notes to pages 22‒31 373leadership opportunity structures. See Stephen Skowronek, Th e Politics
Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993).- For a particularly careful account of several presidential decisions to go to
war, see Hess, Presidential Decisions for War. - James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolu-
tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), chap. 4. - Presidents may choose not to issue orders, preferring instead to make sug-
gestions to their military subordinates or to persuade through reasoned
discussion. But behind these alternatives lies the possibility of command
(and sanction for disobedience). Of course, orders are not necessarily
obeyed by military subordinates, and we should note that some wartime
presidents have been frustrated by compliance problems. Lincoln once
complained, “I am as powerless as any private citizen to shape the military
plans of the government.” Geoff rey Perret, Lincoln’s War: Th e Untold Story
of America’s Greatest President as Commander in Chief (New York: Random
House, 2004), 340. - David R. Mayhew, “Wars and American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 3
(September 2005): 473–93. - Seth Jones fi nds that governments prevail more often in insurgencies
than do rebels, but the longer a confl ict drags on the less likely it is that
the government side will prevail. See Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires ,
153–54. - Only George H. W. Bush in 1990–1991 encountered strong legislative
doubts about his plans to eject Hussein’s troops from Kuwait. Antiwar
legislators in 1991 displayed considerable backbone, questioning whether
military action should be postponed until economic sanctions and
diplomacy had been given every chance to compel Saddam Hussein to
withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Th e congressional resolution sup-
porting the use of force passed by only a narrow margin. Hess, Presiden-
tial Decisions for War , 190–94. - Rose, How Wars End , 4–5.
Chapter 1
- Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Gettysburg Pennsylvania,” in Lincoln,
Selected Speeches and Writings (New York: Vintage/Library of America,
1992), 405. - For an enumeration of his mistakes by sympathetic scholars, see James
M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
(New York: Penguin, 2008), 266–67. Recent critics go further: they see
Lincoln as reckless in his willingness to embrace war as a response to
secession and stress the sheer destructiveness of the confl ict. See William
Marvel, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (New York: Houghton Miffl in, 2006).