Supreme Command; Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime
New York, NY: The Free Press, 2002. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xiv, 288, [2] pages. Inscribed and dated by the author on the front free endpaper. Inscription reads: Washington, DC, 13 June 2002. To Chuck Lane, With every best wish--Eliot A. Cohen. The book includes Preface, Acknowledgments, Notes, and Index. Chapters include The Soldier and the Statesman, Lincoln Sends a Letter, Clemenceau Pays a Visit, Churchill Asks a Question, Ben-Gurion Holds a Seminar, Leadership without Genius; The Unequal Dialogue, and an appendix on The Theory of Civilian Control. Eliot Asher Cohen (born April 3, 1956 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American political scientist. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. In 2019, Cohen was named the 9th Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, succeeding the former dean, Vali Nasr. Before his time as dean, he directed the Strategic Studies Program at SAIS. Cohen "is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field", according to international law scholar Ruth Wedgwood. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. In this book, Eliot Cohen examines four great democratic war statesmen--Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion--to reveal the surprising answer to the question of who should run the show, especially in times of war: the politicians. The generals may think they know how to win, but the statesmen are the ones who see the big picture. Derived from a Kirkus review: Strategy analyst Cohen challenges the view that wars are best fought by military technicians without civilian interference. Those who maintain that Vietnam would have been an American victory if only U. S. generals had not had their hands tied by desk jockeys back home will doubtless take issue with Cohen’s thesis, which argues that inflexible military professionalism was one factor in America’s defeat. Reinforcing (but also qualifying) the adage “War is too important to be left to the generals,” Cohen examines the history of military campaigns in which democratic governments managed their generals in the field. Among the most successful was Abraham Lincoln’s constant intervention in Union military strategy; rather than concentrate on capturing the Confederate capital of Richmond, as his generals wished, Lincoln insisted that the war be fought on the periphery of the South, steadily weakening the enemy by attrition. Cohen effectively demonstrates that the president “exercised a constant oversight of the war effort from beginning to end.” So did French leader Georges Clemenceau, who secured victory in WWI by balancing the competing demands of two very different generals, Pétain and Foch, and of independent-minded allies. So too did Israeli premier David Ben-Gurion, a gifted student of history who introduced civilian control (and guerrilla tactics) into the new nation’s army, making it something of an “organizational anomaly,” but a remarkably effective one. Although he appreciates professionalism and warns of the dangers of civilians without military experience being given too much managerial authority over affairs in the field, Cohen clearly endorses the idea of civilian control over those whose mission is to kill people and break things. Timely and provocative reading in a era of drum-beating. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Leadership, Soldiers, Statesmen, Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, David Ben-Gurion, Ulysses Grant, Samuel Huntington, Persian Gulf War, Haganah, Palmach, Edwin Stanton, Vietnam War
ISBN: 0743230493
[Book #79538]
Price: $65.00