c onclusion 343operations in Vietnam. Th ese yielded casualties for no gain. He was
much more deeply involved in supervising air operations, with no
better results. Nixon involved himself episodically (one might say,
impulsively) in military matters when he wanted to demonstrate his
toughness to the North Vietnamese, interventions that failed to produce
the diplomatic breakthroughs he desired. American forces pursued a
coherent and eff ective counterinsurgency campaign during the Nixon
years, but this was done with minimal White House intervention, other
than occasional directives to pursue ill-considered operations such as
the Cambodia (1970) and Laos (1971) incursions. George W. Bush del-
egated responsibility for the Iraq invasion and its aftermath to his sec-
retary of defense. Rumsfeld played a very active role in planning the
invasion, then left it to generals at CENTCOM and in Iraq to deal
with the worsening insurgency. Rumsfeld’s detachment represented a
variation on the objective control approach that disdains microman-
aging military operations. When disaster loomed in late 2006, Bush
himself briefl y exercised active direction of the war eff ort. He then
returned to his preferred style of leadership-via-delegation, this time
entrusting full responsibility to his military commander in Iraq with
better results.
Two conclusions emerge from this very mixed record of wartime
military leadership. First, presidents seek to avoid the errors they believe
their wartime predecessors have committed but often draw questionable
conclusions. Convinced that Lincoln had been too meddlesome,
Wilson went to the opposite extreme. But he had misread Lincoln’s
record, ignoring the last eighteen months of the Civil War; even where
the earlier years of that confl ict are concerned, it is hard to maintain
that Lincoln would have done better by leaving McClellan and
company to their own devices. Similarly, Bush felt Johnson had been
overly involved in Vietnam military decisions and decided to refrain
from questioning how his military commanders were addressing the
worsening insurgency in Iraq. Here, too, a president misconstrued the
historical record. Johnson had practiced minimal direction of the
ground war with results that should have sobered any later president
facing a serious counterinsurgency military challenge.
Second, focusing on how actively a president oversees military
matters seems misplaced. No approach ensures that a president will