Commentary by Roger Martin Martin writes about research at KU for Kansas media and in a Web zine. Contact Martin at rmartin@kucr.ukans.edu or (785) 864-7239. Martin also can be heard on KANU 91.5 FM public radio Archives More articles by Roger Martin Subscribe now to receive KU News by email

Historian says great wartime presidents exhibit 'ruthlessness'

by Roger Martin

As Richard Norton Smith tells it, there was this smug matron from Beacon Hill schmoozing President Calvin Coolidge. She shook his hand to death and gushed, "Oh, Mr. President, I'm from Boston."

"Yep," Coolidge says, "and you'll never get over it."

Smith is the new chief of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. When it comes to presidents, he can tell stories like that one all day.

He's a Harvard magna cum laude, has directed four presidential museums -- and has a dry wit to boot.

For example, on the Jim Lehrer News Hour late last year he was talking about the abridgement of civil rights during World War I. Journalists were herded around by a Committee on Public Information, and historians were pressured to write propaganda.

"About the only people who were liberated," Smith said, "were women. Woodrow Wilson undertook a campaign to collect scrap metal, and so women were liberated from the steel corset. The result was that we built three battleships."

In my view, a sense of humor is a good thing in a presidential historian. It's fine to honor our presidents for taking on a bruising job -- and we'll do that next Monday on Presidents' Day -- but we shouldn't confuse them with God.

Maybe that belief explains why my ears perked up during the NewsHour interview when Smith said that the great presidential war leaders have "a touch of creative ruthlessness in them."

When I called him about this, he said he was thinking of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

He said, "Because Lincoln was willing to suspend one sentence in the Constitution, we have the luxury today to sit around and debate the excesses of presidents in wartime."

And what sentence was that, Dr. Smith?

"The one about habeas corpus," he said.

Habeas corpus, in case you missed civics class, protects Americans from groundless arrest. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus so he could arrest 31 Maryland legislators without any real grounds.

"That was half the legislature," Smith said, "so then it couldn't vote to secede. If it hadn't been for Lincoln's ruthlessness, the luxury to debate the issue of presidential power in wartime today might not be ours."

Roosevelt's ruthelessness involved permitting secret military tribunals that led to the execution of some Nazi agents. Roosevelt also considered closing down the Chicago Tribune after a reporter wrote a story that, when read carefully, showed we had cracked secret Japanese codes.

But Roosevelt's attorney general talked him out of that idea.

In defense of Roosevelt, Smith says, "This is the man who saved capitalism from itself."

Presidents aren't always irreproachably moral, Smith said, or politically correct. Sometimes, as Coolidge proved, they're not even nice.

No, they're not gods, but there's an upside to that: Given their frailties, they'd have a tough time bringing down the republic.