Choosing War: Presidential Decisions in the Maine, Lusitania, and Panay Incidents
This is a timely volume to read as one witnesses the transition of power in Washington from one president to another and wonders about the nature, methodology, and style in decision-making that
a new president will bring to the White House. While there are many studies of presidential decision-making, there are few that focus in depth on how presidents have dealt with a range of naval crises and their differing contexts in both domestic politics and foreign relations.
One can think of a variety of incidents at sea in U.S. naval history that have created a foreign policy crisis, if not a war, but before the appearance of Douglas Peifer’s book, there has been no study to examine the nuances and differences that gave rise to one outcome or the other. Among the numerous choices available to study that range across two centuries, from the Quasi-War with France to the attack on the USS Cole (DDG-67) in 2000, the author of this book has chosen just three: the sinking of the USS Maine (ACR-1) in 1898, which did result in war; the sinking of the Royal Mail liner Lusitania, which certainly created a diplomatic crisis in 1915 and eventually contributed to U.S. entry in to war in 1917; and the Japanese attack on the USS Panay (PR-5) in 1937, which was settled through diplomacy without going to war.
In approaching his subject, Peifer admirably shows himself to be a careful analyst and researcher of both the documentary sources and the published literature on each of his three case studies. Drawn to examples in history that link the past to the present, particularly those with national security implications, he has skillfully deployed his experience to select examples that stimulate thinking about the complexity of maritime issues at the level of presidential decision-making. With the sensitivity of a good historian he is careful not to attempt to create testable suppositions and theories that are applicable in all cases as “lessons-learned,” but instead shows the much greater value to be found in careful historical study on separate and unique events within their own historical context and framework.
Inspired by Eliot Cohen’s admonition to develop a historical mindset that eschews misleading analogies, lessons learned, and theoretical generalizations, Peifer identifies the essential elements and contexts of these situations to better grasp and evaluate how past leaders reacted in crises. This is, he argues, the best way to equip ourselves “to think critically about appropriate responses if and when things go awry.”
Peifer’s choice of case studies was guided by the fact that there is a firm documentary basis for understanding these three examples of crisis decision-making. He has used to his advantage the fact that archival records, private diaries, and personal papers are all readily available and that the topics have been examined from different perspectives by several generations of scholars and commentators. He has looked at each event using the same analytical approach, with sections for each part that examine the incident, the broad context of the international scene, the immediate reaction in terms of the public, the press, and domestic politics. This is followed by an examination of the respective president’s decision and is followed by a concluding section on the aftermath, consequences, and reflections on each of the incidents.
In this very readable and highly valuable work, Peifer has made a major contribution to understanding three particular historical incidents, while also providing thoughtful conclusions about the importance of such historical study for decision-makers and analysts of current and future problems. First, he concludes that leaders in national security must anticipate the unexpected. All three incidents involved the sinking of ships and the loss of American lives, but they created reactions within their specific contexts that did not lead to identical conclusions and reactions. Second, it is extremely difficult to categorize naval incidents. No single analytical method is useful that does not obscure one or another factor critical to understanding. One can best grasp the range of issues, causes, possible responses, and outcomes involved if one studies several incidents in depth and in the context of their historical and geopolitical contexts. And finally, the context of situations overrides theory: “The particular is at least as important as the general.”
Ice Station Nautilus: A Novel
In his 2009 review for Naval History magazine, Rear Admiral William Holland wrote the following of Captain William Anderson’s book, The Ice Diaries: “At the heart of the tale are Anderson’s calm descriptions of penetrating ice barriers with only a few feet of distance above and below and of navigating in high latitudes where all directions are south. Those stories explain the problems for those who have never imagined them . . . [and] those who have not experienced these intense situations may have trouble appreciating the potential peril of the circumstances.” Add to the inherent peril of this formidable environment three Russian submarines bent on mischief, a rapidly assembled Russian ice station near a newly erected U.S. station, and a slew of Arctic-trained Russian special forces (Spetsnaz) facing a smaller number of Navy SEALs and also with malice in mind, and the reader of Commander Rick Campbell’s most recent novel, Ice Station Nautilus, can begin to appreciate the intensity of this well-crafted novel. Campbell has used his extensive experience as a career submariner and his vivid imagination to write a book that is difficult to put down.
