Reasons to Be Cheerful — Part 3

In the United States, people born into poverty don’t simply have a chance to rise; they actually do rise. Not only do they have opportunities, but they act on those opportunities.

Income can be measured in a variety of ways. One of them is by dividing the population into quintiles. The top fifth is the 20% of people who have the highest income; while the lowest fifth is the bottom 20%. But each method of calculating income has strengths and weaknesses. “Income” is different from “consumption,” and the latter is a more accurate measure of a person’s experienced standard of living.

Remaining in a quintile, rather than rising to the next fifth, doesn’t translate into stagnation, because all quintiles enjoy improving standards of living.

The result is social mobility: The United States is a place where people can rise. In a January 2023 article, co-authors Phil Gramm and John Early explain:

Measured by inflation-adjusted household income, 93% of children who grew up the bottom income quintile were better off than their parents. Of children in the middle three-fifths, 86% grew up to live in families with higher incomes than their parents. Even among those in the top income quintile, 70% were better off.

This upward mobility across all income classifications was possible because of the growth of the American economy. Over the 35 years of the study, real median family income rose by 89%. This American cornucopia was spread across the entire income distribution — with the exception of the prime work-age adults in the bottom quintile who dropped out of the workforce as government transfer payments exploded beginning in the mid-1960s. They benefited from the growth in transfer payments.

Together with John Ekelund, the two authors of this article wrote a book explaining in greater detail their findings: that most Americans experience material improvement during their lives.

Mathematics and economics can explain some of this: as the overall standard of living rises, individuals find that their circumstances improve not only because their income has increased, but also because features of daily life like microwaves and smartphones have become assumed to be part of even the most humble life.

Without accounting for this overall income growth, three independent research efforts have measured relative mobility — the extent to which children reared in families in one income quintile stayed in the same income quintile, rose to a higher quintile, or fell to a lower quintile. The first, an extension of the Pew Charitable Trusts study cited above, looked at parental income from 1967-71, when the children were younger than 18, and 2000-08 when the children were 32 to 58.

The second study, by Raj Chetty of Harvard, looked at parental income from 1996-2000, when children were 15 to 20, and adult children’s income in 2011-12, when the children were in their early 30s. The final study, by Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, compared the income of children who were in their 40s in 2013-17 with that of their parents in their 40s.

Another bit of calculation explains America’s ability to lift people out of poverty: it’s important to distinguish between ‘earned income’ and ‘total consumption’ — as various goods and services are provided by the government, an individual doesn’t need a paycheck to obtain them.

Many states now offer free classes at community colleges: something for which people formerly had to pay. Likewise, senior citizens can receive various services for free, or for a reduced price, like bus fares, healthcare services, or access to physical exercise facilities.

Phil Gramm and John Early continue:

The findings of these three studies covering the past half-century were extraordinarily similar.

Several factors can hide the statistical improvement which people in the U.S. are enjoying: The changing and rising definitions of ‘poverty’ and the distinction between ‘earned income’ and ‘total consumption’ conceal the fact that, even for an individual who remains in quintile into which she or he was born, the standard of living rises significantly over a lifetime.

The share of adult children who grow up to live in a household in the same income quintile as their parents is surprisingly small. The chart shows that for the middle three quintiles, only 22.6% to 24.4% of children remain in their parents’ quintile — barely more than the 20% that would result if income quintiles were assigned at random. On average, 39% of those children as adults rose to a higher quintile.

The result of these opportunities is that the majority of Americans experience an increase in the standard of living during their lives, and enjoy a higher standard of living than their parents did.

Of children reared in the top quintile, 62% fell to one of the lower quintiles, including more than 9% to the bottom quintile. A significant number of the children reared in the top quintile who stayed in the top quintile as adults had incomes far greater than their parents, but statistically they could not rise out of the top quintile.

With few advantages and often trapped in failing public schools, 63% of children who grew up in bottom quintile families rose to a higher quintile, 6.1% rising all the way to the top quintile.

