March 1, 2005

Effective wartime presidents are generalissimos, commanders-in-chiefs wielding military power to achieve historically monumental strategic ends; visionaries who shape and mold events through bold political and military action. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, America’s two greatest wartime Presidents, served the nation’s best interests, forfeiting contemporary public approval to the judgment of history. President George W. Bush also qualifies as one of the greats.

Abraham Lincoln led the nation through its greatest peril. Following Lincoln’s election in 1860, Southern secessionists mistakenly believed they had a constitutional right to secede and that the Federal government lacked the means or will to stop them. Lincoln, a country lawyer whose qualifications for wartime leadership paled next to those of his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, nevertheless proved vastly more effective as a wartime President. Lincoln, initially without Congressional authorization, raised Union armies, blockaded Southern ports and used his authority to silence criticism. Understanding the Confederacy needed military forces to prevail, Lincoln saw Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia as a greater threat than Richmond’s ineffective government. Accordingly, Generalissimo Lincoln appointed and fired generals until he discovered U.S. Grant who understood, as Lincoln did, that annihilating Lee’s army was essential to victory. He also knew preserving the Union meant crushing Rebel morale. So while Grant obliterated Lee’s armies, Lincoln loosed William Tecumseh Sherman “to make the war odious to the South” with massive raids through Georgia and Alabama and into the Carolinas. Lincoln is the nation’s greatest wartime president.

Before becoming Commander-in-Chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s only military experience was as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. From 1933 to 1940, with the economy faltering and war clouds gathering abroad, Roosevelt propounded the New Deal to provide government policies and bureaucracies appropriate for an Industrial Age economy. Thus the United States became the “Arsenal of Democracy” to overwhelm the Axis powers in World War II. Internationally, despite persistent isolationist sentiment, Generalissimo Roosevelt pushed the Lend Lease Act through Congress and, in 1940, boldly moved against German U-boats to prepare the nation for its decisive role in the coming conflict. His vision for a postwar international environment in which the United Nations, supported by US military power, would maintain world peace set the political aegis beneath which architects of containment devised strategies that bound Soviet power until Communism’s inherent contradictions tossed the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history. Historians judge Roosevelt the nation’s second greatest wartime president.