The President as Commander in Chief

IF Richard Nixon has relied upon any single rationale for the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, it has been the necessity of protecting the lives and safety of American troops in Viet Nam. He emphasized the point firmly in his April 30 speech announcing the invasion. In his TV conversation last week, he mentioned it repeatedly, even invoking it as justification for the continuing American presence in South Viet Nam. "The President of the U.S.," he said, "has the constitutional right--not only the right but the responsibility--to use his powers to protect American forces when they are engaged in military actions. I have that power and I'm exercising that power. The legal justification is the right of the President of the United States under the Constitution to protect the lives of American men."

That is an effective emotional appeal; who, after all, could quarrel with the goal of protecting the lives of young Americans? Moreover, the President's legal right to go into Cambodia can be roundly defended. However, the idea that protecting American troops in the field automatically justifies other actions --which may be questionable on their own merits--is a disturbing doctrine. Nixon has used it often and pursued it assiduously. He appears to be saying: it does not matter how or for what reason, faulty or otherwise, the troops got there in the first place. Now that they are there, protecting them becomes in itself a basis of new policy, the justification for almost any other actions the President may wish to take in the war. By going into Cambodia, Nixon explained on April 30, he was acting to save the lives of "our brave men fighting tonight halfway around the world"--an aim that has not been literally realized, since 339 Americans died in the Cambodian venture. If saving lives is the ultimate end of his policy, then sheer logic would decree that the best way to do it would be to bring every American soldier home from Viet Nam at once.

Nixon's conception is also disturbing because it becomes highly dangerous if pursued to its logical end. Had Harry Truman chosen to apply the Nixon principle in Korea, for example, there would have been no reason for the U.S. to hold back from bombing or even invading Communist China in order to protect American troops from the attacking Chinese. To follow the argument further to its admittedly absurd conclusion, why not attack Russia and China, suppliers of the weapons and ammunition that kill U.S. soldiers in Viet Nam? Or invade North Viet Nam, provider of the men who use those weapons? The point is not that the President would seriously consider doing any of these things, but that policies, once launched, can acquire an inexorable legitimacy of their own.

When Nixon speaks of his duty to protect troops in the field, he usually couples it with emphasis upon his role and responsibilities as Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Of course, he is far from the first to emphasize the license implicit in the role of Commander in Chief. Invoking its powers to justify the use of U.S. troops in the absence of a declaration of war has been a resort of Presidents almost since the Republic began. But the device has become increasingly popular since World War II. Harry Truman made use of it to send U.S. forces into Korea in 1950; Dwight Eisenhower dispatched the Marines into Lebanon under it in 1958; Lyndon Johnson employed it to invade the Dominican Republic--and to expand the U.S. presence in Viet Nam.

As a result, the role of Commander in Chief has very nearly become a doctrine distinct from the other powers of the presidency. Many scholars contend that the Commander in Chief was never meant to have so broad a charter. The drafters of the Constitution gave the President that title to ensure civilian control over the military, and to allow him to respond immediately to a sudden, direct attack upon the U.S. Any protracted conflict was to be authorized by a congressional declaration of war.

Lyndon Johnson never sought a declaration of war against North Viet Nam, possibly because to do so might have provoked Peking and Moscow to respond in kind against South Viet Nam. Instead, after what was widely publicized as an attack on two U.S. destroyers by a group of North Vietnamese torpedo boats in 1964, he sought and got from Congress the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which gave him carte blanche to use U.S. forces however he chose in Viet Nam. The Senate voted two weeks ago to repeal the Tonkin Gulf resolution, but the Nixon Administration had never relied on it anyway. By depending so heavily on his role as Commander in Chief, the President has committed himself to a new rationale for his actions in Indochina--a rationale that simultaneously says too little and too much. The imprecision implies, rightly or wrongly, an uncertainty of purpose that could return to trouble his future choices in Viet Nam.

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