The setting is a few years hence, shortly after an apparent, unspecified dust-up between the United States and China has concluded. It also takes place when the United States and Russia are in the midst of negotiating the successor to the old Strategic Nuclear Arms Treaty (START), which had stalled on the issue of verifying Navy-launched systems and missile warheads, specifically for Russia’s newest class of nuclear ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN), the Borey. The first of these SSBNs, the Yuri Dolgorukiy, is commencing deployment on its first operational patrol. In response, one of the U.S. Navy’s newest attack submarines, the North Dakota (SSN-784), has been assigned to trail and collect intelligence on the Dolgorukiy. It seems the latter might reveal something the Americans suspect that the Russians, we soon find at any cost, want to prevent the United States from discovering.
The Dolgorukiy proceeds north under the Arctic ice cap with the North Dakota dutifully following. After some cat-and mouse maneuvering, the two submarines accidently collide, and both incur major damage and are unable to proceed. The U.S. Navy soon determines that the North Dakota is disabled and cannot communicate and immediately initiates rescue and recovery operations that include establishing a temporary station on the polar ice cap above the sunken submarine. The Russians conclude that the Dolgorukiy also has been disabled and, learning of the American ice station, proceed to establish their own station nearby. Tensions between the two nations rapidly rise, and additional Russian and U.S. Navy SSNs arrive on the scene. Torpedoes are fired, and Navy SEALs and Spetsnaz forces are deployed to the scene, engaging in a series of maneuvers and deadly firefights. The Russians are intent on erasing any evidence of the incident, while the Americans are dedicated to saving their and the Russian submarines and crews, as well as discovering the Russians’ closely guarded secret.
In page after page the suspense builds, along with the reader’s desire to learn the outcome. Campbell describes well the advanced technology of systems that include sensors, weapons, command and control, and submarine rescue techniques and operations. (The latter is reminiscent of the 1939 rescue of the crew of the USS Squalus (SS-192), a newly built U.S. Navy submarine that sank in shallow waters off New Hampshire. The Squalus later was raised, repaired, refurbished, and renamed Sailfish [SS-192] to fight in the Pacific in World War II.) In the back of the book Campbell conveniently provides a list of every character’s name, along with his/her title and task.
Ice Station Nautilus follows the tradition of Tom Clancy’s thrilling novels, which kept readers on the edge of their seats, and is a worthy successor to Campbell’s earlier novels, The Trident Deception and Empire Rising. This book, in the face of the Arctic region’s increasing accessibility to Russian and North American economic and military activity, is thought provoking and is well-suited for experienced sailors as well as the general public.
Read Melville
By Captain William R. Bray, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Reading Herman Melville is not popular in today’s Navy, but it should be encouraged as part of a character development program. Because introspection helps the profession better police itself when things go awry, character development initiatives blend reading, thinking, discussion, and action. Reading well, as current Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson encourages, is not a luxury in helping Navy leaders cultivate a capacious self-awareness and sincere humility, empathy, and respect for fallibility.
Melville’s unquestioned place in the U.S. literary canon, his profound insight into the soul of a troubled nation in the mid-19th century, and his mastery of language are reasons enough for anyone to dive into the world of this author, but for the U.S. Navy professional, there are specific reasons for which Melville’s work should maintain a prominent place on the bookshelf.
Navy Experience
Melville served in the Navy, enlisting on 20 August 1843 in Maui. He had spent the previous three months working odd jobs there, following an adventurous two years in the South Pacific that included service on board three whalers (Acushnet, January 1841–July 1842, before deserting on the island of Nukuheva in the Marquesas; Lucy Ann in August 1842, participating in a mutiny that resulted in his being briefly jailed in British-controlled Tahiti; and the Charles & Henry, November 1842–April 1843).1 In the Navy, Melville served as an ordinary seaman on the frigate USS United States from August 1843 until October 1844, when he was discharged in Boston following service in the South Pacific and South Atlantic.
