Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

by Maddow, Rachel

  The result was a twenty-six-minute short film, Rear Gunner, starring Burgess Meredith as milquetoast Kansas farm boy Pee Wee Williams and Ronald Reagan as an eagle-eye lieutenant who thought Private Pee Wee might have bigger things in store for him than aircraft maintenance. “Pee Wee,” Reagan asks, “how’d you like to go to gunnery school?” In short order, Pee Wee would be molded into an ice-veined, steel-eyed warrior—“one of aviation’s mightiest little men … a Galahad of gunnery”—and then shipped off to the Pacific to serve on the flight crew headed by that same eagle-eyed lieutenant. By the time the film ended, Pee Wee had won the Distinguished Service Medal, and potential recruits had been reminded that “the fire from your guns is the fire of freedom.”

  Rear Gunner worked on a variety of levels. American audiences knew nothing of Reagan’s trepidation about actual flying, but they’d seen his previous turns as a hero pilot in movies such as Secret Service of the Air, International Squadron, and Desperate Journey. And publicity for Rear Gunner noted that both Meredith and Reagan were active-duty lieutenants: “Perhaps they were more than acting their parts in the film—perhaps they were living them.”

  Reagan really never did more than act the part of a combat soldier. He spent his entire war at that Culver City back lot, with Hollywood’s once and future stars, directors, and producers, helping the 1,200-man-strong motion-picture unit churn out more than four hundred training, recruiting, or booster films. He never busted out to fly combat missions like Clark Gable or Jimmy Stewart; he never got a chance to fight the Japs like his actor friend Eddie Albert did. But Reagan took pride in the fact that he’d done what was asked of him, and he’d taken to heart one of Fum-Poo’s central missions: to keep reminding the folks at home (the ones who could buy the war bonds, for instance) that the United States and its military power was all that stood between our freedoms and the maniacal world-enslaving designs of Adolf Hitler and his Japanese allies. Nearly forty years later, he’d hauled himself into the White House by reminding the folks at home that US military might was all that stood between our freedoms and the maniacal world-enslaving designs of the Soviets and their energetic and ruthless agent in the Western Hemisphere, Fidel Castro.

  By the time Reagan became president he’d long since come to understand that good enemies (even welfare queens and tinhorn dictators) make good politics. The two previous Oval Office inhabitants had made plenty of hay with war metaphors, but they never really set up suitably threatening or concrete antagonists. Gerald Ford had declared war on the high cost of living (“Whip Inflation Now!”) … and lost the presidency. His successor, Jimmy Carter, had declared war on our national dependence on foreign oil. Carter’s renowned 1979 “malaise speech”—the one in which he never uttered the word “malaise”—is little remembered as what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation’s dire energy future. “Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977—never,” President Carter said in his nationally televised address to the nation. “The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade.” Carter was going to use all the weapons at his disposal: import quotas, public investment in coal, solar power and alternative fuel, and—drum-roll, please—“a bold conservation program” where “every act of energy conservation … is more than just common sense; I tell you it is an act of patriotism.” He tried to make it all sound as martial as possible: “Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war.… We must deal with the energy problem on a war footing … the moral equivalent of war … a fundamental threat to American democracy … the threat … the crisis … threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America … a clear and present danger to our nation.” Name-checking the world wars repeatedly, Carter declared that “energy … can also be the standard around which we rally!”

  But somehow Carter’s “battlefield of energy” never really filled up with eager American combatants. It just never felt like anybody was going to be draped in glory for taking public transportation, or carpooling, or turning down the thermostat and wearing a cardigan.

  Lost in President Carter’s ten-car pileup of war metaphors was a line that probably should have been his headline that night: that America was “a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world.” But Jimmy Carter did not try to sell that; instead, he declared a “war” on the energy crisis … and lost the presidency.

  The founders were onto something with their cautions about that whole military vainglory thing. There really is nothing that approaches war’s political potency. Carter proved this point in failure—shouting into the void that something other than a war, if maybe you called it a war, “can rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future, and give our nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose.” No, it can’t. Or at least, no, it hasn’t.

  In 1895, at a time when America had enjoyed peace for more than a generation, a fifty-five-year-old Massachusetts judge named Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. delivered a Memorial Day speech called “A Soldier’s Faith” that, as well as anything before or since, described Americans’ attraction to war. It’s not just the mistake of kings—even in a government that is by, for, and of the people, the people’s own understandable, emotional inclination to war can make it hard for a country to remain peaceable.