To be sure, social mobility includes the opportunity to move down as well as up. Children born into the very highest levels of income can, and sometimes do, end up with a lower standard of living than their parents. The children of multi-billionaires may well end up with fewer billions than their parents.

Downward mobility can be the result of deliberate choice: the child of a successful lawyer may simply want to be the curator of a museum, an instructor at a college, or a teacher. Downward mobility can also be the result of bad choices, or of unforeseeable tragic accidents.

These studies measure relative mobility by comparing the children’s income quintile then and now. Relative mobility is a zero-sum game — by definition, 20% of households are in the lowest quintile and only 20% in the highest — but income growth isn’t. The vast majority of adult children had higher real incomes than their parents. To rise out of the bottom quintile, children’s inflation-adjusted income had to increase by more than the growth of the income ceiling for the bottom quintile during the years between generations — 35% in Mr. Strain’s study. Children reared in any other quintile had to see their real income as adults rise on average by roughly 50% above their parents’ income simply to avoid falling into a lower quintile than their parents. The climb to a higher quintile is steeper still.

Fortunately, data from the Strain study can be used to measure mobility in a way that takes into account the extraordinary income growth in America between the parents’ generation and the adult children’s generation. When the income of the children is compared with the inflation-adjusted income of their parents using the real income quintiles of their childhood in 1982-86 rather than the income quintiles of 2013-17, measured mobility is dramatically greater. Only 28% of children reared in the bottom quintile had adult incomes that would put them in the bottom childhood quintile, and 26% rose all the way to the childhood top quintile, which required a minimum income of only $111,416 (in 2016 dollars) for a family of four in 1982-86. A family of four with that income in 2013-17 would have been in the middle quintile based on 2013-17 income distribution.

During the 35 years of the study, adult children who worked rode up the American economic escalator as average incomes rose dramatically. Those who climbed as the escalator rose moved up faster. Those who stood still or stumbled down rose more slowly, and those who stayed off the escalator by not working missed the ride. The mobility studies shown in the chart capture the effect of climbing, stumbling and choosing not to ride, but they miss the escalator effect, which came from the growth of the American economy. Many of today’s middle-income adults have a real standard of living that would have put them in the top quintile in their parents’ era.

This incredible income mobility is measured only over one generation. Parents struggle and sacrifice to provide their children with education and opportunities they themselves lacked. Millions of parents have lived out their dreams through the achievements of their children, generation after generation. As a result, America’s real mobility is most visible over multiple generations.

“The American Dream is of individual upward mobility,” Phil Gramm and John Early conclude: “Upward mobility is alive and well in America,” and “the vast majority of adults have higher income than their parents did.”

A younger person who immigrates into the United States, or a young person born in the United States, has exceptionally good opportunities to rise socially and economically.

Kennan Sees the Soviets Accurately: Only with Great Caution Should the Western Allies Join Forces

Between 1931 and 1963, George F. Kennan worked for the U.S. State Department. During those years, and afterward, he gathered information, analyzed it, and explained, both to the U.S. federal government, as well as to the public at large. He served under an impressive and diverse array of presidents — Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.

In 1941, Kennan was in Berlin, observing the operations of the Nazi government, which had taken over Germany eight years earlier. France and England were already at war with the Nazi government. Russia, i.e. the USSR, had recently switched sides, from being a friend of the Nazis to an enemy of the Nazis.

America was already supporting Britain in its war effort to liberate Germany from the Nazis. It was becoming increasingly clear that the United States would probably soon become directly involved in the war.

When Russia changed its allegiance, and started fighting against both the Germans and the Nazis, the English government under the leadership of Winston Churchill issued statements warmly welcoming the Soviet Socialists to the anti-Nazi cause. It is probable that many English political leaders had private misgivings about an alliance with the Soviets.

