A First-Rate Madness (29 page)

Unlike Churchill, Chamberlain earned a reputation as a successful steward of the British economy; during a period of postwar prosperity, he helped Baldwin promote a “new Conservatism,” one that undercut the Labour Party's appeal by giving the working class progressive social reforms. By 1929, Chamberlain had led twenty-five reform laws to fruition. By 1931, when Labour's MacDonald took over the national unity government, Chamberlain was seen as indispensable. Remaining as chancellor of the Exchequer, he would guide Britain through the Great Depression.

 

 

THE CONTRAST BETWEEN Churchill's and Chamberlain's approach to Nazism is well known. As previously noted, Chamberlain wanted to establish personal relations with Hitler and rationally
convince
him of the need to avoid war. This was appeasement, the optimistic and misguided attempt to confront tyranny with logic: “If Germany could obtain her desiderata by peaceable methods there was no reason to suppose that she would reject such a procedure in favor of one based on violence.”

Had Chamberlain retired in 1937, people would have hailed him as a success. He wasn't a buffoon; he was the wrong kind of leader. Or perhaps more accurately, he was a good politician, but not a good leader. In peacetime he was perfect, but when war loomed ever larger he was horrendous. The two aspects may go together. Churchill, his opposite—terrible in peace, sublime in war—captured the truth in his generous eulogy at Chamberlain's funeral, which occurred in the darkest period of 1940, barely a year after the war had begun: “In one phase men might seem to have been right: in another they seem to have been wrong, and when the perspective of time lengthened, all stood in a different setting.”

Until Munich, their peers saw Churchill as unstable, and Chamberlain as eminently sane. The question then becomes: Was Churchill's insanity linked to his wisdom? Was Chamberlain's sanity linked to his blindness? Sanity prevented realistic assessment and rational decision making; one had to be somewhat depressed, a bit out of the mainstream, a contrarian rebel—as Churchill was—to see what was coming. In the storm of crisis, complete sanity can steer us astray, while some insanity brings us to port.

AS I MENTIONED in chapter 1, the American Civil War provides another close pairing—between William Sherman and George McClellan—whose divergent trajectories suggest the perils of sanity for leaders in crisis. As much as Sherman failed in peacetime, McClellan succeeded; as much as McClellan failed in war, Sherman triumphed. McClellan was second in his class at West Point, with hardly any demerits. Sherman was sixth in his class, but with many demerits. In the 1850s, the decade of Sherman's despondency, McClellan was the beau of the American military.

As with Sherman, we have important insights into McClellan's mental states based on near-daily letters to his wife. These letters weren't fully appreciated as a whole and made public until recent decades, and they provide a good record of his thoughts and emotions throughout much of his life. McClellan rarely, if ever, expressed any doubts about himself; his usual attitude was to blame others; he almost never expresses a hint of sadness or anything resembling depression of any kind. If sanity means not being mentally ill, and lacking anxiety and unhappiness, then George McClellan was an eminently sane man.

The son of a Philadelphia surgeon, raised in a wealthy family, McClellan entered the University of Pennsylvania at age thirteen and graduated in only two years. At fifteen he entered West Point, which waived its minimum age requirement of sixteen years. After years of private schooling among the elite in America's most prominent city, McClellan easily handled the academic work of West Point.

He served in the Mexican War under General Winfield Scott and Captain Robert E. Lee, and then, as a twenty-one-year-old veteran, returned to West Point as faculty, becoming a devotee of an unofficial postgraduate officers' course (called the “Napoleon Club”) on the recent Napoleonic conflicts. McClellan prepared two papers, one on the battle of Wagram, and a 111-page tome on the Russian campaign of 1812. The core of this Napoleonic teaching was the notion that wars were won by strategy (rapid marching and flanking movements) combined with massive direct assaults focused on the enemy at one point. In Napoleon's era, these tactics were needed partly because the main weapon of war, the musket, was inaccurate. Many soldiers had to line up side by side and shoot in the same direction if they had any hope of hitting a target; a single soldier could not aim and hit a specific target. Movements of masses of men, and concentration of those forces, were needed.

After the Crimean War of 1854, the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, sent McClellan (then age twenty-nine) and two senior West Point officers on a yearlong tour of Europe to study the conflict. The young McClellan had audiences with Napoleon III in Paris and Tsar Alexander II in Russia. He visited the Crimean battlefields and studied the siege of Sevastopol. He became fluent in French and German, taught himself Russian, and translated the first Russian military textbook into English. Yet his long military report did not recognize the key novelty of the Crimean War, soon to be tragically proven in the American Civil War: the rifle was now much more accurate than muskets had been a generation before. Soldiers could kill with much greater accuracy, making Napoleonic mass assaults nothing but scenes of slaughter. McClellan saw the immense losses in Russian assaults but did not appreciate their cause.

When McClellan returned to America, the booming railroad industry courted the young officer, offering him a far higher salary than the military. He became chief engineer and vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad. In 1857, when the financial crash ruined Sherman's banks, the railroad industry endured. By 1860, McClellan, then president of the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, was wealthy and had just married a high-society wife.

Unlike Sherman, McClellan's career before the war was a series of unbroken successes.

 

 

AFTER THE NORTHERN LOSS at Bull Run, McClellan, who had succeeded in skirmishes in friendly West Virginia against Robert E. Lee, was brought to Washington, promoted to major general, and given command of the main Union army force. At age thirty-four, he was second in rank to his old chief, the now aged General Scott. McClellan chalked up one more triumph, writing to Ellen, “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—therefore I won't be Dictator. Admirable self-denial.” He settled in a large house in Washington and shared formal dinners with dignitaries like Prince Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon III, with whom he conversed in fluent French.