His naval service was the basis for the book White-Jacket (first published in 1850), and it provided Melville with the material for Billy Budd nearly 40 years later. The author dedicated that novel to Jack Chase, the real-life captain of the maintop in the United States with whom he had formed a deep friendship. Chase was an avid reader of the classics, and the two had long talks about literature while standing watches.2
Progressive Thinking
Diversity up and down the ranks, to ensure the Navy reflects the U.S. demographic, remains a forefront issue today. Melville challenged conventional 19th century views on race, class, and what it meant to be “civilized” (gender equality is the one theme that does not feature in his work). His first book, Typee, is a fictional account of his desertion in the Marquesas and ensuing weeks living among the natives of the Typee Valley. Published in 1846, it was a significant commercial success, as readers were fascinated with the story of two young, innocent American sailors discovering a lush carnal paradise as dangerous as it was alluring. The novel is also a subtle commentary on the sins of antebellum America. Research has shown that Melville heavily embellished his account to present a romanticized version of the “pre-civilized” world, but Typee nevertheless reveals a young writer’s enlightened sensitivity to modern society’s capacity to corrupt as well as refine. By 1850, Melville would be a “reformed, if not repentant, romantic, who saw the fragility as well as the deformity of culture.”3
The year 1850 was momentous in the author’s life. His discovery of Shakespeare in the late 1840s and newfound friendship with his western Massachusetts neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne were seminal events that accelerated his evolution from popular adventure writer. By summer he had finished a draft of a whaling novel (a manuscript that did not include the character Ahab), but his admiration for Hawthorne’s daring exploration of dark, controversial themes inspired a feverish rewrite of Moby Dick in the winter and spring of 1850–51.
Early in the novel in the third chapter, titled “The Spouter Inn,” Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, learns he must share a boarding room in New Bedford with a harpooner. He becomes terrified when this turns out to be a “savage” with the strangest customs. In a few short paragraphs after Ishmael and Queequeg meet, the narrator travels out of the darkness of prejudice to see Queequeg’s humanity. Melville makes clear that this is not a journey Ishmael would have made from listening only to Christian homilies of his day. He needed direct interaction with the strange foreigner. “I stood looking at him a moment,” says Ishmael after realizing Queequeg is at once kind and harmless. “What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”4
Moby Dick is much more than social criticism. It is a remarkable metaphysical exploration that is more about man against the universe than it is about man against society, according to Brown University’s Arnold Weinstein. Melville seems to insist that no exploration of that magnitude can honestly begin from a place of ignorance and bias. The reader must be set free of false assumptions about foreign cultures and customs to join the author in an even larger literary mission.
In Melville’s lifetime, Moby Dick was a grand failed experiment, too modern for readers of its time. It would not be recognized as a great work for nearly 70 years. Stung by the failure of his epic, Melville turned to serial publication in the mid 1850s and produced some of the greatest short fiction in U.S. literature. In 1855 he published the novella Benito Cereno, which would later be included in The Piazza Tales (1856).
In his copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Prudence,” next to the famous line “trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great,” Melville wrote in the margin, “God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to this.”5 The narrator in Benito Cereno, the optimistic and naïve U.S. merchant captain Amasa Delano, is that poor fellow. In a mere 85 pages, Melville uses the nightmare of slavery to not only continue his inquiry into man’s true nature, but also to quite presciently predict the coming reckoning. Set in 1799, the story is a masterful study in hubristic self-deception, where a man (or a society) convinced of his own righteousness and benevolence is incapable of seeing the world the way it actually is, indeed the very horror at the heart of what was considered to be civilization.