The question facing the United States was this: in American efforts to stop the Nazis, should the U.S. embrace the Soviet Socialists as allies? Like many officials in the upper levels of government, George Kennan was aware of the mass murders which the Soviets had carried out in Ukraine and other places. Kennan wrote to Washington from Berlin:

It seems to me that to welcome Russia as an associate in the defense of democracy would invite misunderstanding of our own position and would lend to the German war effort a gratuitous and sorely needed aura of morality. In following such course I do not see how we could help but identify ourselves with the Russian destruction of the Baltic States, with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning of Poland and Romania, with the crushing of religion throughout Eastern Europe, and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely feared and detested throughout this part of the world and the methods of which are far from democratic. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that in every border country concerned, from Scandinavia — including Norway and Sweden — to the Black Sea, Russia is generally more feared than Germany.

Kennan’s report reveals that, even after fighting had begun on the Eastern Front, the nations of central and eastern Europe were more worried about the Soviets than about the Nazis.

Such worries turned out to be correct. Although the war in that part of the world killed many thousands of people between 1939 and 1945, the postwar Soviet occupation of that same part of the world killed millions more. The postwar peace under Soviet Socialist domination turned out to be deadlier than the war itself.

Writing in late 1941, after the Soviet Socialists had started fighting against Germany, but before the U.S. had declared war, Kennan wanted to persuade the Roosevelt administration “that we should do nothing at home to make it appear that we are following the course Churchill seems to have entered upon in extending moral support to the Russian cause in the present Russian-German conflict.”

If it would indeed become necessary — and it did become necessary — to make common cause with the Soviet Socialists against the Nazis, then, Kennan urges, the U.S. should in no way endorse the USSR’s goals and ideologies — the U.S. should in no way portray the Soviets as friends or supporters of democracy. It should be made clear what was in fact the reality: any bonds to the USSR extended only as far as the war effort against the Nazis, and no further. This is how the Soviets could be seen as allies as late as September 1945, but become the aggressors and enemies in the Cold War as early as 1946 or 1947, depending on which date one chooses to mark the start of the Cold War.

The Soviets had made it clear that they did not support free elections, a free society, a free market, or free trade. The Soviets had both said and shown that they were willing to be allies of the Nazis as much as they were willing to be allies of the United States — they would do one or the other based only on which one would give them the most geopolitical power.

The fact that the Soviets had been allies of the Nazis until June 1941 revealed that they were not interested in a postwar world organized around governments of freely-elected representatives. The Soviets planned to receive help from the western Allies against Germany, but once Germany was defeated, the Soviet plan would be to destabilize the governments in those western Allies. The USSR hoped either to foster revolutions in France, in the U.K., and in the U.S., or to subvert the electoral process and thereby install pro-Soviet governments in those countries.

It had similar goals for Italy, Greece, Belgium, etc.

Therefore, Kennan wanted the Roosevelt administration to clearly articulate that the U.S. was cooperating with the Soviet Union only for the purposes of defeating the Nazis, and that beyond this one goal, there was no affinity between the two nations:

It is obvious that the Russian involvement in this struggle is not the result of any concern for the principles underlying the Allied cause and that Russia, despite its present involvement, has little desire to see England emerge as a real victor. Russia has tried unsuccessfully to purchase security by compromising with Germany and by encouraging the direction of the German war effort toward the west. Throughout the war the Moscow government has been most vehement in insisting that its own policy was based on sheer self-interest and in expressing its determination to do nothing to aid any warring power. It has thus no claim on Western sympathies; and there is no reason apparent to me why its present plight should not be viewed realistically at home as that of one who has played a lone hand in a dangerous game and must now alone take the moral consequences. Such a view would not preclude the extension of material aid wherever called for by our own self-interest. It would, however, preclude anything which might identify us politically or ideologically with the Russian war effort. In short, it seems to me that Soviet Russia could more soundly be regarded as a “fellow traveler” in the accepted Moscow sense, rather than as a political associate.

In sum, George F. Kennan is advising the Roosevelt administration to proceed in some military cooperation with the Soviet Socialists, but to do so with eyes wide open. The Soviets should be viewed as a military power which happens, at the moment, to have the same enemy as the western Allies have. There is nothing more to the partnership than a temporary alignment of military goals. Cooperation will cease as soon as those goals are accomplished.

