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From Pinstripe Wool to Ripstop Poplin: The US President, Symbolic Politics, and the Salute

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2010

THOMAS JAY NISLEY
THOMAS JAY NISLEY
Affiliation:
Department of International Studies, Southern Polytechnic State University. E-mail: tnisley@spsu.edu
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Abstract

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan began the tradition of returning military personnel's salutes. At his inauguration, President Barack Obama returned the salutes of the troops as they paraded by the reviewing stand. Some may suggest these actions are simply a sign of respect by Presidents for the service of the military. Nevertheless, we must also understand how Presidents have used military ritual and symbols to enhance their powers. By embracing military symbols, the President is transformed from a civilian to a military figure. This transformation diminishes Congress's ability to exercise its constitutional war power. Congress is less likely to challenge a President perceived as part of the military than one perceived as the civilian chief executive.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 2011, pp. 131 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

In response to a state of emergency declared in Pakistan, President George W. Bush pronounced the need to hold elections and declared that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf needed to take off his military uniform. Bush said that he told Musharraf, “You can't be the President and the head of the military at the same time.”Footnote 1 The irony of the President's statement is that Bush participated in a process that has transformed the president from a purely civilian to a military figure. The symbolic gesture associated with this transformation is the military salute.Footnote 2

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan began the tradition of returning military personnel's salutes. Presidents have also taken to wearing military jackets and flight suits when making addresses to gatherings of military personnel. At his inauguration, President Barack Obama returned the salutes of the troops as they paraded by the reviewing stand. The salute by the President has become such a commonplace routine that in his first flight on Marine One, the presidential helicopter, news reports made little of the salute and instead focussed on the addition of a presidential handshake.Footnote 3 Some may suggest that these actions are simply a sign of respect by Presidents for the service of the military. However, we must understand how Presidents have used military ritual and symbols to enhance their powers.

Scholars such as Andrew Bacevich have warned of a growing militarism within American society, “manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force.”Footnote 4 In this milieu, recent US Presidents have wrapped themselves in military raiment and mimicked military gestures such as the salute. The purpose of this paper is to examine the historical development of Presidents issuing salutes to military personnel and to understand the act in the context of the presidential and Congressional struggle for power. This paper begins with a discussion of civil–military relations in the United States and the role of the President as commander in chief. I also examine the struggle for power between the Congress and the President in relation to the war power. Next, I explore the concept of symbolic politics and discuss how we must understand the use of rituals for the enhancement of power. I examine how, beginning with President Reagan and continuing uninterrupted through President Obama, Presidents have changed the relationship between the President and the military, transforming the President from a civilian commander in chief ruling over the military to a military commander in chief ruling within the military. Presidents have used this symbolic transformation of the presidency to enhance their power over Congress regarding war power. The development of the presidential salute comes after Congress tried to reassert its war power in the post-Vietnam era with the War Powers Resolution (WPR) of 1973. Congress is less likely to challenge a President perceived as part of the military than one perceived as the civilian chief executive.

CIVIL–MILITARY RELATIONS AND THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF

Civilian control of the military is essential for a democracy to maintain its characteristics. “The military is, by necessity, among the least democratic institutions in human experience; martial customs and procedures clash by nature with individual freedom and civil liberty, the highest values in democratic societies.”Footnote 5 The closer the involvement of military forces in the governing process, the less likely that a state will maintain free institutions.

Civilian control is often used interchangeably with democratic control; however, this is not always the case. As Andrew Cottey and his colleagues correctly point out, the Soviet Union “retained quite strong civilian control over its armed forces, but in a fashion that could in no way be deemed democratic.”Footnote 6 One pillar of modern democratic theory is the ability of legislative bodies to constrain the actions of the executive. Therefore democratic control of the military must account for “the role of legislature/parliaments in exercising political control over the armed forces or wider civil society debate on the military and defense.”Footnote 7 As discussed below, democratic control of the military diminishes if civilian control of the military is limited to a single individual who is nominally a civilian and nominally the leader of the military.

