Democratic and Republican members of Congress all thought highly of Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford. He was knowledgeable in domestic and foreign policy issues and was as well prepared as a president could be. And despite being unelected to both the vice presidency and the presidency, his approval rating was 75 percent. After he pardoned Nixon a month later, though, this rating dropped precipitously to 54 percent. Their party, undermined by Ford’s and Nixon’s unpopularity, would suffer a worse fate. In the congressional elections that November, forty incumbents, thirty-six of them Republican, were defeated. In addition, thirteen retiring Republicans were replaced by Democrats. The House Democratic majority thus expanded from 56 percent to 67 percent. Of thirty-four Senate seats up for grabs that year, the Democrats netted four additional seats and lost no incumbents.

In 1976 the country was looking for competent leadership and, after Watergate and the Vietnam War, someone to tackle two major emerging issues: inflation and energy problems. Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate, nuclear submarine expert, former Georgia state senator and governor, was elected president. Former Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill said Carter was the smartest president he’d served with and certainly the hardest working. Jimmy Carter was a master of detail. He could stand before fifty members of Congress and answer in-depth questions with ease, without ever turning to his staff for help.

A meeting at the White House in 1977 illustrates the importance of public support. The Democratic leadership was invited to discuss the president’s proposal to raise the gasoline tax ten cents in reaction to the oil embargo. The goal of the tax was to curtail demand. The president believed consumers would get the money back in the form of lower payroll taxes. The leadership pledged to support the president on the tax but I knew the public would not buy it. I spoke up, and, as a junior member, all eyes were on me. I said, “Mr. President, you won’t get fifty votes.” By the time the vote got to the floor, the gas tax proposal had gone from the original ten cents down to four cents. Nevertheless, the vote failed miserably. The president received only fifty-two votes.

The Iran hostage crisis, which began in November 1979, a year before the next election, further eroded the public’s confidence in President Carter. Fifty-two U.S. diplomats were held hostage for 444 days. The president ordered a rescue attempt, but it failed because he overestimated the capability of our military. General Peter J. Schoomaker, the current army chief of staff, participated in that raid as a young soldier. He reflected on that time in history during a recent hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee and said he learned a valuable lesson from the failed attempt: “We should never confuse enthusiasm for capability.”

Six months after the 1980 election I asked President Carter why he had lost to Ronald Reagan. He said he had paid too much attention to detail. After all, he was an engineer. In my view, however, it was because he was unable to recover from the Iran hostage fiasco. The public perceived him as weak and incapable of dealing with our enemies. Thus this highly intelligent president would be remembered primarily as a peanut farmer who was in over his head.

Ronald Reagan was an affable, charismatic actor and governor of California who exuded paternalistic patriotism. As soon as he took office, he began a crusade to upgrade the military, which had been suffering from low morale, low pay, and outdated equipment. The defense budget increased 43 percent during Reagan’s presidency. He raised military entrance standards and discharged thousands of unqualified service members. As a result, the American public enthusiastically supported Reagan, whom they viewed as strong and decisive.

In 1982 President Reagan sent sixteen hundred marines into Beirut to help restore order. But that was not nearly enough, particularly when compared to the Lebanon crisis of 1958, when President Eisenhower sent fourteen thousand soldiers and marines into Beirut. I was sent to Lebanon to assess the situation and I recommended that we get out. The rules of engagement were unclear and there were not enough troops to patrol the high ground. On October 23, 1983, we lost 241 marines in Beirut. The public was outraged. They asked, “Why should our young men be dying in Lebanon?” President Reagan argued that peace in the Middle East was of vital concern to the security of our nation and that the terrorists were trying to weaken American will and force the withdrawal of U.S. troops. But in the end, President Reagan was forced to withdraw. The American public had spoken.

I admire President Reagan’s willingness to compromise at the right time and his ability to read the public’s mood. I supported him through his Central American forays—El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama, though a majority of Democrats were against his policies. I chaired election oversight committees to El Salvador and Panama and was gratified by the democratic results. But even as democracies emerged, the president’s foreign policy goals in Central America became untenable due to waning public support.