Despite Kennan’s prescient warnings, the Roosevelt administration engaged in some public discourse which painted the Soviets in a better light, and engaged in conferences with Stalin which gave the Soviets a hand in shaping the postwar world.

Had the Roosevelt administration heeded Kennan’s advice more carefully, many lives would have been saved, and the world would not have endured the setbacks to the cause of freedom which happened during the Cold War.

Reasons To Be Cheerful — Part 1

The nature of human communication includes a temptation to focus on bad news. This is not a recent development, fostered by the internet and cable TV. Thousands of years ago, it was already known that bad news travels fast.

The effort to conscientiously focus on good news is a mental discipline which will reward the person who practices it. Charles Calomiris reported the following in December 2022 in the Wall Street Journal:

The percentage of people living in poverty fell from 32% in 1947 to 15% in 1967 to only 1.1% in 2017. Opportunities created by economic growth, and government-sponsored social programs funded by that growth, produced broadly shared prosperity: 94% of households in 2017 would have been at least as well off as the top quintile in 1967. Bottom-quintile households enjoy the same living standards as middle-quintile households, and on a per capita basis the bottom quintile has a 3% higher income. Top-quintile households receive income equal to roughly four times the bottom (and only 2.2 times the lowest on a per capita basis), not the 16.7 proportion popularly reported.

“Real income of the bottom quintile,” Calomiris adds, “grew more than 681% from 1967 to 2017.” He concludes: “Average living standards have improved dramatically.”

If these data seem unfamiliar, it is because of that principle which dictates that the media, left unchecked, tend to focus on bad news. The reader who is regularly exposed to the typical news media will have been so bombarded with negative reports that good news will seem counterintuitive.

Readers may even have developed an automatic skepticism about any good news. Yet pleasant developments do, in reality, take place.

What does this all mean? That in the United States, wage-earners in all categories have experienced increases in their standards of living, and that those in the lowest categories are catching up to the middle and upper classes.

While there is a form of income inequality, if one measures pre-tax earned income, the situation looks quite different if one measures post-tax income from all sources: this is because those earning larger incomes pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes, and those earning smaller incomes receive a larger share of unearned income.

Calomiris continues:

The equality of consumption between the bottom quintile (in which only 36% of prime-age persons work) and the middle quintile (in which 92% of prime-age persons work) is a striking finding.

The savvy reader will be aware of the news media’s tendency to amplify or invent some types of problems. Worth noting is also a tendency to downplay or ignore types of problems.

When the Budget Decides the War: U.S. Defense Spending and the Korean Conflict

The second half of 1949 and the first half of 1950 formed a twelve-month period of history which was a traumatic year for global peace and diplomacy. In late 1949, two events shook the world: the communists took over China and the Soviet Socialists used their espionage network inside the United States to steal the intellectual property needed to build an atomic bomb. In early 1950, a select group of leaders inside the U.S. government received a secret document, titled NSC-68, which unsettled them with its revelations and evaluations of the world military scene. Finally, in June 1950, North Korea, backed by both communist China and the Soviet Socialists, make a surprise attack on South Korea, starting a war which would eventually kill millions of people.

Prior to 1949, there was a seemingly reasonable hope that the world would be able to experience a time of protracted peace. To be sure, the Cold War tensions between the USSR and the western Allies were real and detectable, but America’s monopoly on atomic weapons was assumed to be the trump card which would prevent massive Soviet aggression.

Anticipating peace, the U.S. had begun dismantling its military.

The addition of China to the communist bloc also strengthened the Soviet position. Sino-Soviet relations would remain strong for several years after 1949. In the mid-1950s, those relations would cool.

It was not obvious that the Soviet Socialists were using their spy network inside the U.S. to gain nuclear weapons technology. When they conducted a weapons test in August 1949, exploading an atomic bomb, and when U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed this event was confirmed in September 1949, the global balance of power shifted. The USSR was emboldened, and used ruthless military power to squash uprisings of freedom fighters in Berlin in June 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Prague in 1968.

