American History Revised (38 page)

This breakdown in organization, caused by lack of focus and will, led the South to fail. For a simple example of the South’s inaction, consider what one field commander complained to General Robert E. Lee: “Ripley dislikes Pemberton, Pemberton dislikes Ripley, and everything is dysfunctional.” Surely one could never make such a comment about the North under Abraham Lincoln.

1868
The great Robert E. Lee, tall and handsome, from impeccable Virginia pedigree, brilliant student and superintendent at West Point, called by his commanding general Winfield Scott in the
Mexican War “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field,” the man Lincoln had once tried to hire as head of the Union Army. Turning down the post to join the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee became the only man in world history to be invited by both of two nations fighting each other to head their armies. Yet he was no George Washington or Ulysses Grant, able to slug it out in a long, difficult, and messy war. Lee was too patrician, too bookish, too proud.

The only way the South could have won the Civil War was to fight a defensive war on its own soil. In this it had significant advantages: better generals, home territory with readily available food and medical supplies, and a more powerful purpose for fighting a war (defending the homeland), whereas the North had an unpopular president, indecisive generals, draft riots, and vast territory to cover. The Confederacy, it is useful to remember, covered a huge area: 750,000 square miles—more than Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany combined. In wars of attrition—and that’s what the Civil War eventually turned out to be—the defender usually wins. It is a military axiom that the attacker needs three times as many soldiers as the defender (and five times as many if the enemy is strongly entrenched). The North had only slightly more troops than the South when they met head to head, clearly putting it at a disadvantage as an attacker. By playing smart defense, Lee would have repeated his one brilliant victory—Chancellorsville—where, despite being outnumbered two to one, he divided his army, outflanked the enemy, and delivered a smashing attack like Hannibal’s victory over the Romans at Cannae in 216 BC. Another battle or two like Chancellorsville, and the British would have entered the war in support of the Confederacy in 1863, Lincoln would have lost the 1864 election to McClellan, and the North would have asked for a truce.

Longstreet, Stuart, and other Southern generals wanted Lee to use his proven skill in outfoxing his Union counterparts: hunt and prey, retreat into the woods, and attack again (akin to George Washington’s strategy of “defensive maneuver”). But Lee felt such skirmishes were personally degrading. When he was assigned to the defense of Richmond and he started digging trenches, he was mocked by the Southern press as “the King of Spades.” A proud soldier from the old school, he was hurt by the insult and vowed to redeem his honor by fighting the enemy face to face on the open field. He was tired. He wanted to go for the big win, a decisive Napoleonic battle.

Its name: Gettysburg. When Lee pushed the enemy back on Day One, he continued to press for territory instead of disengaging so he could safely find the best high hill from which to taunt the enemy to initiate a suicidal attack. Willingly giving up hard-won territory was not a concept Lee liked. Instead he engaged in a
series of bloody confrontations, and on Day Three he launched a massive offensive across a long, open field that resulted in the obliteration of three days’ gains and, in the end, the entire war effort. He relied on “the close-order infantry charge, a method of attack developed in the era of the musket, a gun with an effective range of eighty yards … used against defenders armed with rifles, a far deadlier weapon with a range of four hundred yards.” In Pickett’s Charge, where fourteen thousand Confederate soldiers advanced into the fire of Union rifles, only half came back.

Lee’s problem, wrote the British military historian Sir Liddell Hart, was that he always went on the attack. A wiser course might have been to combine offensive strategy with defensive tactics, “to lure the Union armies into attacking under disadvantageous conditions.” He was a general who “would rather lose the war than his dignity.” Sure enough, he lost the war and preserved his dignity so well that he has gone down in history a martyr, our most overrated general.

Grant, a brutally honest and simple man, had every reason to embellish the skills of his adversary, if only to enhance his own reputation. Yet he did not. To the contrary, he was critical of Lee, and perfectly open about it: “I never ranked Lee as high as have some others,” he wrote. “Lee was a good man, a fair commander who had everything in his favor. He was a man who had had sunshine….Lee was of a slow, conservative, cautious nature, without imagination.”

A review of Lee’s previous military career is in order: how did he get to be a top general? Until 1861, Lee had had a disappointing career: other than a brilliant stint in the Mexican War, his thirty-two-year career in the army had gone nowhere, to the point where in 1858 he almost quit, he was so discouraged. Like Grant, he viewed his career as a failure. Only in 1861 was he finally promoted to colonel. For him then to get the astounding offer to head the Union army, bypassing numerous higher-ranking officers, was only because he was the protégé of General Winfield Scott. In turning it down, Lee committed a monumental blunder of the highest magnitude. When he went back to his mentor and fellow Virginian Winfield Scott to report his decision, Scott didn’t mince his words.