George Herbert Walker Bush took office during the peak of America’s military power. He had been a naval aviator and was shot down in the Pacific Ocean during World War II, and he had been a member of Congress, director of the CIA, ambassador to China and to the United Nations, and vice president. Because he’d “been there,” he was very cautious about putting our men and women in harm’s way. He knew well the consequences of going to war.

On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein ordered a military blitz of Kuwait. More than a hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers backed up by seven hundred tanks invaded Kuwait, overwhelming the small Kuwaiti military in less than twenty-four hours. Soon Iraqi troops were plundering and pillaging the tiny country.

Because of its strategic location in the midst of the world’s largest oil supply, the unfolding crisis was obviously of enormous consequence to the United States and the world. Within days, President Bush sent his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Fahd. The king agreed to allow the deployment of U.S. fighter aircraft and troops to Saudi Arabia to deter Iraqi forces from making a run on that country. The army’s 82nd Airborne and the air force’s F-15 fighters were immediately deployed.

The shape of the post-cold war world was still evolving. The Berlin Wall had come down just eleven months earlier. The Warsaw Pact in the Soviet Union had not yet imploded. As U.S. military buildup of our troops in Saudi Arabia steadily increased, the question arose as to what, if any, congressional authorization was needed for conducting military operations. President Bush was in constant communication with the leaders of the international coalition and members of Congress to keep them apprised of the unfolding events and to ask for their support.

On September 21, 1990, about a month after his initial order to deploy U.S. troops, the president invited a small group of members of Congress to the White House to discuss the crisis. We met in the president’s private dining room. The president’s secretary of state, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft, director of national security, were the only representatives from the executive branch in addition to the president himself. The meeting was interrupted twice when the president answered phone calls from heads of state involved in the deployment.

President Bush began the meeting by explaining why he had felt it was necessary to order the deployment of U.S. troops. He hoped each of us would support him. While most present were supportive of the actions taken thus far, there were many words of caution expressed. President Bush astutely asked how long we thought our troops could remain in Saudi Arabia with the support of the American people. Some members thought our troops could remain for a prolonged period of time. I was not among this group and said that only about six months could pass before we would lose the morale of our deployed troops and the support of the American people. I provided the following rationale: Our troops would be in one of the most hostile physical environments on earth. The longer they sat idle without combat action, the more impatient they would become. Although the polls indicated strong support for the president’s policy, the percentage of those who opposed it was rising. President Bush knew the public would not tolerate an extended deployment and realized the benefit of quick and decisive military action.

I don’t think that any president could have handled a foreign policy crisis or war better than President George H. W. Bush. When the war ended, he received a lot of criticism from Washington insiders, particularly conservatives, who believed that he should have gone after Saddam Hussein. But the president followed the UN resolution that clearly called only for the eradication of Iraq from Kuwait. He later said, in his book A World Transformed written with Brent Scowcroft, “Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaged in ‘mission creep,’ and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had not yet been able to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well.”

President George H. W. Bush does not receive enough credit. He came from a generation that realized results are what counts, and that results speak for themselves. He consulted, listened, and then acted. He is the quintessential model of how the commander in chief should operate.

President Bill Clinton won the presidency with less than a majority of the popular vote, 43 percent. Initially, he misunderstood his mandate and how that mandate translated into results. He took on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had just won an overwhelming military victory in Kuwait, on the divisive issue of gays in the military. Clinton lost. Then he took on a massive, powerful, and diverse health care insurance industry with a twenty-million-dollar advertising budget to influence public opinion—and he lost. But he learned quickly.

President Clinton was a gifted orator and he knew public support was imperative to a president’s effectiveness. In my view, the State of the Union Address is purely show and I usually watch it on television. But after President Clinton’s indiscretions, I felt compelled to go in person to see how he would perform. He was masterful. The American public responded favorably and his poll numbers immediately went up.