In light of these events, President Truman requested that the National Security Council (NSC) write a comprehensive document, detailing the global military situation. The report, titled NSC-68, analyzed the state of the world, projected possible future scenarios, and advised steps which the U.S. could take in order to be ready for those scenarios. A small number of officials within the U.S. government read the text, written jointly by members of the Department of State and the Department of Defense; the text disturbed the readers: their hopes for a few quiet and peaceful years were dashed.

Instead of dismantling its military, circumstances forced the U.S. to build up its military.

Based on NSC-68, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) developed a scenario called Joint Outline War Plan Reaper. This was in essence a plan for World War III, and it would go into effect if and when the Soviets attacked. The consensus among the military leaders was that the Soviets would probably attack in Europe. The war in Korea was considered to be a “secondary” theater, as historian William Donnelly writes:

In September 1950, the JCS made their recommendations for a military buildup based on NSC 68. The active Army would expand from ten to eighteen divisions by Fiscal Year 1952, with its active duty personnel strength increasing from 593,526 to 1,567,000. With the end of the Korean War expected in 1951, the active duty personnel strength would fall to 1,355,000 by Fiscal Year 1954, but the number of active divisions would remain at eighteen so that the Army could meet the demands of Joint Outline War Plan Reaper.

Although acknowledging the importance of the Pacific Rim, the plan anticipated a major Soviet offensive, crossing what was then the border between East Germany and West Germany. NATO and U.S. forces calculated that the Soviets would have the advantage in the first few days of the war, so the strategy was to let the USSR extend itself as far as the Rhine (Rhein). At that point, the western powers would have organized a defensive line. The Soviet would have spent their initial energy and would face longer supply lines across unfamiliar territory.

Like all war plans, Reaper was a collection of hypotheticals, as historian William Donnelly explains:

The Joint Outline War Plan was the JCS plan for World War III with the Soviet Union, and Reaper was the first version of the plan prepared in light of NSC 68’s recommendations. Reaper called for ten Army divisions stationed in the Zone of the Interior (ZI — the contemporary term for the continental United States), four in Japan, and four in Europe at the start of the war. Like previous Joint Outline War Plans, Reaper foresaw that the initial Soviet advantage in ground forces meant that the Air Force and the Navy would play the dominant roles in early operations. The ten Army divisions and their supporting units in the ZI would form the General Reserve, portions of which could be deployed overseas early in the war, but whose most important function would be to serve as the cadre for a massive expansion of the Army. The four divisions in Japan would defend it from a Soviet invasion while the four divisions in Europe, along with their allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), would conduct a delaying operation that, in conjunction with air attacks, would halt the Soviet Army along the Rhine. The U.S. Army, drawing on the resources made available by a World War II-type national mobilization, would expand and then launch a second crusade in Europe, ending the war after four years with a Soviet surrender and a force of eighty divisions.

The implications of War Plan Reaper and the assumptions and attitudes which shaped it were these: The Korean conflict would receive limited resources, and the U.S. would need to engage in substantial defense spending and a military buildup.

Unlike WW2, when the combat operations of the military held a high priority, the Korean conflict would be supplied, manned, and funded around preparations for a speculative war plan. The military units in Korea, where actual fighting was happening in real time, received less funding, because resources were being diverted to a buildup in Europe and in the continental United States.

Not only did supply shortages and a “manpower dilemma” (Donnelly’s phrase) impact the field effectiveness of the U.S. Army in Korea, but morale also understandably suffered. Many of the soldiers in Korea were conscripts who stayed no longer than they were required to do so, while the army sent more experienced soldiers and officers to Europe.

Morale deteriorated further when it became clear that the goal for the NATO and United Nations (UN) coalition, including the United States, was an armistice or ceasefire, not a victory.