  “War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine.… In this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous, untamed streaming of the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger.” Thousands of citizens had assembled to hear Holmes’s Memorial Day oration, but the judge was speaking mainly for the benefit of the stooped and grizzled old soldiers in the crowd that day.

  More than thirty years earlier, Holmes had fought in the Civil War, in what remain, to this day, America’s most terrifying and costly battles. He was shot through the neck and left to die at Antietam, where nearly twenty thousand of his countrymen were killed or wounded in a single afternoon. Nearly two years later, he was still up and in the fight. In the Wilderness campaign, he saw a man instantaneously decapitated by flying shrapnel and noted in his diary the carnage at the Bloody Angle: “the dead of both sides lay piled in the trenches 5 or 6 deep—wounded often writhing under the superincumbent dead.” And only then, aged twenty-three years and two months, did Holmes finally choke on the blood. He walked away from that war before the outcome was decided, with little concern for which side won or lost. “I have felt for sometime,” he wrote to his parents in May 1864, “that I didn’t any longer believe in this being a duty.”

  But as he delivered “A Soldier’s Faith” thirty years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes had been enveloped by the practiced amnesia of a willful romantic. “It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds,” he said that day. “Sooner or later we fall, but meantime it is for us to fix our eyes upon the point to be stormed, and to get there if we can.” After walking away from his own war when he lost his sense of its purpose, decades later, Holmes made that purpose war itself; war, regardless of its cause, as its own reward, its own sublime virtue, an inevitable consequence simply of life as man, and man’s need for a reason to need one another. He continued:

  As long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is battle. I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedi
ence to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.…

  Perhaps it is not vain for us to tell the new generation what we learned in our day, and what we still believe. That the joy of life is living, is to put out all one’s powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacles overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier’s faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battlefield, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning; to love glory more than the temptations of wallowing ease.…

  We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.

  If the eighty years that followed Holmes’s ode to soldiering is any guide, Americans share his suspicion of peace and his conviction that battle can be a source of existential meaning and personal uplift. This country developed a serious war jones. Even a bookish and bespectacled Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson cheered “the young men who prefer dying in the ditches of the Philippines to spending their lives behind the counters of a dry-goods store in our eastern cities. I think I should prefer that myself.” We’d got in the habit of being at war, and not against some economic crisis, but real war—big, small, hot, cold, air, sea, or ground—and against real enemies. Sometimes they’d attacked us, and sometimes we’d gone out of our way to find them. It had got to the point that being “at peace everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might” was a condition to be downplayed, a losing political message, as if being at peace, in our “snug, over-safe corner of the world,” made us edgy, as if we no longer knew, absent an armed conflict, how to be our best selves.

  JOHN TRAVOLTA’S APPEARANCE IN AN ARMY PUBLIC SERVICE announcement—with production values on a par with early public-access cable television—is an oddly reassuring artifact from the ’70s, and a useful marker to show just how deeply Ronald Reagan changed the way Americans think about their military. Here was the not-yet-famous teenage Travolta, a fresh-faced if slightly confused-looking new recruit not long removed from the hallways of his New Jersey high school, pillow-lipped, goofily coiffed, weaponless, with his future star wattage tucked neatly into Army-issue olive drabs, receiving a ceremonial lei and a kiss on the cheek from a lovely and inviting Asian American woman. He was all smiles at the bargain the Army was offering him: free housing, thirty days of paid vacation (could be Hawaii!), a starting salary of $288 a month (“every month”), and, with so much paid for, enough cash left over to finance a new car.

  The military marketers had started retooling their sales pitch when the unspooling Vietnam disaster had convinced politicians the time had come to end the draft. The Army brass had to get people to volunteer for military service, and they found themselves thrown into the business of devising new ways to improve its sagging public image and to showcase its most alluring features to potential recruits—give it “some romantic appeal,” as old Hap Arnold used to say. The good news was that recruiters no longer had to trundle their reels of film around to high schools and colleges; they could get to the boys right in their own living rooms while they watched popular TV shows like Laugh-In, Bonanza, Mannix, and—“Here come da Judge! Here come da Judge!”—The Flip Wilson Show.

  “To achieve the goal of voluntary accessions, it will be necessary to greatly increase the reach and frequency of our advertising delivery, particularly against the prime target audience of young men,” the Army’s director of advertising and information confessed. “We must follow the lead of the razor blades, shaving creams, and automobiles, and buy the time necessary to deliver the audiences we need to reach.” Recruiting specialists found $10 million in the Army’s annual budget to begin selling itself in this mod new way, and handed the account to the venerable old agency N. W. Ayer & Son, who convinced the generals that they knew just how to talk to civilians. The officers in charge, however, were less than pleased when the admen pitched them the slogan “Today’s Army Wants to Join You.”