As commander in chief, President Clinton also garnered support on military matters by consulting with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Two prominent Republican senators recently told me they were consulted more under President Clinton than under his successor, George W. Bush.

When the United States intervened in the conflict in Kosovo with aerial attacks, the president’s advisers predicted it would take four days to get the conflict under control. I thought it would take thirty days or more. The president called me after forty-four days and said the bombing was not going well, but we could not afford to fail. Although I originally opposed the use of ground forces, I thought we needed to use them. The president adamantly replied, “No way!” I said, “Mr. President, I intend to send you a letter recommending it.” But before my letter was formalized, his national security adviser leaked to the press that all options were on the table; in other words, ground forces were being considered. Milosevic folded. The perception of power.

In Somalia, it was a different situation. The president let his advisers change the mission from a humanitarian one to a nation-building one that culminated catastrophically in the failed kidnapping of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid by U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers. We paid a heavy price for the debacle. This was mission creep. Clinton’s secretary of defense, Les Aspin, was forced to resign over the affair as Clinton attempted to regain public and military support.

Democrats and Republicans had high hopes for President George W. Bush. He campaigned strongly against nation-building and the use of our military to police the world. He pledged to work in a bipartisan fashion in the pursuit of humble foreign policy objectives. In fact, he even attended the first Democratic caucus to be held during his presidency.

After September 11, 2001, President Bush’s public polling figures were off the charts. He had the support of 80 to 90 percent of the public. When we went into Afghanistan, the world was with us. But then he diverted us from Afghanistan to Iraq, and the reasons for going into Iraq turned out to be false. Mistakes and miscalculations were made but nobody was held accountable, although this country is paying a heavy price for those mistakes. We have lost more than twenty-three hundred Americans, and more than sixteen thousand have been wounded, half of whom have not returned to duty. The president’s military mission in Iraq has grown and morphed so often that the public has lost confidence in him. As of this writing, his approval polls are in the midthirties and still sinking.

Nonetheless, in no time in history have I seen the power in our government so unbalanced as it has been under the Bush 2 administration. President G. W. Bush has insisted on absolute deference to the executive branch from Congress and the judiciary. I am not proud of how the president has rolled over Congress, but in a one-party monopoly, such as the Republicans enjoy today, it is nearly impossible to fight the party in control. That is, unless the public reacts vehemently and public outcry forces the president to change direction. We saw this scenario play out perfectly in George W.’s push for Social Security reform. No matter how he packaged it, the public was against reforming Social Security and they would not allow it.

The legislative branch reads and reacts to public mood far faster than any other branch of government. The House of Representatives, whose members must be elected every other year, is in particular the voice of America. Members of Congress, even under a one-party system, will stand by the president for only so long before the pendulum swings and Congress reasserts its constitutional powers.

A classic case of this change in tides came as the American public learned of a Dubai-owned company’s acquisition of operations at six major U.S. ports. The public’s outcry was loud and clear—they thought the acquisition was a slap in the face to our homeland security efforts. As support for the president and the vice president was at an all-time low, Congress reacted. In a 62-to-2 vote of an amendment to the Emergency Supplemental Spending Bill of 2006, the committee voted essentially to confront the president and to kill the Dubai port deal.

The public spoke. Congress reacted. The balance of power began to shift. The perception has changed.

My friend Alan Shapiro and my brother Burt both offered valuable suggestions and sources. I would be remiss if I did not express my thanks to Stephen Power, my editor, for his work that helped shape the finished book.

How has the country gone about the business of war? The U.S. Constitution, drafted at the end of the eighteenth century, employed disarmingly simple language. Article II, Section 2: “The president shall be commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.” However, under the theory of separation of powers, Article I, Section 8 states, “The Congress shall have power . . . To declare war; . . . To raise and support armies; . . . To provide and maintain a navy; . . . To provide for calling forth the militia; . . . To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia.”