“You have made the greatest mistake in your life.”

Now look at what might have been on that fateful day when Lee turned down Lincoln’s offer. Suppose Lee (married to the daughter of George Washington’s adopted stepson) had followed the footsteps of his idol Washington and put his country ahead of his state. Suppose he had listened to Winfield Scott, also from Virginia. Suppose he’d had more loyalty to New York—where he went to school and lived for more of his adult life than in
Virginia. How different history would have been! General Robert E. Lee of the Union Army would have been excellent: he would have marshaled the North’s superior resources, and pursued the war so professionally that the North probably would have won it in two or three years, as everyone expected. He would have been blessed, as Grant said, in a situation where he had “sunshine.”

Not only was Lee in the wrong job (general for the South, not the North), he was in the wrong profession. Back in 1856 he had come out against slavery well before Lincoln did: “There are few in this enlightened age, who would not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.” To prove his point, he freed his slaves. Coming at a time when many Union generals owned slaves (until finally forbidden to do so by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1868), Lee’s act set an example for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 (which, by the way, only freed slaves in the South, not in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia). In 1870, several months before he died, he said:

Whereas Grant and Sherman had no compunction about laying waste to farms and doing harm to civilians standing in their way, Lee did. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he said, “otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” As his armies advanced northward and captured farms, he instructed his soldiers that whatever food they took from the farmers, they pay for it. He, not Grant, won the moral advantage recognized by history.

Had he been the Northern general, Lee—like George Washington, a Southerner presiding over a Northern country—would have been in a unique position to bridge the gap between the two sides and unify a war-torn nation. Worshipped by his men, he exuded calm leadership. Nominated for U.S. President in 1868, he would have made a far better president than his wartime opponent, Ulysses Grant. As it turned out, the bitterness of the defeated Southerners because of Grant’s and Sherman’s slash-and-burn methods resonated for a full century—a long time for America.

Theodore Roosevelt, certainly a serious student of history and able to see both sides, being a Northerner with a Southern mother, said Robert E. Lee was our greatest American. Winston Churchill, even more adept at history, said the same. So, too, did Eisenhower. In a 1954 speech to the Boy Scouts of America, President Eisenhower cited Lee as one of his heroes.

In 2003, bowing to political correctness, the Boy Scouts of America in central Virginia
removed Robert E. Lee from the boys’ badges and the regional council name. “It will help our minority recruiting,” said one Boy Scout Association officer. (Presumably he had never bothered to learn of Lee’s freeing his slaves or that Lee’s daughter in 1902 had been arrested for sitting with blacks on a Washington DC train.)

1941
For decades scholars have argued why the U.S. was so caught by surprise when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. While certainly there were many signals and mysterious messages that suggested such an attack was imminent, nobody could put the dots together. The prevalent thinking was that Isoroku Yamamoto, head admiral of the Japanese navy, would attack the Philippines first.

In any guessing game about an enemy’s intentions, it pays to “know thine enemy.” In Yamamoto, FDR and the American military had a unique opportunity—and they blew it, big time.

Curiously, Yamamoto had studied for two years at Harvard College. Had the White House done some serious background checking about his college days (and certainly FDR, himself a Harvard graduate, would have known how revealing it could be), it would have uncovered some interesting nuggets for a psychological profile. Classmates would have remembered Yamamoto well: a hard worker but not a grind, exceptionally curious and imaginative (“a big thinker”). When they introduced him to the game of poker, he became a fanatical poker player who would stay up all night, winning hand after hand. And what did he do with his poker winnings—lead the good life? No, not at all: he hitchhiked around the country during the summer, exploring America.

Clearly a most unusual young man. Years later, as a naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington DC, Yamamoto was asked by younger officers how best to spend their time in America. He told them, “Read a biography of Lincoln to better understand the country, and skip meals so as to have more funds for travel to see various states.” He also advised them not to speak any Japanese during their first six months in the United States.

During his stint in Washington, Yamamoto was well known to the U.S. Navy. A compulsive poker player, he became a regular in all-night poker games run by the U.S. military and diplomatic personnel. Spurred on by his victories, he developed contempt for the mental agility of his American naval opponents at the poker table. “The American navy,” he said, is nothing more than “a club for golfers and bridge players.”