Customer Reviews

Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America's Future

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Perret does a fine job of showing how the war powers of congress have been gradually eroded to the point where the president may take the country to war at whim and not be held accountable. He shows how the trend actually began with Truman and continued with a the series of our "smaller" wars. Overall, a very good analysis. No one else has summed up this material quite as well.

I've just about finished a very uneven diatribe against American presidential power called "Commander-in-Chief," by Geoffrey Perret, an historian who wrote a good bio of U. S. Grant about 10 years ago. The basic premise of the new book is that Truman, Johnson, and Bush Two extended presidential power in unconstitutional ways to pursue wrongheaded wars, and they had help from Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush One. JFK, Ford, and Carter get somewhat of a pass, but not JFK's advisors, and certainly not his generals.
Much of Perret's prose is so vitrolic and sarcastic that it takes away from the strength of the arguments he's trying to put forward. His footnoting of his research is also uneven; a claim that a Kuwaiti diplomat's daughter gave perjured testimony to the U.S. Congress about butchered babies in the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, and that this testimony helped persuade Congress to vote for war powers to attack Iraq in Gulf One, is unsupported by any footnotes. The hell of it is that he's basically on the money in his assessments.
I'm too old and fixed in habit to stop reading and listening to historical and political pundits, but I would solemnly advise you not to bother to do so, and just simply vote against any politician (such as Rudi Giuliani) who suggests that going to war is going to solve our problems. As Perret points out, the U.S. must reassess the limits of its power, find alernative energy sources other than in the Mideast, and stop parading around as the toughest guy on the block. Otherwise, the chaos and anarchy created by our unwise actions will ultimately combine to make us defeat ourselves.

COMMANDER IN CHIEF: HOW TRUMAN, JOHNSON, AND BUSH TURNED A PRESIDENTIAL POWER INTO A THREAT TO AMERICA'S FUTURE is a powerful history linking expanding presidential powers to unwinnable wars. The three selected presidents profiled here each share the attribute of confronting wars that no American force could win. How they reacted would change the shape of politics, executive powers and freedoms in America, making COMMANDER IN CHIEF a top recommendation above the usual military library. Public libraries also will find the blend of military history and biography, with its focus on civil liberties, to be essential reading.

If you believe that the result of the Korean,Vietnam and current war in Iraq have permanetly harmed this nation and benfitted China then this book is for you. Perret trace the origins of the cold war and although condems Stalin's brutalty chareterizes the reponse of the Soviet Union and Mao as reasonable.

Perret traces the cold war to Gerald Ford and manages to only praise Kennedy's handing. He calls Nixon a mad man but the sub title doesn't mention him. He barely mentions Carter or Reagen which is suprising considering how even liberal historians give Reagen some credit for ending the cold war.

The last one third of the book descends into an anti Bush diatribe. Any pretension about being an even handed historian from a liberal bent are disgarded and every emotional /charge is made agaisnt GW Bush from calling him an action figure to a draft dodger drug user.He details Bush's alleged evil deeds such as signing statemnts. There appears to be factual errors in this part of the book but to detail them is beyond my responsibilty (much like the writer's I suppose). Perret inadvertedly makes Bush's arguments that the jihadists will follow us back to the US. Isn't it the Republican argument that it is better to fight them in Bagdad than in the streets of New York ?

It is said that those who do not learn the mistakes of the past are doomed to relieve them. However Perret stands this on its end by weaving history to fit his conclusions about the present.

I gave this three stars for the insignt one gets from the first half of the book but the second part should have been written twenty years form now when emotions cool .