A major concern of the founders of the United States when they created a national government under the US Constitution was to produce a strong executive branch to avoid the problems of governing under the Articles of Confederation, specifically in regard to providing defense against external threats. However, the founders worried that a powerful executive could overwhelm the legislative branch. Historically, a significant source of executive power is the ability to take a country to war. James Madison called war “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”Footnote 8 Consequently, the writers of the US Constitution gave the war power to Congress. According to Donald Snow and Eugene Brown, debate records from the constitutional convention reveal little discussion about the allocation of the power to take the country to war. “This reflects a broad consensus among the convention's delegates, nearly all of whom agreed that the executive must not have the power unilaterally to take the country into war.”Footnote 9 Nevertheless, the founders thought it necessary for the President to have the ability to respond in an emergency.

The US Constitution grants the President the ability to respond in an emergency through the commander-in-chief clause. Article II, section 2 of the US Constitution states that the “President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into actual Service of the United States.” At the founding of the Republic, the paucity of troops limited this presidential power of commander in chief. As Alexander Hamilton explained in the Federalist, No. 69, the President would have “only the occasional command of such part of the militia of the nation as by legislative provision may be called into actual service of the Union.”Footnote 10 Hamilton reminded his readers that the governors of several states also retained the power of commander in chief over their respective militias. The resources available limited the power of the President as commander in chief.

In the early days of the US, a major military operation would have required the mobilization of several state militias. Today, with the resources available, a President can fight a full-scale minor war entirely on his or her initiative. A full discussion of the implications of a large standing military force on civil–military relations and on the democratic control of the military is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, the existence of these capabilities has changed how recent American Presidents see their role as commander in chief.

CONGRESS, THE PRESIDENT AND THE WPR

Edward Corwin suggested that Congress and the President struggle for power to control foreign policy: “the power to determine the substantive content of American foreign policy is a divided power, with the lion's share falling usually to the President, though by no means always.”Footnote 11 The power to direct the control of military forces is no less a component of the struggle. One must understand the presidential salute as the latest manifestation of this struggle and a presidential reaction to the Congressional attempt to wrest control over the use of force back from the exclusive purview of the President.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. documents in his seminal work The Imperial Presidency the expansion of the presidential war power through the years, beginning in the nineteenth century with the enlargement of the theory of defensive war.Footnote 12 The second half of the twentieth century ushered in the age of presidential wars.Footnote 13 According to Schlesinger, “Nearly every President who extended the reach of the White House provoked a reaction toward a more restrictive theory of the Presidency, even if the reaction never quite cut presidential power back to its earlier level.”Footnote 14 After the long US military involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, Congress developed the War Powers Resolution (WPR) as means to constrain presidential wars.

The WPR (PL 93–148) was passed in 1973 over President Nixon's veto. The Act stipulated that the President must consult with Congress before committing troops into harm's way. Moreover, the President must inform and consult with Congress within forty-eight hours of the introduction of troops. Finally, the Act stipulated that the executive must remove troops within sixty days (or ninety days in special circumstances) if Congress has not declared war or approved action.Footnote 15 This Congressional initiative marked a major reversal of Congressional inaction over the previous decades. Since the end of World War II, Congress had given the President wide leeway in the commitment of military forces.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the number of militarized interstate disputes involving the United States increased compared to the decades before World War II.Footnote 16 For the most part, Congress allowed the President to act on his own, or essentially gave the president a blank check to do whatever he wished to do. In Korea, Truman sought no authorization from Congress and instead, with the encouragement of Secretary of State Acheson, relied on his power as commander in chief and the authorization of the UN Charter.Footnote 17 When Presidents sought authorization, Congress tended to grant them the authority to do whatever they deemed necessary. For example, in 1955, after Chinese troops captured a small island near the Tachens and appeared ready for an assault on the territory controlled by the government in Taiwan, President Eisenhower transmitted to Congress his “Formosa Resolution.” Both Houses of Congress overwhelmingly passed the resolution that authorized the President “to employ the armed forces of the United States as he deemed necessary in defense of Formosa.”Footnote 18 Although most members of Congress acquiesced to the President's request, one senator who opposed the resolution proclaimed it as “transferring the power to declare war from Congress to the executive.”Footnote 19 This pattern of congressional behavior was repeated with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized President Johnson's war in Vietnam.