But, as with many provisions of the Constitution, the interpretation of who has the right to do what and how has always been a contentious matter. It’s fine to codify a theory for representative government, but, in a Clausewitzian context, action confronts evolving actual conditions. It falls to the executive branch, the president, to deal with them. White House residents bring to the situations their beliefs, ambitions, and prejudices, and, most formidably in recent years, the intelligence gathered. At the same time, the presidents are subject to the influences of precedents, political ramifications, congressional attitudes, public opinion, and the media.

As the foremost world power, the United States now faces challenges that the founding fathers never could have imagined. The once fine line between the power to declare war and the authority to conduct that war has been smudged, if not erased. To understand what has happened, it is useful to examine the role of the chief executive, who, when the trumpets sound, replaces his civilian character with a military one. The authors of the Constitution, anxious to avoid the trappings of royal courts, in 1787 named the head of the executive branch “president.” There’s a prosaic quality to “president,” but when the assembled statesmen decided on the powers of the office, in Article II, Section 2, they may have opened the door to mischief by using a commander in chief never imagined by the authors. “The president shall be commander in chief.”

“Commander in chief”: can there be any title more grand, more all-encompassing? It far surpasses the simple “king,” “emperor,” or any of the fanciful titles some maximum leaders and tinpot dictators have bestowed upon themselves. The honorarium dubs its holder supreme over the most potent arm of any government, and might infect almost anyone with tumescent hubris. When the commander in chief alights from an airplane or arrives at a military base, the senior officer salutes him. Bands blare his personal anthem, “Hail to the Chief,” vesting the president with majesty.

According to the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Secretary of State Cordell Hull said that during World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt preferred the title of commander in chief to that of president.¹ How else would one explain the incident when President Lyndon Johnson visited Vietnam and as he headed for a helicopter, a young officer said, “Sir, that’s not yours.” “They’re all mine,” grandly announced LBJ. Or how in 1986, upon first hearing of the scheme to free Americans seized as hostages in Lebanon by dealing weapons to Iran, Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, braced Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, asking why he and his fellow military leaders had been kept ignorant. Weinberger rebuffed Crowe with the retort that President Ronald Reagan, as commander in chief, “can do anything he wants to do.”² In an interview with the author in 2004, Weinberger insisted that this should be understood in the context of the time.

When Richard M. Nixon in 1970 broadened the American front in Vietnam by invading Cambodia, he announced, “I shall meet my responsibility as Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces, to take the action necessary to defend the security of our American men.” He declared his decision as worthy of his office. “The legal justification . . . is the right of the President of the United States under the Constitution to protect the lives of American men. As Commander-in-Chief, I had no choice but to act to defend these men. And as Commander-in-Chief, if I am faced with that decision again, I shall exercise that power to defend those men.”³

Nor was the ascension of the president into the highest rank decried by the legislative counterweights. Senator J. William Fulbright, the Arkansas Democrat regarded as one of the most thoughtful legislators, wrote that when confronted by the prospect of nuclear war, expediency demanded sole authority. “As Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, the President has full responsibility, which cannot be shared, for military decisions in a world in which differences between safety and cataclysm can be a matter of hours or even minutes.”⁴

In 2004, President George W. Bush, in claiming the right to detain captives from Afghanistan and Iraq without their access to standard legal procedures, invoked his power as commander in chief. Bush, particularly as his campaign for reelection gathered steam, frequently referred to himself as commander in chief, and his rival, Senator John Kerry, starting with his anointment at the Democratic Party convention in July 2004, countered with oratory about what he would do as commander in chief. Time magazine even billed its September 20, 2004, campaign accounts as “The Commander-in-Chief Election.”