Budgetary considerations had a major influence on both the strategies and the tactics of the coalition supporting South Korea in war.

Facing the Greatest Danger Without the Greatest Resources: Balancing the Korean Conflict with the Global Cold War

Following WW2, the United States began to reduce the size of its armed forces. The number of men in the military was reduced. Spending on research and development for new weapons was reduced. Procurement of current weapon systems was reduced. The overall budget for defense spending was reduced.

The war was over. The principal enemies, Japan and Germany, had been thoroughly smashed and were occupied by Allied troops. The United States alone possessed the technology to manufacture and use atomic weapons, giving it an unsurpassable advantage over any competing nation.

America felt secure. There was no need for large military spending or for a large and well-equipped army.

So, from the time that WW2 ended in late 1945 — a ceasefire took place in August, and both sides signed the final surrender papers in September — the United States optimistically anticipated a time of peace. There were no obvious threats of major military action on the horizon, so disassembling the U.S. military seemed like a sensible thing to do.

Four events would startle this calm attitude.

First, the USSR obtained from its network of espionage agents the American technology needed to assemble its own nuclear weapons. In late August 1949, the Soviet Socialists conducted a test, exploding for the first time their own atomic bomb. By early September, the U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed this reality. Suddenly, the U.S. was not the only nation on earth possessing nuclear weapons. This changed the balance of power suddenly and dramatically. The Soviet Socialists no longer needed to restrain themselves in their plans to take over and oppress other smaller nations.

Second, in late 1949, the Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War. This war had started in 1927, dragging on for many years, and had paused during WW2. A few of the freedom fighters who had resisted the Communists fled to the island of Formosa, and set up their own small country, called Taiwan or “free China.” Communist China, or “mainland China,” allied itself closely with the Soviet Socialists during the first several years of its existence.

Third, in January 1950, President Truman asked the National Security Council (NSC) to compose a report about the world’s geopolitical situation. The document, known as NSC-68, was kept secret until it was declassified in 1975. It alarmed the few leaders who had permission to read it. It persuaded readers that, instead of dismantling the military, the U.S. needed to be ready to face major threats.

Finally, in June 1950, North Korea, with substantial support from Communist China, and a smaller amount of support from the Soviet Socialists, launched a surprise attack on South Korea. This began the Korean War, which would ultimately cost the lives of more than a million human beings. Although the majority of military support for North Korea came from China, the Soviet Socialists led the political and strategic impulse behind the war. The procurement of nuclear weapons emboldened the USSR, in which Stalin was still ruling. The global counterforce was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), created in 1949, a collective mutual security system, based on a large alliance between thirty nations. These nations pledged to help defend each other, and the major threat was obviously the Soviet Socialists.

The globe was not as safe as had been hoped, as historian William Donnelly writes:

President Truman and his senior advisors quickly concluded that the North Korean invasion on 25 June 1950 demonstrated that the Soviet Union was beginning to take greater risks as predicted by NSC 68. American intelligence estimates stated that the Soviets were not likely to initiate a general war until they had built up conventional and nuclear forces to the point where they could be confident of overrunning Western Europe and deterring an American nuclear response. NSC 68 had warned that 1954 would be the year of maximum danger of a general war. Preventing that war decisively colored the U.S. response to the invasion of South Korea. North Korea’s aggression had to be repulsed lest it encourage further local attacks, but the United States would limit its military commitments on the peninsula in case the attack actually was a Soviet effort to weaken America’s ability to defend the crucial areas of Western Europe and Japan. American leaders decided that the United States would avoid a wider war in Asia, undertake a massive buildup of conventional and nuclear forces to defend crucial areas, use much of that buildup to create a credible conventional defense in Europe, supply its allies with large amounts of military aid, and do all this by 1954 without causing irreparable harm to the American economy.

The thinking about defense spending changed significantly between 1948 and 1951. Although thinking can change quickly, the physical realities change slower. The events of 1949 and 1950 were shocking. There was a lag time between those events and the implementation of plans for a military buildup.