Even after Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1971, President Nixon continued the prosecution of the war in Southeast Asia under the aegis of the presidential power of commander in chief. It is in this context that Congress passes the WPR. Although no President has publicly accepted the constitutionality of the resolution, initially Presidents tended to conform to its dictates. For example, President Ford reported the Mayaguez incident under the requirements of the WPR.Footnote 20 Neither Presidents Carter nor Reagan committed troops for long enough periods for the WPR to be relevant. David Auerswald and Peter Cowhey argue that the WPR has changed the process by which Congress challenges presidential use of force.Footnote 21 The WPR allows Congress to engage in “stage management” and allows the legislature to deal more effectively with collective-action problems. Auerswald and Cowhey suggest that Congress rarely uses the Act “because presidents tailor their behavior to abide by the Act's provisions.”Footnote 22 In the context of this resurgent Congress, Aaron Wildavsky's two-presidencies thesis, which argued that the President was powerful in foreign policy compared to domestic policy, was shown not to be relevant in the post-Vietnam era. With the end of the Cold War, even Wildavsky conceded that the thesis had its limits.Footnote 23 The end of the Cold War has heightened conflict between Congress and the President.Footnote 24 Partisanship in Congress is an important factor in determining support for presidential foreign policy.Footnote 25 Partisan influence even extends to the use of force.Footnote 26

Nevertheless, as Eileen Burgin demonstrates, the 1989 invasion of Panama marked the beginning of Congressional silence for presidential disregard of the WPR.Footnote 27 Moreover, since the attacks of 11 September 2001, Congress has reverted to its pattern of behavior before the WPR and has given Presidents wide latitude to use military force.Footnote 28 Some individual members of Congress have tried to invoke the WPR, but with no success.Footnote 29 How have Presidents been able to turn the resurgent Congress back to acquiescence? To understand this question one must examine the use of symbols in politics.

SYMBOLIC POLITICS AND PRESIDENTIAL SALUTES

How does one understand the significance of Presidents issuing salutes? The impact is not superficial, particularly as we find ourselves in an era where symbolism and discourse often hold sway over law, tradition, and reason in the application of authority.Footnote 30 The presidential salute is not an act that we can easily dismiss. Its symbolic relevance is more than a President showing support for the troops. The gesture in essence changes the relationship between the President and the military, the President and Congress, and the President and the citizenry. To understand symbolic exercises in politics, we must turn to the seminal work of Murray Edelman.

In The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Professor Edelman taught of symbols in politics. “Every symbol stands for something other than itself, and it also evokes an attitude, a set of impressions, or a pattern of events associated through time, through space, through logic, or through imagination with the symbol.”Footnote 31 Symbols exert powerful effects on human behavior. Emile Durkhiem said, “The soldier who dies for his flag, dies for his country; but as a matter of fact, in his own consciousness, it is the flag that has the first place.”Footnote 32 Many scholars referenced Edelman's work to understand the use of symbolic action in social movements.Footnote 33 Nevertheless, Edelman always emphasized the ability of the elite to manipulate symbols as a means to stir up or placate fears and generally to direct the feelings of the masses.Footnote 34

We must see the presidential salute to military personnel as a political act. “Political acts, speeches, and gestures involve mass audiences emotionally in politics while rendering them acquiescent to policy shifts through that very involvement.”Footnote 35 Presidents enhance their power over the military and over Congress through the ritual of saluting. The ritual involves the participants in a “common enterprise, calling their attention to their relatedness and joint interest in a compelling way.”Footnote 36 The use of the common gesture binds the military to the President and binds the President to the military. By participating intimately in the culture of the military, the President alters the role of commander in chief from that of a civilian to a military figure. This alteration exists not only in the minds of those observing the President, but can also exist in the mind of the President. Evidence supporting this statement can be found in a speech by President Bush to the Army cadets at the United States Military Academy, West Point. In what was his final speech to the cadets as President, Bush told his audience, “There are many honors that come with the presidency, but none higher than serving as Commander-in-Chief in the greatest armed forces on Earth.”Footnote 37 The operative word the President used was “in” instead of “of.” By using the word “in”, President Bush obviously sees the President as part of the US military, and not as a civilian.