General Scott had already prepared a war strategy: conduct a naval blockade of the South, preventing any imports or exports, thus weakening the Southern economy over time; focus military attack on control of the Mississippi River, attacking through Tennessee down through Georgia toward New Orleans, thereby dividing the South in two and further impairing any commerce within the region. Northern newspapers dubbed this the “Anaconda” plan, since Scott seemed to want to strangle the South from the periphery, like a snake, rather than to attack it at its heart. The Northern press preferred the latter approach, calling for a direct assault on Richmond, the Confederate capital.

The loss at Bull Run increased fears that Northern morale might not withstand the protracted conflict that Scott's strategy envisaged. When Lincoln asked him to provide his own plan of attack, McClellan came down strongly against Scott. Proposing a Napoleonic strategy of maneuver followed by direct assault, McClellan returned to what he had learned in West Point. He told Lincoln that the North needed to raise 500,000 troops, most of whom would be put under McClellan's command. With the center of operations in Virginia, the simple plan was to “crush the rebellion in one campaign” by taking the Southern capital, followed by South Carolina and Savannah, then moving through the deep South, and ending in New Orleans. In the face of Scott's resistance, McClellan argued, “Shall we crush the rebellion at one blow, terminate the war in one campaign, or shall we leave it as a legacy for our descendants?” All other military activity in the western regions of the South would be merely diversionary to the main focus on the eastern coast. One historian summarized this strategy: “One Napoleonic grand army, perfectly prepared; and one grand campaign, perfectly executed and with nothing left to chance, and the secession impulse would be crushed.”

Lincoln vacillated at first, partly in response to the opposition of Secretary of State Seward, before going with McClellan's plan. Referring to Seward, McClellan wrote his wife, “How does he think that I can save this country when stopped by General Scott—I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor!—that confounded old General always comes in the way—he is a perfect imbecile.” And again: “I am here in a terrible place—the enemy have 3 to 4 times my force—the President is an idiot, the old General in his dotage—he cannot or will not see the true state of affairs.”

McClellan, never having failed in anything, was certain he knew what to do.

 

 

HISTORY RECORDS MCCLELLAN to be a dismal failure; his defeats are rather commonplace in Civil War history. Here I will briefly summarize. When he first took command, he sought to flank Richmond by a sea route, moving troops down the Virginia coast to advance on the rebel capital from the east. In this Peninsular Campaign, he proved adept at moving and organizing troops, but he failed when the moment of battle came. His attacks were weak and ill-timed, easily repulsed by the new Southern leader, General Robert E. Lee. After a few losses, McClellan packed up and came back to Washington. Lee, in contrast, rapidly moved into counterattack mode, sending Stonewall Jackson up the Shenandoah Valley to threaten Washington, winning the Second Battle of Bull Run. McClellan, by then removed as commander, watched as new Union generals tried to directly attack Lee, losing repeatedly in the process (at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville). Lee, as usual, followed defensive victories with offensive attacks, entering Maryland in late 1862. Others having failed, Lincoln reluctantly reappointed McClellan to repulse Lee from the north. Luck gave McClellan Lee's written orders, which a Confederate officer had dropped and a Union soldier found, so McClellan knew exactly what Lee would do and when. Still, at the bloody one-day battle of Antietam, all McClellan could manage was a draw. Lee withdrew to Virginia, and Lincoln practically did somersaults trying to get McClellan to counterattack. The cautious general refused, and Lincoln fired him again, this time for good.

In all, McClellan rarely won a battle, infrequently attacked the enemy successfully, and barely held off Lee while on his own ground, with superior numbers and the enemy's written battle plan in hand.

Like many healthy failures (such as Richard Nixon, see below), McClellan commonly is judged, in retrospect, in unflattering terms: historians call him grandiose, paranoid, narcissistic. Like Nixon, McClellan may have approximated such epithets—like most healthy, normal people would in such circumstances—because he suffered from the hubris of power. He had not failed enough to realize that he was really not as great as everyone said he was. The historian James McPherson has documented McClellan's foibles well. For instance, early in the war, McClellan judged Lee as follows: “Cautious and weak under grave responsibility . . . likely to be timid and irresolute in action.” As McPherson points out, “A psychiatrist could make much of this statement, for it really described McClellan himself. It could not have been more wrong as a description of Lee.” I believe that McClellan was too healthy—not depressed enough (unlike Lee, who seems to have been dysthymic in his baseline personality) to be realistically accurate in such judgments.

McClellan started out as the new Napoleon; he ended as a comedic shadow of the tragic original, called “McNapoleon” by his detractors. The crisis and strain of war would prove his undoing. Until he was tested by battle, McClellan's claim on power went unchallenged. One is reminded of Plutarch's comment about a failed ancient ruler: had he not become king, no one would have doubted his fitness to rule.

 

 

THIS ANALYSIS of failed homoclite leaders is convincing, I hope, but I realize that some readers may be thinking of counterexamples: what about Reagan, Eisenhower, Truman? They all seemed levelheaded and relatively successful. I would say they were homoclites, but that their presidential successes did not include handling major crises, like World War II (almost over when Truman took office), or nuclear standoff (Reagan never faced a Cuban Missile Crisis), or the civil rights crisis (Eisenhower briefly intervened in Little Rock, and otherwise avoided conflict).