While anchored near Santa Maria island off Chile, Delano wakes one morning to discover the Spanish merchant ship San Dominick limping into the natural harbor. Eager to help a fellow mariner, he offers assistance to its captain, Benito Cereno. San Dominick is an African slaver and in terrible condition. Cereno explains he has already lost many crew and passengers to fierce weather and illness. What Delano eventually discovers, however, is that the tale about storm and sickness is a cover story. The San Dominick is experiencing a slave mutiny, and its captain is actually a prisoner.
What Delano cannot initially see is the same phenomenon that much of the United States in 1855 could not see: that of being a prisoner to the institutional evil of slavery, with bondage hurling it toward a violent cataclysm that might ultimately prove cathartic or might doom the great democratic experiment.
Why did Delano not more rapidly discern the clues before him? The character is not entirely unobservant, and throughout the story he senses that something is seriously amiss on board the San Dominick. At several points he fears that Cereno is actually a pirate setting a trap to rob his ship (the Bachelor’s Delight). But, ever the optimist, repeatedly Delano dismisses his own suspicions: “exerting his good nature to the utmost, insensibly he came to a compromise. ‘Yes, this is a strange craft; a strange history too, and strange folks onboard. But—nothing more.’”6 Insensibly, like his native America, Delano cannot not see the horror before him.
With the problem of racism still haunting U.S. society today, Navy personnel do well to question whether we really see things as they are, or only as we think or wish them to be. Melville says of Amasa Delano’s optimism about human nature: “Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.”7 Melville’s skepticism may be just enough to save us from the insanity of believing Emerson’s claim.
The Captain-Crew Relationship
For scholar Maxwell Geismar, Melville was a “pre-Freudian depth psychologist of fantastic proportions.” Indeed, Melville has a keen, penetrating eye for the complex psychological forces at work in the relationship between captain and crew. For naval officers today who aspire to ship command, a close reading of Melville’s depictions provides a rich complement to formal training.
Ahab is, of course, the most famous Melvillian captain. His crew is merely a vehicle to help him quench his irrational thirst for revenge against an animal, safety be damned. Long before Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, American literature had its mad commanding officer, a monomaniac. But in Ahab, Melville constructs a more complex character, one that also demands some measure of sympathy. Ahab is both a victim of an unfeeling world and its malevolent agent.
His psychological hold on the crew is magnetic. Ahab does not appear until the eponymous chapter 28, but the reader senses his presence long before that. He is the crew’s “supreme lord and dictator.”8 In chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” Ahab reveals that the true purpose of the voyage is to kill the white whale and gain for the captain some measure of universal justice. The commercial bottom line of a whaling voyage is a distant secondary objective. Ahab recognizes that only the first mate, Starbuck, can thwart his design. He takes his case straight to the crew in Starbuck’s presence, understanding that the men are not simply pragmatic creatures motivated by financial concerns. They are romantic adventurers who yearn for glory, prestige, and greatness—easy prey to enlist in Ahab’s unholy cause. Starbuck never has a chance.
For aspiring commanding officers and command master chiefs, at the very least chapter 36 should be required reading. It is a brilliant fictional depiction of how a captain’s almost irresistible, if brooding, charisma can hypnotize a crew into a dangerously blind obedience. Crew morale is always critically important, but it can also be manipulated to serve corrupt ends.
Toward the end of the novel before the final, catastrophic chase, in chapter 123, “The Musket,” the Pequod has just ridden out a typhoon south of Japan. Starbuck goes below to the captain’s cabin to report a fair wind. Ahab is fast asleep, and as Starbuck approaches he eyes his loaded muskets in a rack. “Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought.”9 In the ensuing Shakespearean soliloquy—and Shakespeare’s influence on Melville cannot be overstated—Starbuck struggles with the thought of assassinating Ahab to save the crew and himself; “Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel.”10 Having picked up one of the muskets to see if it was loaded, at the close of this magnificent scene, he puts it back in the rack. He cannot take up against his captain. Even now, when convinced Ahab is leading the crew to its doom, Starbuck cannot bring himself to betray a lifelong sacred respect for a captain’s authority.