A look through American history finds that the only individuals who in their presidency seem to have been less assertive of that omnipotent title were those professional soldiers who once actually led the military—Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower. Acording to General Maxwell Taylor, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division in World War II and during Eisenhower’s terms held the job of army deputy chief of staff, said that Ike, while president, was “very loathe to make decisions in the military field.” Taylor reported that Eisenhower refused to even offer advice to Charles Wilson, his secretary of defense, about problems in the Pentagon.⁵

Historian Schlesinger, in his 1973 book The Imperial Presidency, said, “The repeated use of the term Commander-in-Chief as if it were an incantation would have confounded the Founding Fathers . . . the office through most of American history had a strictly technical connotation; it meant no more than the topmost officer in the armed forces.” Schlesinger believed World War II conferred “new glamor” upon the title, and its implied power led to its use even when dealing with purposes outside of war. As the United States began to accept and develop its role as a world military power after World War II, it followed that the title assumed greater gravitas.

So seductive is the title that it may encourage entry to armed conflict. In 1990, during the run-up to Desert Storm, the coalition that drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, Admiral Crowe, chatting with General Colin Powell, his successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, “First, to be a great president, you have to have a war. All the great presidents have had their wars.” When Powell laughed in agreement, Crowe continued, “Two, you have to be attacked.”⁶

In fact, the last dozen chief executives, with the possible exceptions of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter but including George W. Bush, have all been full-scale war presidents. Franklin D. Roosevelt commanded during most of World War II, and when he died, Harry S. Truman held office for the final months and then later presided over the Korean War. Dwight D. Eisenhower took office with the war in Korea still ablaze. His successor, John F. Kennedy, waded through the Bay of Pigs, negotiated the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then inserted the first sixteen thousand soldiers in Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson expanded the conflict there, and Richard Nixon, who implied he had a plan to end the war, carried on until 1973. The only use of U.S. military force during the time of Gerald Ford was an abortive effort to rescue the crew of the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez in 1975. Jimmy Carter’s regime saw the seizure of the hostages in Iran, and his single exercise of armed force was a disastrous expedition to rescue them. Ronald Reagan put marines in harm’s way in Lebanon, with deadly effects, and U.S. airmen combated Syrian pilots and antiaircraft. The invasion of Grenada also occurred on Reagan’s watch. Under the first George Bush, Americans, as part of a vast coalition, drove Iraq out of Kuwait and invaded Panama. Bill Clinton used American Rangers to pursue a Somali warlord, with unhappy results, and through NATO dispatched U.S. forces to suppress ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. He hurled missiles at suspected sites of WMDs and nests of terrorists in Iraq, the Sudan, and Libya. George W. Bush launched an attack on al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan before starting a war against Iraq.

While one can argue whether Crowe’s principle is accurate—does anyone regard Zachary Taylor or William McKinley, both of whom had wars, as great?—the second requirement, that the country must be attacked, and the war a defense of national security, has generated the most controversy. As this book will detail, history reports but a few instances where the United States was actually attacked, although certainly on some occasions American interests were perceived as threatened. Under strict interpretation of the powers of the Constitution, although the charter for the original United States anointed the president with a grandiose status, that document’s authors had no intention of giving the president carte blanche to exercise his role as commander in chief and the choice of when to wage war. The founding fathers knew that any pretense of democracy would collapse if an American president, like the British king, possessed the sole authority to originate and then wage war. Hence the language of Article I, Section 8, quoted at the beginning of this introduction, which would seem to severely circumscribe the actions of a commander in chief. The founding fathers believed that by insisting upon deliberations by the legislative branch, they kept the head of state from ever hurrying the nation into war.

Even here, the language had undergone revision. Originally, it read, “To make war.” While many delegates feared any extension of war powers to the chief executive, they also realized that the commander in chief should, in the event of a surprise attack, be able to instantly retaliate without waiting for Congress to assemble and act. James Madison and Elbridge Gerry suggested that “declare” replace “make,” understanding that the change provided the necessary latitude for a quick defensive response.⁷ In the eighteenth century that might have seemed a foolproof solution. Alexander Hamilton knew better and warned in number 23 of the Federalist Papers, “The authorities essential to the care of the common defense are these: to raise armies; to build and equip fleets; to prescribe rules for the government of both; to direct their operations; to provide for their support. These powers ought to exist without limitation, Because it is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies, or the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them [Hamilton’s italics].”

