This thorough study examines the candidacy patterns of military veterans who have emerged as U.S. presidential candidates. Its approach juxtaposes candidates’ military records and candidacies by historical era. The identification of the varying eras—some producing many and others few veterans’ candidacies—is a distinctive contribution of the book.

Jeremy Teigen mentions in his introduction that an editor convinced him to adopt the book’s title, but that title is a bit of a misnomer. The work does not really address “why” veterans run. A thorough answer to that question would depend on personal interviews and documentary information on candidates’ decision processes that are not systematically available. Teigen here examines instead when and how veterans run for the presidency over the course of the nation’s history. He completes that task well in this book. His original proposed title, Tippecanoe and Hanoi Hilton Too, more memorable and certainly more comic, also would have missed the main focus of the work.

Chapter 2 comprises the analytical heart of the book. In it, Teigen presents the summary characteristics of veteran presidential candidates and their electoral fates in a lengthy table, 2.1 (pp. 13–15). He also sets forth analytical categories employed in subsequent chapters. He specifies five types of candidates: those who served as career generals, battlefield generals, combat veterans, common veterans, and nonveterans (p. 13). He also presents an original and useful categorization of historical areas that shaped the emergence or absence of veteran candidates in Table 2.2: the early republic (1789–1820), antebellum (1824–64), Civil War officers (1868–1900), a veteran hiatus (1904–48), the “greatest generation” (1952–90s), and the post-Vietnam era (1990s–present) (p. 45). The era typology is an innovative cynosure of the book. Fittingly, the author organizes subsequent chapters by era.

Teigen’s topic does not provide many opportunities for quantitative analysis, but he does provide such as is possible, and it serves largely as a supplement to an essentially qualitative, historical piece of research. In descriptive crosstabs, he mines the American National Election Studies beginning in 1952 (Eisenhower versus Stevenson) to analyze the importance of a candidate’s military record for respondents. More ambitious quantitative analysis resides in the book’s appendix, where Teigen adds a “candidate veteran” variable to two well-known models employing aggregate data to postdict presidential election results: Douglas Hibbs’s “Bread and Peace” model and Alan Abramowitz’s “Time for a Change” model, estimated for elections from 1948 to 2012. For both models, the “candidate’s military service does not make a good predictor of presidential election outcomes” (p. 252). An additional analysis of 2000–2014 congressional election models reveals that “none of the four models shows a systematic, measurable effect of military backgrounds” upon candidates’ electoral performance (p. 254).

If veteran status has no measurable effect on presidential results from 1948 to 2012 and congressional elections from 2000 to 2014, what is the importance of the book’s analysis? It lies in the areas of elite recruitment and political institutions. Teigen charts changes in the structure of the U.S. military that, over time, rearranged the political opportunities of veterans: “The entirely federalized, well-funded, apolitical hyperprofessional U.S. military of today has little resemblance to the militia-reliant, impoverished, hyperpartisan and poorly trained armed forces of the early American republic” (p. 241). Likewise, the changing presidential nomination process—from congressional “King Caucus” to machine-dominant nominating conventions to the open, participatory caucuses and primaries of today–also shaped the possibilities for veteran candidates. Teigen’s chapters on the pre-1900 linkages of wars, parties, and veteran candidates in particular add much to our understanding of early American political development.

Beyond elite recruitment and party processes, Teigen notes how the length and popularity of various wars shrank or expanded prospects for veteran candidates. Victorious Civil War veterans dominated presidential elections until the end of the nineteenth century, but veterans of the controversial Vietnam War contesting the presidency have faced a much more problematic electoral fate. Teigen summarizes wars’ political impact succinctly: “The popularity of a war can shape the pattern of veteran emergence into politics, and a war’s results shape its popularity” (p. 64). Which results matter? The author suggests that the war’s length, casualties, and outcome shape its subsequent political popularity. Recent wars have been longer, and casualty news arrives more quickly and vividly, making the Vietnam and Iraq conflicts more problematic incubators of presidential candidacies.

The book abounds with interesting historical nuggets about how veteran candidates employed their military records during presidential campaigns. Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign did not emphasize his long army career, probably because his central role in winning Word War II needed no embellishment. John Kennedy’s campaign heavily promoted his PT-109 war heroism, even issuing PT boat lapel pins. True to character, Lyndon Johnson consistently exaggerated his brief World War II service as a congressman, which yielded him a dubious Silver Star medal from “political general” Douglas MacArthur. As the decades passed, World War II experience received less mention by the campaigns of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush (despite Ford’s and Bush’s impressive combat records). Robert Dole’s use of his World War II experiences in 1996 probably underscored his advanced age to many voters.

Teigen concludes with an assessment of Donald Trump, who never served in the military and as a candidate audaciously criticized ex–prisoner of war Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for being captured by the Viet Cong. Like victorious generals Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, and Eisenhower, Trump was able to make a “lateral entry” into the White House despite a total lack of prior political officeholding. The author asks what made Trump “immune from damage” for such behavior (p. 234). He speculates that perhaps it was due to the passage of time since the Vietnam War, the unpleasant memories of that war, and the avalanche of free media coverage that helped to limit the impact of any particular remark from Trump.

Trump’s lateral entry may also indicate a new means of gaining a presidential nomination. Where once victorious generals were widely viewed as having proven themselves for office despite no prior political officeholding, it is now possible that well-known media celebrities enjoy a similar advantage. Celebrities get big media exposure and as outsiders can benefit from widespread public discontent with government, documented in Steven E. Schier and Todd E. Eberly, American Government and Popular Discontent (2013). Celebrities may well displace distinguished military veterans as credible political outsiders in the twenty-first century. Trump, despite his many prevarications, may have pioneered a new way to the presidency.

Teigan’s historical organization of the military–presidential institutional linkages across American history make this an important addition to the literature on American political development. Why Veterans Run is also a significant addition to the literature on civil–military relations established in prior works by Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Teigen has written an insightful and useful “big picture” analysis of linkages among the military, political parties, and the presidency across the nation’s history.