The little procession—George Washington and two companions—that had left Mount Vernon without ceremony on the morning of April 16, 1789, had turned into a triumphal promenade of republican spirit. A people frustrated by years of war and uncertainty and hardship, a people starved for leadership and direction, citizens denied the power of directly choosing their leaders and often denied any vote at all—these persons were now voting with lungs and legs for their leader, a man on a white horse, a republican hero.
Washington had hoped for a subdued arrival in New York City, where his inauguration would take place. "No reception can be so congenial to my feelings," he had written in late March to the governor of New York, "as a quiet entry devoid of ceremony." But there would be no quiet entry. [More...]
Fellow Citizens of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years: a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my Country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens, a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with dispondence, one, who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpractised in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions, all I dare aver, is, that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of eve ry circumstance, by which it might be affected.
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Expressing his sympathy for the plight of veterans, he declared that it was simply unfair to add to the national debt for fewer than 5 million veterans at the expense of 110 million Americans; "whether inspired by grateful sentiment or political expediency," it would undermine the confidence on which the nation's credit was built and "establish the precedent of distributing public funds whenever the proposal and numbers affected make it seem politically appealing to do SO."22 The House overrode the veto. But the Senate sustained it. It was a bold stand by the president in an election year, and it hurt him politically in the short term. [More...]
With the exception of the iconic George Washington, Monroe, among the first half dozen American presidents, is set apart by his consistent lifelong concern for the security of the nation.
He witnessed the humiliation of the nation with the burning of the capital in 1814, and did all he could thereafter to prevent any such event in the future.
He consistently and persistently pursued expansion of fortifications and coastal defenses, placed U.S. garrisons in abandoned British posts in the original Northwest, extended a new network of outposts into the Louisiana Territory he had helped to acquire, and called on Congress, even in dire financial times, to maintain and expand the U.S. Army and Navy.
Most memorably, in 1823 he proclaimed principles that positioned the United States as the dominant power in the entire Western Hemisphere. Though a presidential statement of foreign policy principles and not a congressionally endorsed resolution authorizing presidential use of force, the Monroe Doctrine was a foundational statement of the United States' intention to play a wider role in the world. [More...]
Few things have done as much for naval aviation as putting one of the most popular actors in the business, Tom Cruise, on screen in the hottest airplane of the day, the F-14.
Can you believe 25 years have passed since the film Top Gun was released?
Those of us who went to TOPGUN, before the movie, thought the school was incredibly cool and we felt fortunate to go. But we sure didn’t expect anyone we knew to even come close to understanding what we were doing. After the movie though, all you had to do was say you went to TOPGUN, and people immediately thought more highly of you. [More...]
Enter to Win 1 of 5 Copies of Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders by Nathan Hodge.
In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with the shortcomings of "shock and awe," the U.S. military shifted its focus to "stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed.
Combining recent history and firsthand reporting, Armed Humanitarians traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. Following this extraordinary experiment in armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti, Nathan Hodge exposes the difficulties of translating these ambitious new theories into action.
Over the past decade, the United States has become more deeply involved in nation building than at any point since the Marshall Plan.
Iraq was the turning point.
Confronted with the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the early occupation, the military rediscovered the principles of population- centric counterinsurgency, an approach that translated in practice to armed social work. But the military establishment overcompensated. As the Pentagon took on a greater share of diplomatic and development work, foreign policy became dangerously out of balance. [More...]
The column continued its march to Lexington, but Percy could find no one to give him an idea of what was taking place to the northwest. It was not until he had marched through Menotomy (today called Arlington) that Percy “was informed that the Rebels had attacked His Majesty’s Troops, who were retiring, overpowered by numbers, greatly exhausted & fatigued, & having expended almost all their ammunition.”
Hearing that, Percy pushed the men on, “as fast as good order & not blowing the men would allow.” The 1st Battalion and the marines marched up the Lexington Road toward the town where the fighting had begun. It was around 2:00 P.M., as the grenadiers and light infantry staggered into Lexington from the northwest, that Percy’s column approached the town from the southeast. Mackenzie recalled, “We heard some straggling shots fired from about a mile in our front:—As we advanced we heard the firing plainer and more frequent.”
As the battalion approached Lexington, they could at last see the remains of the flank companies now all but running down the Lexington Road, pursued by a great crowd of militia. The gunfire was nearly continuous, and a cloud of gray smoke hung in the air and trailed behind the advancing troops. [More...]
In March 1775, representatives from Virginia's counties met to choose delegates to the Second Continental Congress, and once again they elected Washington, Peyton Randolph, Patrick Henry, and others. They also voted to prepare their colony to defend itself, heeding Henry's stirring call, "We must fight! Give me liberty or give me death!" Especially after the clash of British troops and American volunteers at Lexington and Concord in April, Americans indeed were experiencing new feelings of militant patriotism. "It is my full intention," Washington wrote to his brother Jack that month, "to devote my Life and Fortune in the cause we are engaged in, if need be."
"Colonel Washington appears at Congress in his uniform," noted John Adams, "and by his great experience and abilities in military matters, is of much service to us." In May 1775, Washington had taken to Philadelphia the old blue military uniform he had worn only once—for Peale's portrait—since the French and Indian War. Was it a calculated gesture? Always attentive to the importance of costume, did he wish to communicate a message of military experience and readiness? Neither an intellectual like John Adams nor an orator like Patrick Henry, Washington could offer the unique combination of his past military service, wealth, integrity, and good judgment. Even though he had not excelled during his years in uniform, he had come to understand logistics, strategy, discipline, and leadership. An aggressive, courageous man, he was, as he once said, "bent to arms." [More...]
From the spring of 1776, when he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Third Virginia Regiment at the age of seventeen, until near the close of 1781, when as a twenty-three-year-old colonel his duties ended, James Monroe was a military man. For virtually the entire first five years of his early adulthood, Monroe saw military service in the cause of the American Revolution.
Like Washington, but unlike John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison, Monroe was a military man before he was a diplomat or politician. And like Andrew Jackson and other military veterans to follow, Monroe viewed the future of the young republic through the lens of what today we would call defense or national security. The faint but lingering smell of gunpowder would cause him to be concerned with defining the nation's southern and western boundaries and its position in the Western Hemisphere. [More...]
Those who fought and suffered in Italy—that “tough old gut,” as Ernie Pyle called it—were left to extract from the bad time what redemption they could. “Few of us can ever conjure up any truly fond memories of the Italian campaign,” Pyle wrote in Brave Men in late 1944. “The enemy had been hard, and so had the elements. . . . There was little solace for those who had suffered, and none at all for those who had died, in trying to rationalize about why things had happened as they did.”
He continued:
I looked at it this way—if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives that winter we would save a half million lives in Europe—if those things were true, then it was best as it was. I wasn’t sure they were true. I only knew I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all.
Faith and imagination were required to elevate the Italian campaign, to see as the poet Richard Wilbur, a veteran of Cassino and Anzio, saw: “the dreamt land /Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.” Even Pyle, who knew better than most that “war isn’t romantic to the people in it,” sensed the sublime in moments “of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our fate.” [More...]