With this manipulation of military symbols, the President elevates and enhances presidential power in military matters in relation to the civilian population and Congress. The highly public gesture of the President saluting military personnel creates the setting of military competency for the President. The setting helps legitimize an act against those who might “oppose or overturn it politically by establishing that it was not properly or appropriately motivated.”Footnote 38 Just as the judicial setting of a courtroom with the judge seated behind a high bench dressed in dark robes legitimizes confidence in the competence and judiciousness of the judicial system, a President standing erectly with his hand to his forehead as the troops march by legitimizes the decisions made by the President to use military force.

FROM PINSTRIPE WOOL TO RIPSTOP POPLIN

Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was not a highly militarized country. Presidents only had meager active military resources to command and relied on the citizens' militia in case of conflict. One clear exception is the American Civil War. Nevertheless, Lincoln fulfilled his constitutional role as the civilian commander in chief of the military without portraying himself as a military man.Footnote 39

Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over the largest standing military force the United States has ever seen, with more than 16 million troops in uniform. Like Lincoln before him, Roosevelt did not hesitate to exercise his authority over the military. He used his constitutional powers in several cases to overrule military leaders, including decisions on warplane production, military aid to Great Britain, and the sending of the Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor.Footnote 40 According to the Roosevelt biographer James MacGregor Burns, the President enthusiastically embraced his role as commander in chief and established a close rapport with his military chiefs.Footnote 41 Roosevelt was the first President since Lincoln to visit a combat zone.Footnote 42 Like Lincoln before him, Roosevelt did not wear military attire or adopt the ritual of the salute. Unlike his partner in the war, Winston Churchill, Roosevelt did not feel the need to don a uniform.Footnote 43

Following its victory in World War II, the United States emerged as the world's preeminent military and economic power. US Presidents found themselves leading a coalition of states countering a rival great power, the Soviet Union. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led the allied victory in the European theater, was elected President in 1952. At the time the United States was mired in a conflict on the Korean peninsula. Eisenhower, who had campaigned for President on the promise to end the war in Korea, traveled to South Korea as president-elect. Eisenhower wore a military cold-weather jacket while visiting the war zone in winter. Following this one event, Eisenhower never again wore military-style clothing, and he always wore a pinstripe suit or casual golfing apparel. Eisenhower was very sensitive to civil–military relations and understood the need for civilian control even in appearances.

Understandably, Eisenhower organized his presidency much as he had organized his military commands. Cabinet members were delegated significant authority. Nonetheless, Eisenhower was sensitive to the possible image of military influence in his administration. None of his former military deputies were considered for his staff.Footnote 44 Moreover, Eisenhower's chief of staff, the former New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams, “bore the deliberately nonmilitary title the assistant to the president.”Footnote 45 Eisenhower resisted any latent temptations to return the salute of military personnel who are required to salute the President. Subsequent Presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter, kept their hands by their sides when military personnel saluted.Footnote 46 This long-standing presidential practice ended with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Like many other young men during World War II, Ronald Reagan served in the military. Due to vision deficiencies, the military confined Reagan to stateside duties. Fitting with his talents as a movie actor, Reagan's assignment placed him in a unit that made training films. One of his first tasks was to recruit technicians and artists from the movie business to fill the ranks of the new unit. In short, Reagan spent his military service not with traditional military personnel, rather with the same people that had worked with him in Hollywood.Footnote 47

Ronald Reagan intentionally started a new tradition for Presidents, the returning of military personnel's salutes. Initially, when uniformed men and women saluted him, he would just nod, smile, and say hello. Reagan felt uncomfortable with this. In his autobiography Reagan relates,

Finally, one night when Nancy and I were attending a concert at the Marine Corps headquarters, I told the commandant of marines [sic], “I know it's customary for the president to receive these salutes, but I was once an officer and realized that you're not supposed to salute when you're in civilian clothes. I think there ought to be a regulation that the president could return a salute inasmuch as he is commander in chief and civilian clothes are his uniform.”Footnote 48

According to Reagan, the general told him that if he returned the salute, he did not think anyone would say anything to the President. The President was so excited about the new practice that he encouraged George Bush “to keep up the tradition.”Footnote 49 A major effort of President Reagan was to reinvigorate presidential power and US military preeminence in the post-Vietnam era. Reagan's use of the salute was part of this effort. Not only did Reagan's saluting enhance his standing with the military, the symbolic act of saluting also reinforced the President's role as commander in chief and strengthened presidential calls for the use of force.

