Lincoln, Churchill, Bush?

DURING his August vacation at his Texas ranch in 2002, George W. Bush was said to be spending the hours not spent cutting brush immersed in Eliot A. Cohen’s Supreme Command. The book presents an argument about the proper course of civil-military relations together with four case studies of the masters of wartime leadership: Lincoln, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Ben-Gurion. Whatever wisdom the president may have extracted from his studies, the effort suggests that, during the summer before the invasion of Iraq, he intuited the challenges he would face and set a high standard for meeting them.

Perhaps even this never-look-back man would acknowledge that he has fallen short of the bar he seemed to set. But a summary judgment of George W. Bush as supreme commander is less informative than an examination of the reasons things didn’t work out as planned. It is too early to undertake a thorough assessment of Bush’s performance, but perhaps we can begin to distinguish the troubles of the man from the troubles of his times.

About the Author

Thomas M. Donnelly

Mr. Donnelly is director of the Center for Defense Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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DURING his August vacation at his Texas ranch in 2002, George W. Bush was said to be spending the hours not spent cutting brush immersed in Eliot A. Cohen’s Supreme Command. The book presents an argument about the proper course of civil-military relations together with four case studies of the masters of wartime leadership: Lincoln, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Ben-Gurion. Whatever wisdom the president may have extracted from his studies, the effort suggests that, during the summer before the invasion of Iraq, he intuited the challenges he would face and set a high standard for meeting them.

Perhaps even this never-look-back man would acknowledge that he has fallen short of the bar he seemed to set. But a summary judgment of George W. Bush as supreme commander is less informative than an examination of the reasons things didn’t work out as planned. It is too early to undertake a thorough assessment of Bush’s performance, but perhaps we can begin to distinguish the troubles of the man from the troubles of his times.