In fact, not only did the problem lie in the inability to divine the future, but also in the inexactitude of definition, inherent when words stand for things. This created fertile soil for differing interpretations. The disconnect has become more obvious in the events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where the “common defense” has come to include terms such as “preventive” and “preemptive.” It is thus not surprising that over some 220 years, the policies, ambitions, and agendas of presidents wearing their commander in chief’s hats have tested, bent, and even broken the constraints prescribed in the language of the Constitution, if not also the intent of its authors.

A further complication lies in the definition of war. Former national security adviser Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft has said, “An act of war is not necessarily a war.”⁸ Perhaps so, but for those reeling from the sting of bombs or missiles, this may split an irrelevant hair.

The relationship in matters of war has been complicated by the natural expansion of government. In the eighteenth-century infant nation, the commander in chief relied on secretaries of the army and navy, a mere two or three generals and admirals, while the legislative branch operated with a minimum of committees. Today, the apex of the presidential pyramid descends through a secretary of defense backed up by a number of under-secretaries in the military along with a chief of staff for each of the armed forces, themselves under a chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In this infrastructure, those in uniform, while expected to carry out the policies of the commander in chief, can exercise a certain amount of independence, not only arguing with their bosses but also covertly or overtly (at the peril of their careers) with members of Congress. That body also now fields multiple committees and subcommittees to poke into the doings of the armed forces and foreign policies.

To stress an already delicate balance, the process and the deliberations today usually hinge on that vast netherworld known as intelligence. Many eras ago, information flowed from embassy contacts, commercial travelers, and even casual tourists. Not until World War II, with the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, did the United States systematically enter into the gathering of data about the military strength, political forces, and prime movers in other lands. Along with the CIA, the armed services themselves, the State Department, and other agencies began building up their own intelligence forces. Furthermore, the CIA has since the 1950s been more than just a collector of information; it has been “proactive,” funding and arming foes of unfriendly governments, destabilizing and even assisting in the overthrow of them, what could be construed as acts of war, if not actually war itself.

Intelligence has become the whipping boy for wartime failures, and not without justification. Errors of judgment committed because of missing or wrong information have left the landscape strewn with corpses. That holds for the debacle at Pearl Harbor, through Korea, Vietnam, and with the most recent struggles against terrorists and the twenty-first-century Iraq war.

In the eighteenth century we understood war as being conducted by organized armed forces. Since the twentieth century, however, another kind of war, that of guerrillas, combatants without uniforms, frequently sponsored by nations with their own agendas and movements lacking clearly defined home states, have shed blood around the world. To protect U.S. interests, but unwilling to openly contest those considered hostile, commanders in chief have increasingly resorted to covert actions. While handfuls of Americans, as members of intelligence services, have participated in some of these hidden wars, often the strategy has been to fund and arm friendly indigenous people. Under these circumstances, a president seemingly is not directing American armed forces. However, the law in the United States recognizes that hiring a person to injure or even kill another human being makes one an accomplice, as guilty as the individual who actually commits the deed. Therefore, the use of surrogates, whether Afghan warlords, Contras in Nicaragua, or loyalists in El Salvador, puts a president at war.

When he left office, George Washington warned against “foreign entanglements.” He believed it unnecessary to enter into alliances that could bring war because the huge oceans separating the United States from the existing powers limited American interests abroad. In the interdependent world of the twenty-first century, isolationism has lost credence. We belong to the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and the Organization of American States, to name but a few groups that influence decisions to make war and have encroached upon the original authority solely owned by Congress.