President George H. W. Bush continued the emerging tradition established by Reagan and was often seen saluting the Marine guard positioned at the boarding ladder of the presidential helicopter.Footnote 50 Bush had served in the military during World War II and comfortably issued the hand gesture. President Clinton, who had never served in the military, had some early difficulty with the salute.

Clinton's early attempts at saluting the troops elicited disdain in the editorial pages.Footnote 51 These critiques were not for the practice of the salutes, rather for the technique, such as a limp wrist or a misplaced thumb. The journalist Maureen Dowd commented that Clinton's salute suggested his lack of comfort with the military. “Where there should have been snap, there was only chagrin.”Footnote 52 Instead of shunning the new tradition, Clinton embraced the practice of the salute. Perhaps he understood the power it imparted to the President. When Clinton decided to introduce ground troops into Bosnia in 1995, despite Congressional hostility to Clinton and to the policy, Congress failed to cut off funding for the troops or to invoke the WPR. In the end, all Congress did was to approve “a measure expressing opposition to the Clinton-inspired mission but support for the troops carrying it out.”Footnote 53 However, symbolically, a saluting President is one of the troops. Over the years Clinton's salute improved and, “Compared to military initiatives by Reagan and Bush, Clinton's eight years marked an extraordinary increase in the use of U.S. force against other countries.”Footnote 54

President George W. Bush embraced Reagan's practice fiercely, saluting at every opportunity. With US military forces engaged in combat operations in two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the engagement in a “global war on terrorism,” the Bush administration worked diligently to cast the President as the country's military leader. With the declared end of major combat operations in Iraq, President Bush committed the most dramatic symbolic act portraying the President as a military figure, when he landed on an aircraft carrier dressed in a military flight suit, giving the impression that he was prepared to fly the next combat mission.

The historian Garry Wills suggests that how we use the title “commander in chief” has changed. Whereas Lincoln called himself commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, today “[i]t is just ‘commander in chief,’ or even ‘commander in chief of the United States’”Footnote 55 This subtle change has major implications. The President is no longer the civilian commander of the military, rather the military commander of the entire country. James Pfiffner has even gone as far as to argue that the President as commander in chief is moving beyond the constitutional check of the US Congress.Footnote 56

CONCLUSION

The US Constitution gives the power to declare war exclusively to the legislative branch. Nevertheless, since 1950, US Presidents have consistently taken the initiative in leading the country to war, in what Louis Fisher has characterized as “presidential wars.” Since the US became the world's dominant power, it has engaged in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) at a higher rate than in any other period of US history (3·78 per year).Footnote 57 The imbroglio that was the Vietnam War provoked Congress to pass the WPR as a means to reinvigorate Congressional power over the use of force. Nevertheless, Presidents have adroitly manipulated the use of symbols, such as the salute, to enhance their powers as commander in chief and to undercut Congressional authority over the war power. After the invasion of Iraq, some have called for new legislation to engage Congress in the decision-making process of taking the country to war.

In 2008, James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher oversaw a commission to develop new national war powers. The commission recommended that in the first hundred days of the next presidential administration the President and Congress work to enact a War Powers Consultation Act. According to Baker and Christopher the new act should focus “on ensuring that Congress has an opportunity to consult meaningfully with the President about significant armed conflicts and that Congress expresses its views.”Footnote 58 Clearly, such a high-profile bipartisan commission suggests a concern among former policymakers about the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches regarding the war power. Nevertheless, if the President continues to portray himself as military commander in chief, new legislation may do little to resolve the imbalances between the branches.

A President portraying himself as part of the military makes it difficult for Congress to challenge the President on military matters. If Congress were to challenge the President or fail to support the President's policy, supporters of the President would portray such action as questioning the military. It is highly unlikely that the collective body of Congress can generate the political will to undertake such a challenge.

