Larry Schweikart - Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and Their War with the Swamp

Also by Larry Schweikart

Reagan: The American President

Published by Bombardier Books

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-63758-188-9

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-189-6

Dragonslayers:

Six Presidents and Their War with the Swamp

2022 by Larry Schweikart

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Tiffani Shea

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

To the imprisoned martyrs of Patriot Day, January 6, 2021, who reminded us that the US Congress still is the Peoples House, if only for a few hours.

Contents

When I first started this project, I thought I had six themes, all bound by a common concept of the Swamp. Nevertheless, I considered these largely separate and distinct topics. As I delved into the research, it became immediately clear that all six of these Swamp-related issues were intertwined. Slavery had been protected by the Spoils System, which became the target of reformers in the late 1800sthe same reformers who set their sights on the trusts. By the end of World War II, Americans inability to control the Spoils Beast and the war-created bureaucracies led to the rise of quasi-independent agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agencyeach of which, due to claims of national security, could hide many of their activities behind the cloak of national security. John Kennedy was unable to control them: whether they controlled him is a part of our story. No greater opponent of big government existed than Ronald Reagan, who, at the end of two terms, had scarcely put a dent in the shadow government. By the time Donald Trump came into office, vowing to drain the Swamp, it was beyond the ability of any administration, let alone any president who lacked 100 percent support in his effort, to do so.

Our presidents had much in common. They were all big men: four of the six were over six feet tall, and the shortest two (Theodore Roosevelt at 5'10" and Grover Cleveland at 5'11") were nevertheless stocky. Roosevelt had worked to become tough and muscular; Cleveland was portly. Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump were all tall with Reagan and Lincoln being physically athletic. Kennedys public relations machine created an image of him as physically active, though much of that was a myth. All but perhaps Cleveland had an aura that commanded a room when they walked in. ThreeLincoln, Trump, and Rooseveltsuffered business failure, though Roosevelts cattle ranch was a hobby he never personally managed. Two had studied law (Lincoln, Cleveland), four had been in the military, though neither Lincoln nor Reagan ever really saw combat. (Lincoln joked that he was wounded in the Black Hawk Warby a mosquito). Reagan spent World War II making training films and inspirational movies in Hollywood for the army. Only Roosevelt and Kennedy had truly tasted war on the front lines, and both emerged as heroes.

Of the six, only Kennedy and Cleveland were insiders. Roosevelt had the upbringing and connections, but he wanted to upset the Swamp apple cart, leaving him in the vice presidency until fate cast him into a higher role. Cleveland, while part of the Democrat Party machine, nevertheless stood well outside the partys mainstream as a gold Democrat. Had the Swamp had its way, none of the six would have come anywhere close to the presidency.

An awareness of the growing size and power of the unelected bureaucracy started long before any of our six Presidents were even born. In the 1670s, for example, freemen began to complain about the number of burgesses, their daily pay, and the number of meetings. According to historian Edmund Morgan, they wanted an end to fruitless government expenditures. Much of their tax money, they suspected, was going to line the pockets of a pack of officials. George Washington sought permission from Congress to create a body of assistants who could help with running the government, and the Departments of War, Treasury, and the State Department were established. Those remained quite small: Hamilton had, at times, only three secretaries or assistants and Jefferson only thirty for a worldwide effort in the State Department. Some growth would be expected. Yet it was kept small. President Jefferson still answered the White House door himselfin his slippers. During the War of 1812, at one time Secretary of State James Monroe was doing his own job, that of the secretary of war, and filling in for President James Madison, who was engaged in a ride of almost thirty hours trying to catch up to the army.

But by Lincolns time, the growing spoils monster created by Martin Van Buren when he originated the Democrat Party to protect and preserve slavery was out of control. As we will see, Lincoln dealt with job seekers constantly. They interfered with his ability to run a war; they diverted his attention from reuniting the nation. Subsequent presidents (finally) acknowledged the problems posed by armies of job seekers descending on a chief executive and absorbing his time and attention. Washington, DCs answer to anything is reform, and usually the reform is as bad as the problem itself. While the Pendleton Act removed the immediate burden for presidents of naming thousands of people to federal jobs, it quietly started another Swamp of its own, the perpetual lobbyists for interest groups, who changed the nature of campaigning from offering a few specific jobs to individuals to offering masses of group jobs to the special interests. Notice, this was neither anti-constitutional, nor would it have been a surprise to the Founders, particularly James Madison, who expected factions to appear. I doubt, however, Madison ever dreamed they would be camped out perpetually in Washington, DC, spending their entire time trying to bribe senators and representatives.

As politicians attempted to reform the Spoils Swamp, the Trust Swamp grew under their noses. Theodore Roosevelt rapidly moved from a neutral position on these to being the Trust Buster dedicated to breaking up the big business combinations. As we will see, TR did this largely with the best interests of big business in mind (or so he believed), perceptively seeing the national sensationalistic press as a problem equally destructive as the trusts themselves. Preventing the Yellow Journalists from starting a class war against big business and the rich was as noble an objective as Van Burens goal of preventing a civil war, but in each case badly imagined and ineptly structured. Each, in a sense, only accelerated the end they hoped to avoid. One wonders what Theodore Roosevelt would say about todays Hoax News that generates an endless waterfall of lies.

Much changed after Roosevelt, especially during the Great Depression and World War II, when the Spoils System gained new muscular, nearly bionic, legs. Under Theodores cousin, Franklin, the unelected bureaucracy exploded with agencies such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Works Project Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Civilian Conservation Corps and hundreds of others. Some of these would disappear after the Depression and the war, others would assume near immortality. World War II further expanded the bureaucracies, especially those related to national defense and security, to the point that by the end of General, President Dwight D. Eisenhowers second term, he sternly warned Americans about the Military-Industrial Complex. While on a specific basis there is some question as to the extent of the defense contractors powers (my own study of the National Aero-Space Plane showed that some of the biggest contractors wanted nothing to do with the program), the near-universal influence of military contractors in Washington is undeniable. Ike was right in that the perpetual lobbying by these groups for more or better weapons began to drive policy decisions by itself. Donald Trump would discover the influence of the military-industrial complex in his term when he attempted to withdraw American forces from the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.