Everything Has a Precedent If You Search For It

Recently we had an extraordinary lapse of national security.  Our Secretary of Defense went into the hospital, evidently without notifying anyone either above or below him in the chain of command of his planned absence.   If what we read in the papers is to be believed (admittedly a rather large caveat), neither the White House nor the Secretary of State noticed his absence for several days.

Secretary of Defense Austin is a retired 4-star general, so there is no doubt that he is an expert on the chain of command, so I’m inclined to believe this was an inadvertent accident like the numerous times previous presidents have misplaced the launch codes or accidentally driven off without the military officer carrying the nuclear football.  Every administration is made up of people and we all know how unreliable people are.

Naturally, there was only one possible reaction to the news:  Has something like this ever happened before?  Of course, it has.

In 1897, after being elected president, William McKinley started assembling his cabinet.  The Republican Party had two competing factions, a group led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge—who favored more military expansion and American involvement in world affairs—and a rival group, led by Governor John Davis Long, that pushed for a more modest, slower military expansion, believing that large militaries encourage countries to engage in war (and in the process bankrupt their economies).  Each of the two rival factions had its own favorite candidate for the position of Secretary of the Navy.

Few Americans can name the Secretary of the Navy today, but at the end of the 19th century, the civilian head of the American Navy was much more important than it is today.  The ever so much politically correctly named Department of Defense was not created until 1949, so the military was divided into two main branches.  The army was led by the Secretary of War and the navy was headed by the Secretary of the Navy.  

Since President McKinley was a close friend of John Davis Long, Long became the new Secretary of the Navy while Lodge’s choice, a young Theodore Roosevelt was picked to be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  Since Roosevelt was the number two man, in a much less glamorous position, he should have become a minor footnote in history.

While Long wanted to modernize the navy, he wanted a small scale program of gradual growth and slow replacement of the aging ships.  His deputy, Roosevelt, wanted….well, everything and wanted it done yesterday.  Long let most of the established departments run themselves, Teddy on the other hand stuck his nose into everything and everywhere, constantly asking questions and making suggestions.  Think of it this way, an elderly Mother Superior was in charge and her deputy was Miley Cyrus on crack.

Luckily for future historians, both men were compulsive writers, and each wrote numerous letters, kept journals, and would later wrote conflicting books on the history of the US Navy.  In Long’s book, The New American Navy, he described his energetic subordinate.

He worked indefatigably, frequently incorporating his views in memoranda which he would place every morning on my desk.  Most of his suggestions had, however, so far as applicable, been already adopted by the various bureaus, the chiefs of which were straining every nerve and leaving nothing not done. . . . He was heart and soul in his work.  His typewriters had no rest.  

Roosevelt, on the other hand wrote about how only a strong navy could uphold the honor of a country, that a strong navy was the best possible guarantee of safety for a nation and that if you didn’t understand that, you probably had to sit down to pee.  (That’s loosely paraphrased.)  All of Roosevelt’s plans probably would have come to naught if Henry Long had not been absent from the office so often.

Whether Long was truly sick or was just a raging hypochondriac is a matter of debate among naval historians.  What we are sure about is that  Long was frequently absent from the office, traveling for his or his daughter’s health to distant health spas, thus leaving the Navy in the hands of Roosevelt (and his rabid typewriter).  

As war with Spain over the independence of Cuba grew closer, Roosevelt began to make frantic plans.  Wanting to strengthen the US fleet on the east coast, Roosevelt took advantage of Long’s absence to order the USS Oregon to sail from San Francisco to Florida around the tip of South America—a journey of 14,000 nautical miles.  The entire nation eagerly read newspaper accounts of the perilous 66-day voyage.  Years later, Roosevelt would use that long delay as a reason for seizing Panama and building the Panama Canal.

While the Oregon sailed, Roosevelt continued to make plans.  He ordered Admiral Dewey to resupply his fleet in the far East and move closer to the Spanish-held Philippines.  Having prepared the navy for war, Roosevelt then resigned his post and began organizing a volunteer force, commonly called the Rough Riders.  

Secretary of the Navy Long thought this last move was foolish.  As Long recorded in his daily journal:

He has lost his head to this unutterable folly of deserting the post where he is of most service and running off to ride a horse and, probably, brush mosquitoes from his neck on the Florida sands.  His heart is right, and he means well, but it is one of those cases of aberration-desertion-vain-glory; of which he is utterly unaware.... Everyone of his friends advises him, he is acting like a fool. And, yet, how absurd all this will sound if, by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark. 

Well, as we all know, Roosevelt led his men up Kettle Hill, across the connecting saddle to San Juan Hill—site of the last land battle for Cuba—and became a public hero, eventually being honored with the Medal of Honor.  His success in battle had one other memorable result.

In 1899, Vice-President Garrett Hobart died of a heart attack, leaving the country without a vice-president until the next election.  Once again, each of the two camps of Republican leadership had a candidate they urged President McKinley to select.  The traditional Republicans wanted John Davis Long, while Senator Lodge urged McKinley to pick the newly-elected governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt.  Obviously, McKinley chose Roosevelt as his new vice-president and after just a few months in office, Roosevelt became our 26th president when McKinley was assassinated.  

Long, somewhat bitter, resigned his post as the Secretary of the Navy and Roosevelt replaced him with someone more to his liking, sending the new secretary a letter of warning about the men in the department.

You will have to struggle against the men who believe in the old system of quiet and rest; of ships that never wear out by work but only by rust, and of respectable men who live long and never do anything wrong because they never do anything at all.  

Once retired, Long wrote his history of the Modern Navy, carefully explaining that Roosevelt had been wrong about everything and anything good in the navy was due to his careful leadership.  Roosevelt, as Commander in Chief, ordered that no copy of Long’s book be allowed aboard any ship of the navy.

Actually, Roosevelt never found the right man to head the Navy during his time as President:  by the time he left office, four different men had attempted to run the Navy to his standards.  (One of those short-term appointees was Charles Bonaparte, the grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, but I promised not to mention the Corsican anymore.)

It is interesting to think what might have happened if Long had stayed in the office more instead of running to various mountains and springs for his health.  Would we have even fought in the Spanish American War?  Would the Panama Canal ever have been built?  Would the United States have had a large enough navy during World War I?  Would Theodore’s cousin have followed in his footsteps and served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and eventually become our 32nd President?

One last point.  The USS Oregon did arrive in Florida in time to fight in the war.  The last and culminating battle of the war occurred on July 3, 1898 when the Spanish fleet attempted to break the American blockade outside the harbor of Santiago de Cuba.  The Spanish Fleet was old and was no match for the American Navy, led by the USS Oregon.  One by one, the Spanish ships were either destroyed or forced to beach themselves to avoid the larger American ships.  The last ship to run aground and be scuttled by its Spanish crew was the Cristobal Colon.

The Spanish Empire in the New World began with Christopher Columbus and ended 406 years later with the scuttling of a ship named after Columbus.  There’s a pleasing symmetry in that.