One of the implications of the situation was that the nations supporting South Korea — which included several NATO countries as well as several United Nations countries — fought the Korean War “on the cheap.” Many of these nations were still repairing themselves from WW2, both economically and in terms of physical infrastructure. They were not available for a massive war effort.

The limited military and fiscal resources had to not only support a war in Korea, but develop a global defense system at the same time. Massive amounts of money were required for the research and development of missiles, jet airplanes, and nuclear weapons, as well as the usual conventional forces.

There wasn’t a lot of money left over to fund the Korean War.

Not only was there a lack of money for equipment, supplies, research, and development, but rather there was also, in the words of William Donnelly, a “manpower dilemma.” Soldiers not only have to be paid, but rather also trained, clothed, fed, and sheltered.

The army was experiencing a “massive expansion,” but given the tasks it faced, the needs for men were still greater than the supply. This was especially so regarding leadership positions like non-commissioned officers (NCO). There was a large supply of enlisted men, given the realities of conscription. But draftees remain only as long as they must, and so there was a high rate of turnover among footsoldiers, making leadership even more important. Yet it was precisely among NCO ranks that there was a manpower shortage.

The United States fought the Korean War on a shoestring budget.

Manpower shortages, high rates of turnover, and a high percentage of draftees among the soldiers led to morale problems. Also detracting from morale was the fact that top-level leadership was deciding to treat Korea as a “secondary theater,” with Europe still seen as the likely place for a face-to-face confrontation with the Soviets. A further dampener was the selection of armistice, rather than victory, as the goal in Korean: this was hardly inspiring to already-skeptical draftees who didn’t want to be in the army in the first place.

Scaling Down: Preparing for Smaller Wars

In January 1950, President Harry Truman requested the Department of State and the Department of Defense to jointly compose a document regarding U.S. objectives in both diplomatic and military concerns. In April, he received the report, a top-secret document titled NSC-68.

This document remained classified until 1975, but is now available to the reading public. It shaped much of American strategic and geopolitical thought throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It addressed both strategy and ideology.

NSC-68 also included references to the nation’s founding texts from the 1700s, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers.

The report’s authors were concerned to distinguish between, on the one hand, massive wars of annihilation on a global scale, and on the other hand, smaller regional conflicts:

The mischief may be a global war or it may be a Soviet campaign for limited objectives. In either case we should take no avoidable initiative which would cause it to become a war of annihilation, and if we have the forces to defeat a Soviet drive for limited objectives it may well be to our interest not to let it become a global war.

It was therefore incumbent upon the United States military establishment to be prepared for both types of conflict. But the U.S. military in 1950 was not ready, as author Russell Weigley writes:

NSC-68 suggested a danger of limited war, of Communist military adventures designed not to annihilate the West but merely to expand the periphery of the Communist domains, limited enough that an American riposte of atomic annihilation would be disproportionate in both morality and expediency. To retaliate against a Communist military initiative on any but an atomic scale, the American armed forces in 1950 were ill equipped. Ten understrength Army divisions and eleven regimental combat teams, 671 Navy ships, two understrength Marine Corps divisions, and forty-eight Air Force wings (the buildup not yet having reached the old figure of fifty-five) were stretched thinly around the world.

It would not be fitting to respond, e.g., to the Soviet blockade of Berlin by unleashing America’s arsenal. Although some military strategists in the late 1940s saw the atomic bomb as the answer to nearly any tactical question, it was now becoming clear that America should have a full conventional force as well.

The Air Force atomic striking force, embodied now in eighteen wings of the Strategic Air Command, was the only American military organization possessing a formidable instant readiness capacity. So much did Americans, including the government, succeed in convincing themselves that the atomic bomb was a sovereign remedy for all military ailments, so ingrained was the American habit of thinking of war in terms of annihilative victories, that occasional warnings of limited war went more than unheeded, and people, government, and much of the military could scarcely conceive of a Communist military thrust of lesser dimensions than World War III.