Still, when issues about war and peace arise, the specter of the Constitution hangs over the debate. Did those who drafted the Constitution and fought for its adoption know what they were about? In a landmark decision of 1952, Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson delved into the title of commander in chief. He wrote that the Constitution implies “something more than an empty title.” Just what that more amounts to, however, is vague. Jackson commented that the designation might be invoked in “support for any presidential action, internal or external, involving use of force, the idea being that it vests power to do anything, anywhere, that can be done with an army or navy.” Youngstown pivoted on the question of whether commander in chief Truman had the right to seize struck steel mills during a war (Korea). Jackson warned of “more sinister and alarming” possibilities through extrapolation of meaning to the commander-in-chief clause. He foresaw situations in which “a President whose conduct of foreign affairs is so largely uncontrolled, and often even is unknown, can vastly enlarge his mastery over the internal affairs of the country by his own commitment of the nation’s armed forces to some foreign venture.” Indeed, in the reign of George W. Bush, his administration legitimized the imprisonment of some suspected terrorists without the usual protections of habeas corpus or due process by dint of his status as commander in chief. It was also argued that it was within his power to order wiretaps that involved citizens inside the United States without warrants.

General Scowcroft remarked, “The founding fathers had it about right, but there is a lot of ambiguity.” The president has the right to veto legislation, requiring a two-thirds majority to override, but as Scowcroft pointed out, “Congress, with the power of the purse and the ability to cut off funding if they feel strongly enough, has the last word.”⁹ In theory that may stand, but as Americans have come to realize, once the men and women of the armed forces are under fire, stopping appropriations for war is an exceedingly hard political sell to those in the national legislature, as senators and representatives learned during the Vietnam War of the 1960s and ’70s and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Just as Justice Jackson suggested in 1952, commanders in chief have been able to thrust their armies, navies, and air forces in harm’s way with little restraint and often with the country and its elected representatives in the dark. In fact, although the United States through its armed forces has fired shots heard in various parts of the world dozens of times, committed deeds that could be construed as acts of war, and openly engaged in large-scale hostile engagements, Congress has declared war only five times—the War of 1812, the Mexican War in 1846, the Spanish-American War in 1898, World War I in 1917, and World War II in 1941. Yet the armed forces have been in harm’s way close to two hundred times. Historically, for the most part these have been deployed in small wars—the word “guerrilla” literally translates as “small war”—because of affronts to citizens, to aid U.S. commercial interests, and to gain territory as part of Manifest Destiny.

The erosion of Congress’s responsibilities markedly increased during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with full-scale wars in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq (twice). On a lesser scale, we have invaded Grenada, bombed Yugoslavia, and launched missiles and air attacks at targets in Lebanon, Libya, and Sudan. In addition, administrations have directed secret operations to overthrow unfriendly governments in Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, infringed upon the borders of sovereign nations with espionage ranging from old-fashioned human agents to spy-plane overflights, submarine listening posts, satellite eyes in space, and the sophisticated technology of electronics roaming the World Wide Web of communications.

In the post-World War II era, Truman chose not to ask for a resolution that approved his intervention in Korea. Congress tacitly accepted the president’s action by authorizing funds for military operations and extending the draft. That papered over a usurpation, occasioned by Truman’s deployment of the armed forces under the rubric of a “police action,” a wildly untenable label. Then there are instances such as that of President John F. Kennedy during the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, where he ordered a blockade and faced a potential shooting war. JFK had the Monroe Doctrine and a Congress that endorsed a policy designed to prevent by any means importation of weaponry into the Western Hemisphere by those hostile to the United States. Succeeding presidents have relied on congressional resolutions, and findings that authorize them to take action but not to declare war—Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, George H. W. Bush in Desert Storm, Bill Clinton in Bosnia and Kosovo, and George W. Bush in Iraq. Under Ronald Reagan, American forces overthrew the government of Grenada, a Caribbean island, without input from the legislative branch.

The contentious relationship between the commander in chief and Congress over the use of the military owes, as General Scowcroft remarked, much to the ambiguity of the Constitution. But that was not because those who drafted the document were careless or unknowing. As the history of the debates in the eighteenth century shows, they recognized the potential risks to a democracy if they did not get it right. How they decided on the language, how it has been interpreted, and how the world has evolved is crucial to the conduct of presidents at war and their partners in Congress.