Fighting Men.

• Author: Parker, Geoffrey
• Position: Books

Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 288 pp., $25.

"THE DIFFICULTIES writers have in putting themselves in the place of a wartime political leader who bears manifold responsibilities and carries stresses that they have never borne", writes Eliot Cohen in Supreme Command,

is the greatest obstacle to sound historical judgment on wartime statesmanship. Indeed, even the immediate subordinates of the man at the top only dimly understand, much less share, the acute pressures or the perspectives of a prime minister or a president.

Despite this important disclaimer, no one is better qualified than Cohen to write about political leadership in wartime. He has military experience and has taught at a service academy; he has read and written extensively about war; he is a member of the Defense Policy Board, advising the Secretary of Defense; and he headed the team of scholars that produced the influential five-volume Gulf War Air Power Survey (1993). This distinguished career helps to explain the outstanding quality of this, his latest book.

Cohen begins by outlining what he calls the "normal theory of civil-military relations", advanced by his mentor at Harvard, Samuel P. Huntington, "which holds that the healthiest and most effective form of civilian control of the military is that which maximizes professionalism by isolating soldiers from politics, and giving them as free a hand as possible in military matters." He then devotes a chapter each to four outstanding wartime leaders who repeatedly violated this norm--Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion--and to those who have led the United States in war since 1965, in a chapter aptly entitled "Leadership without Genius." His final chapter, "The Unequal Dialogue", draws pointed conclusions for those who exercise and study wartime leadership today, with an "appendix" that refutes Huntington's "normal theory" in more detail. He offers not merely an historical analysis but a study of issues that remain alive to this day", and to illuminate them Cohen deploys an i mpressive range of primary and secondary sources in English, French, German and Hebrew.

A PASSAGE from John Nicholay an John Hay, secretaries to Abraham Lincoln, brings Cohen's chapter on "the greatest of American war presidents" swiftly to its major themes:

Military writers love to fight over the campaigns of history exclusively by the rules of the professional chess-board, always subordinating, often totally ignoring, the element of politics. This is a radical error. Every war is begun, dominated, and ended by political considerations. . . . War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseparable and interdependent; and to talk of military operations without the direction and interference of an administration is as absurd as to plan a campaign without recruits, pay, or rations.

Cohen agrees, and his detailed analysis of Lincoln's "direction and interference" helps to explain how his administration "dominated" the war it waged. First, the President solicited advice from many quarters. He consulted junior officers and retired generals, both in writing and on his personal visits to the front. Second, he regularly spent time with his generals. (Grant passed the first week of August 1864 in Washington being briefed by the President.) Third, from March 1863 onward (if not before) Lincoln sent a confident, Charles A. Dana (formerly assistant managing editor of the New York Tribune and later Assistant Secretary of War), to report regularly on the morale and...