So it happened, then, that in June 1950, when North Korea attacked South Korea, the United States was in possession of a large nuclear arsenal, but a barely serviceable — if at all serviceable — infantry. The United States was prepared for global atomic war, but the Soviet Socialists chose smaller proxy wars — Korea, Vietnam — and even smaller military maneuvers to quell uprisings — Berlin 1953, Hungary 1956, Prague 1968.

America’s brief romance with the atomic bomb was over. By the mid-1950s, it was clear that the United States needed a full conventional force alongside its nuclear arsenal.

This would require a bit of a scramble to make up for years in the late 1940s during which the conventional forces were allowed to languish. The Korean War included a U.S. Army which was underfunded and undersized.

In the postwar decades, the United States needed to have both a strategic nuclear force as well as sufficient conventional forces in the traditional Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.

The Best President Ever?

On a regular basis, every few years, journalists will assemble a group of historians or political scientists and ask them to sort through the presidents of the United States, and come up with a list of the top ten, or the bottom ten, or to rank all of them from best to worst, or to select the single best-ever, or worst-ever, president.

Such efforts are sometimes interesting, but in the end, they are meaningless.

These processes are hopelessly subjective, and reveal, at most, the personal preferences and partialities of the researchers involved. Because these types of surveys have been going on for years, one can trace their contradictory results which expose their sheer non-confirmability and un-verifiability.

Writing in 2012, Robert Merry traced the flip-flops and reversals of such surveys:

Consider Dwight Eisenhower, initially pegged by historians as a mediocre two-termer. In 1962, a year after Ike relinquished the presidency, a poll by Harvard’s Arthur Schlesinger Sr. ranked him 22nd — between Chester A. Arthur, largely a presidential nonentity, and Andrew Johnson, impeached by the House and nearly convicted by the Senate. Republicans were outraged; Democrats laughed. By the time a 1981 poll was taken, however, Eisenhower had moved up to 12th. The following year he was ninth. In three subsequent polls he came in 11th, 10th and eighth.

The academics did a similar turnaround, and did an about-face on another famous president:

Academics initially slammed Reagan, as they had Eisenhower. One survey of 750 historians taken between 1988 and 1990 ranked him as “below average.” A 1996 poll ranked him at 25th, between George H.W. Bush, the one-termer who succeeded him, and that selfsame Chester Arthur. Reagan's standing is now on the rise.

If the search for the “best ever” president, or even the “top ten” presidents, is an empty pursuit, can scholars give more meaningful results? Perhaps: while it is meaningless to say that Calvin Coolidge is a “good” or “bad” president, it is meaningful to say that he lowered taxes, lowered the national debt, and reduced the federal government’s spending. Such statements are verifiable and quantifiable.

Historians can give us meaningful data when they research specific and measurable details about a president, instead of merely trying to assign him a relative rank as “better than” or “worse than” some other president.

It is observable, and therefore material, the President Polk’s management of the Mexican-American war impacted presidential elections after the war’s end in 1848.

Such observations are not only more reliable and objective, but also protect scholars from ending up with the proverbial “egg on the face” of declaring some president to be “good” or “bad” and then find themselves facing stiff opposition to such judgments. One example of academics hastily praising a president, only to find themselves slowly retracting such glowing evaluations, is the case of Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson’s high marks from historians belie the fact that voters in 1920 delivered to his party one of the starkest repudiations ever visited upon an incumbent party. Similarly, historians consistently mark Harding as a failure, though he presided over remarkably good times and was very popular.

Exactly as scholars revised their estimates of Eisenhower and Reagan upward, so now they are reconsidering Harding in a more favorable light. Wilson’s reputation, meanwhile, has descended.

In sum, it is more important to gather data about a president than to evaluate him.

Writing about a president should emphasize, not general impressions, but rather observable, measurable, verifiable, and quantifiable data. That’s how serious historians work. Reports about presidents should be full of dates, places, specific actions, and the names of other individuals with whom that president interacted.

Such a method would lead to the “best ever” texts about presidents!