British warship Captain Edward Fairfax Vere in Billy Budd is an entirely different creation than Ahab, but no less instructive for today’s naval professional. If Ahab is charismatic and irrational, Vere prides himself as a calm man of reason. We learn that while at sea, Vere spends a great deal of time reading, mostly authors who “like Montaigne, honestly and in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities.”11 In Vere, Melville satirizes the propensity for many leading 19th century thinkers to believe (or hope) that the rational, scientific approach can fully explain and temper human nature. Like Dostoyevsky, perhaps the ultimate 19th century rebel against the preposterous pretensions of “the rational man,” Melville has seen too much of human depravity and cruelty not to find such faith in science utterly ridiculous.
John Claggart, master-at-arms of HMS Indomitable, is the obvious villain of Billy Budd, intent on destroying the innocent, Christ-like sailor impressed from merchant service.12 But it is Vere and characters like him that should really be feared. Claggart represents clear evil; Vere is something much more dangerous and consequential. He knows that Budd is innocent and Claggart is lying, yet he allows Budd to hang. Vere is not a bad man. He is torn between a fatherly love of Billy and what he views as his duty. But ironically, the calm man of reason ultimately rejects putting Budd’s case to a more thorough, rational legal investigation ashore, instead succumbing quickly to his panicky fears of mutiny. Vere easily rationalizes the execution of an innocent man. It is legal, and therefore justifiable.
Melville hates most those rationalists, noble or criminal, who repress their own emotions and are hence unaware of them. True madmen, they give every appearance of decency, respectability, sobriety, “calm judgment”—and, in Vere’s case, of the class, property, and position to which Claggart aspires.13
Melville wrote Billy Budd at the end of the 1880s, near the end of his life. It was his only work of prose in more than 30 years and was not discovered until the 1920s. Given the horrors inflicted by highly civilized societies in the decades following his death in 1891, one could fairly claim that Melville’s Vere was a chilling prediction of the countless rationalizations of evil from all quarters of respectable society that allowed the unthinkable to occur in the heart of Europe and elsewhere.
Do leaders in today’s Navy at times not easily rationalize their way to doing the wrong thing? Leadership positions, particularly those as daunting as command at sea, inevitably place their inhabitants in the crucible. Reading Billy Budd today, an aspiring naval leader should be wary of rendering quick judgment of Vere. Be careful, Melville seems to warn: there are Veres everywhere, and one of them could be you. Literature will never give us a discrete answer as to how we should act in every situation. But it does help us think about and respect our own vulnerabilities.
An Abiding Prophet
In his lifetime, Herman Melville published all his fiction in 11 short years, from 1846 to 1857. By the 1860s he was already passing into obscurity. One can only imagine what the ensuing decades were like for him, working at the U.S. Customs House in New York City while trying to make ends meet. It would be three decades after his death before his writing would begin to be recognized for the great literature that it is. It remains important and relevant today, in particular for those who aspire to careers in a maritime service. While exploring the deepest mysteries of human nature, Melville forged a lasting bond between the U.S. maritime tradition and our never-ending, sentimental longing for answers to the hardest challenges of sea service leadership.
1. Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Random House, 2005), 41–50.
2. Ibid., 60.
3. Ibid., 312.
4. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Penguin, 2006), 26.
5. Robert Hendrickson, American Literary Anecdotes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 155.
6. Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Benito Cereno (Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 2004), 129.
7. Ibid., 91–92.
8. Melville, Moby Dick, 176.
9. Ibid., 558.
10. Ibid., 560.
11. Melville, Billy Budd and Benito Cereno, 23.
12. HMS Indomitable was the name Melville originally gave the British ship in Billy Budd. In later drafts he changed it to HMS Bellipotent. The Easton edition is based on Elizabeth Treeman’s re-edited version. The discovery of the Billy Budd manuscript and its subsequent editing history is a fascinating story in itself.
13. Maxwell Geismar, introduction to Billy Budd, in Melville, Billy Budd and Benito Cereno, xiii.