slight. He also had no executive experience of his own.

Still, once president, Truman surprised in his new role. He was a self-taught student of the past. His voracious reading as a youngster had convinced him that individual leaders could shape history. A former senator with deep reservoirs of good will in Congress, he turned out to be committed to defending the prerogatives of his new office. He also proved to be quite comfortable exercising them.

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The early days of Truman’s presidency were heady ones. Truman was behind the desk when Japan surrendered. He presided over the nation’s final victory in World War II. His popularity soared. It was as if his every move was wise and well timed. He fast developed a reputation for decisiveness, even courage.

But it was in the years that followed that Truman made his most significant mark in the nearly two-century-old conversation about the powers of the commander in chief. After he had been elected in his own right, his administration took a series of steps that launched a new phase in that conversation. Up to that point, its cadence had barely changed. From George Washington’s time forward, presidents had worked to find language to defuse confrontations over the conduct of war. Even Franklin Roosevelt had stepped back from the brink. With the singular exception of Reconstruction, Congress had tried to answer in kind, avoiding the strident tone that might set off a constitutional showdown with the commander in chief. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, seemed basically happy to listen. It said the president lacked an unlimited power to wage war and that there were certain lines Congress could not cross. The Court had been careful not to say much more.

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