Sublime

Admiral King “listened with utmost enthusiasm,” wrote Captain James Doyle, Turner’s operations officer, when describing the UDT efforts at Flintlock. “Excellent,” King interrupted in the middle of Doyle’s briefing, “that business of the hydrographic survey at the first possible moment is a pet hobby of mine.” For Turner, however, a unit capable of

when the United States entered World War II, US Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall dismissed three-quarters of division and corps commanders and five hundred colonels during the course of the four-year conflict.8 However, by the time President Johnson was the commander in chief, the careful promotion system of Secretary of Defense Rober

Warner, John W., and Carl Levin. “Review of the Circumstances Surrounding the Ranger Raid on October 3–4, 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia.” Washington, DC: United States Senate, Committee on Armed Services, 1995.

As more than one observer has written, Eisenhower’s handling of the Quemoy-Matsu crisis was a tour de force. It was one of the great victories of his career, and the key had been his coolness under pressure—his calculated use of ambiguity and deception. Eisenhower was comfortable wrestling with uncertainty.

For Secretary Hurley, MacArthur, and George Moseley, the Bonus Army was a ragtag assortment of radicals, aliens, criminals, and social misfits led by a Bolshevik cadre intent on storming the American equivalent of the Winter Palace. For the Army’s high command, overthrow of the government lay just around the corner.57

It has short-circuited the normal mechanisms for how the United States as a nation goes to war, and turned the American president into the final arbiter of whether specific people in far-off lands live or die.