Servant of a theory

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman’s August 1914. As President George W. Bush prepares for a second Gulf war, he apparently is reading Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command.

Kennedy would have had more fun. Tuchman is a better read than Cohen. She also advances what proved in the circumstances to be important advice: leave the subordinates to deal with the telegrams while the boss keeps a clear head to decide for peace or war. Curiously, the episode itself produced a book still eminently valuable to a statesman in crisis, Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days. It tells how Bobby, as chairman of the Executive Committee, spared his brother Jack the confusions that helped to drive Europe into the first world war.

There is a strong case for arguing that George W. would be better off with Thirteen Days than with Supreme Command. Bobby’s account is grippingly hands-on. If evidence is wanted of just how wet a professional diplomat and how perversely irrational a single-service commander can be, his depiction of the moral collapse of Dean Rusk and the Genghis Khan-like bloodlust of Curtis LeMay tells all a reader needs to know.

Eliot Cohen’s account of how four civilian supreme commanders – Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, Ben Gurion – dealt with the issue of national survival is not hands-on. It is heavily documentary. That is not the author’s fault, given his choice of subject. He was not alive during the American Civil War or the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, not in Britain while it ‘stood alone’, not in Israel during the War of Independence. Moreover, his choice of subjects is good, at least in the case of Lincoln, Churchill and Ben Gurion. Clemenceau is less good. The episode Cohen chooses to examine, the dispute between him and Foch over the settlement of the Rhine frontier, was not really a military crisis.