  “Do you have to say it that way?” said the Army chief of staff. The retired general in charge of the Defense Manpower Commission was more blunt: “God, I just wanted to vomit.” But they grudgingly signed off, surprising even some of the ad executives at Ayer.

  The “Today’s Army Wants to Join You” campaign flipped on its head the old ethos. The message was no longer about what you could do for Uncle Sam. Honor, Duty, Country? The fire from your guns is the fire of freedom? Whatever. Gunnery wasn’t a big part of the pitch. The Army was now selling all the wonderful ways Uncle Sam and the military could improve your life. And he wouldn’t even make you cut your hair that short. “We care more about how you think than how you cut your hair,” the Army reassured potential recruits. The initial test run of paid television advertising turned out to be a success—recruitment in the period jumped by four thousand over the previous year—but the ads also induced nausea in the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He cut off funding for the advertising campaign, and the Army fell back to its mainstays: public service announcements and print ads.

  Still, those print ads were stylish four-color magazine deals, featuring shirtless young men playing touch football on the beach, promising the opportunity to enlist with your buddies and go through basic training together … guaranteed in writing. “The Army wants to accommodate you. And the guys.” There were ads featuring the exotic emoluments of an extended European vacation: here you are in a green velvet jacket, high collar, long sideburns, sitting intime in a fashionable Parisian café with a beautiful blonde (could she be Swedish?), sporting a comely crocheted beret. This could be available to you from your posting with “one of seven crack outfits stationed in Germany … within easy reach of any free weekend, Italy and the Riviera are just a few hours away.… If you want to live and work where tourists only visit, drop us the coupon.”

  For teenagers less enticed by continental savoir faire, like the guys who might have gone in for the old G.I. Joe Adventure Team, there were the ads in Field & Stream (“You get 12 matches, a knife, some twine, and 3 days to enjoy yourself”) that made military service appear to be a minimally weaponized Boy Scout troop where you could design your own special training mission. “And if your unit commander likes the idea,” promised the Army, “we’ll even supply the equipment.”

  The Army’s new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure … but don’t worry, we’re not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn’t some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.

  Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 changed all that in a hurry. Although it’s laughable enough in retrospect to have been deliberately forgotten by a Reagan-worshipping country only one thin generation later, “Reagan did not forget the impact, especially among conservatives, of his stand on the Panama Canal,” William F. Buckley would write in The Reagan I Knew. Reagan knew provocations to American strength and pride (“Uncle Sam putting his tail between his legs and creeping away rather than face trouble”) could easily mow down commonsense arguments where national security was concerned. Revving the American fighting machine into high idle, he’d discovered by the time he entered the Oval Office, made very good politics. And he was trained to be good at it.

  During World War II,
the Army Air Corps film unit had not only shown the Gipper the importance of public relations, it had made him a practiced hand at stirring America’s martial moxie. That had been his part to play, and he was proud of it. He’d starred in the Fum-Poo training short Jap Zero (“How soon do I get a chance to knock one of ’em down?”). He’d narrated Target Tokyo, the film story of the bomber crews who flew, as he intoned, “almost halfway around the world, to return a visit that had been paid to Pearl Harbor three years before. Pearl Harbor was on their minds now: the two thousand American men dead. Hickam Field in flames … there were other things on their minds. There was a triumphant feeling of being first, the advance guard of a long procession of superforts that would smash Tokyo.” Here was a spokesman who could utter, without betraying a hint of self-consciousness, lines such as “It’s shooting like this that will knock them on their axis” or “The Japanese—a people we used to think of as small, dainty, polite, concerning themselves only with floral arrangements and rock gardens, and the cultivation of silk worms.”

  In his inaugural address in 1981, President Reagan got up and thrummed for all it was worth that old tried-and-not-quite-true Holmesian melody about duty and soldiering. He even made a point to buck tradition and make his speech from the back side of the Capitol Building, facing west, so that, near the end of that talk, he could steer the nation’s gaze toward

  the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row on row of simple white markers.… They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedoms. Each one of those markers is a monument to the kinds of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno … on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam. Under one such marker lies a young man—Martin Treptow—who left his job in a small-town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the Western Front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading “My Pledge,” he had written these words: “America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”