Legal Commentary

How much weight should a voter place on combat experience when selecting a President? McCain?s military experience is, of course, an important part of his Presidential appeal. But military heroics historically have been an important resume builder for many Presidential hopefuls ? sometimes (as with Winfield Scott, the Whig who lost to Franklin Pierce in 1852) their only qualification for office.

Being an academic weenie devoid of any experience remotely combat-oriented (unless one counts a few unfortunate faculty meetings), my professional bias is to think that voters over-value combat experience. Physical courage or tactical skill on the battlefield does not obviously translate into effectiveness in the White House. Why would one believe that bravery in assaulting a machine gun nest or fortitude in a POW camp would suggest skills like canny bargaining for votes in Congress, or Bismarckian sophistication in diplomacy, or eloquence in mobilizing the public with a stirring speech?

But it turns out that the thirteen Presidents with combat experience do surprisingly well. (I left out Nixon, Carter, and Reagan, because, although they served in the military, they saw no combat). Using the Wall Street Journal's survey of historians and political scientists as the measure of quality, military Presidents do alright, having an average rank of 18, a bit above the mean of 21.5. Five out of thirteen Presidents with combat experience rank in the top ten (Washington (1st), Teddy Roosevelt (5th), Truman (7th), Ike (8th), and Jackson (10th)). Their high rankings are brought down by the four dismal Civil War generals who served during the Gilded Age (Grant (29th), Hayes (24th), Garfield (33rd), and Harrison (30th)). But leaving out Garfield and Zachary Taylor (tying for 33rd) on the ground that they died so soon after taking office, the eleven remaining battle-hardened Presidents earn an average rank of 15 ? a substantially higher ranking than Presidents without combat experience. Indeed, my informal group of six most intellectually sophisticated Presidents (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson) does no better, earning an average score of 15. Bravery in combat, it turns out, works just as well as intellectual prestige in insuring a successful Presidency.

What explains the ?combat advantage?? Probably, it is a random artifact of too few data points. On the off chance, however, that the data really does suggest a positive relationship between combat experience and Presidential greatness, I suppose that they provide a reason, albeit a modest one, to support McCain.