During the Cold War, the use of military force by the United States could be attributed to the geopolitical struggle with a rival great power. In the twenty years since the end of the Cold War, US behavior remains unchanged. Some have argued that “the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of more, rather than less, military activism by Washington.”Footnote 59 This military activism also pre-dates the 9/11 terrorist acts. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush sent the US military to invade Panama. A year later more than half a million troops were sent to the Persian Gulf to eject the Iraqi military from Kuwait. The Clinton administration was no less reticent to commit the US military into harm's way. During the Clinton administration, the intervention in Somalia, begun by Bush, continued and turned bloody. The US military went to Haiti to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Clinton also employed US air power against Iraq, Bosnia, and Serbia. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush sent the US military to invade and occupy Afghanistan and later Iraq. President Obama has pledged to remove the US military from Iraq, but has ordered additional troops to Afghanistan in an attempt to pacify that country and he has increased the use of drone attacks in Pakistan. President Obama has also fully embraced the symbolic action of saluting military personnel (and so too has Vice President Biden). One should not dismiss the power of the symbolic act in politics.

Of course, international conditions exist that will lead any state, even a democratic state, to act aggressively in world politics.Footnote 60 Nevertheless, the predilection of US policy to turn violent is only enhanced by the President being portrayed as part of the military. The constitutional structures fashioned by the founders of the United States to check the power of the executive in military affairs have crumbled. Today, the President commands the most powerful standing military forces in the world. The exercise of this power is not as the founders envisioned, with a civilian commander in chief sharing the power to use force with other civilian branches of government, specifically Congress. Symbolically, Presidents are a part of the military as they join in its rituals. This symbolic unity enhances presidential power in military affairs, giving greater credibility to the executive branch over the legislative branch in decisions to use force. With the President represented as the military commander in chief, Congress and the American people more willingly defer to presidential decisions to use military force.

Footnotes

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

References

1 George W. Bush, “President Bush Participates in Joint Press Availability with President Sarkozy of France,” available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/11 (accessed 8 Nov. 2007).

2 I thank JaeSun Riley for his research assistance, and I thank Marc G. Pufong and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

3 Jeff Zeleny, “Obama's First Ride on Marine One,” New York Times, 5 Feb. 2009.

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38 Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, 100.

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40 Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill: 1939–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1976), 184.

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42 Ibid., 316.

43 On one occasion the President can been seen in what could be described as a salute. While on an inspection tour at Fort Washington, New York, a photo shows Roosevelt standing in an open car and “saluting” troops in the distance. The President's salute is more a wave than a proper military salute. Roosevelt's gesture is clearly contrasted with that of the soldier standing to his left. The soldier's hand is in the correct form with the edge of the hand forward, the upper arm horizontal and the forearm inclined at an angle of forty-five degrees. In contrast, Roosevelt's hand is palm forward and almost parallel with his head and his little finger clearly juts out.

44 Steve Neal, The Eisenhowers: Reluctant Dynasty (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1978), 312.

45 Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 106.

46 The Army Officer's Guide declares that the “President of the United States, as commander-in-chief is saluted by Army personnel in uniform.” See Keith E. Bonn, Army Officer's Guide, 50th Edition (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2005), 22.

47 Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 95–99.

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54 Louis Fisher, “The War Power,” 14.

55 Gary Wills, “At Ease, Mr. President,” New York Times, 27 Jan. 2007.

56 See Pfiffner, James, “Constraining Executive Power: George W. Bush and the Constitution,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 38, 1 (March 2008), 123–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 An MID consists of 22 types of military act clustered into three broad categories: threat of force, display of force, and use of force. The data used in this paper is the version 2.10 and can be found at http://pss.la.psu.edu/MID_DATA.HTM. The authoritative documentation for this version of the MIDs dataset is Jones, Daniel M., Bremer, Stuart A., and Singer, J. David, “Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816–1992: Rationale, Coding Rules, and Empirical Patterns,” Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15, 2 (1996), 163–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 James A Baker III and Warren Christopher, co-chairs, National War Powers Commission Report, available at http://millercenter.org/dev/ci/system/application/views/_newwebsite/policy/commissions/warpowers/report.pdf (accessed 22 July 2008), 6.

59 Ted Galen Carpenter, Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America (Washington, DC: Cato Institute 2008), 1.

60 See Nisley, Thomas Jay, “The Pugnacious and the Pacific: Why Some Democracies Fight Wars,” International Politics, 45, 2 (March 2008), 168–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.