Thats live at 6 00 p. M. Eastern also on cspan. American history tv on cspan3, features programs that tell the american story. This weekend we continue our special series on the 1966 vietnam hearings, 50 years later. We will hear a special consultant to president johnson followed by Committee Member questions. Our purpose is equally clear and easily defined. In his speech of april 7, 1965, president johnson did so in the following terms. Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves. Only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way. This has been our basic objective since 1954. It has been pursued by three successive administrations and remains our basic objective today. Next saturday, secretary the state gives his testimony defending johnsons vietnam policies. For the complete American History tv weekend schedule, go to cspan. Org. Next, East Carolina University professor Charles Calhoon talks about the obstac e obstacles faced by ulysses grant. He described how his personality influenced him decisions. Its about 90 minutes. Good afternoon. Thanks for coming out for todays lecture here at the naval war college. Its my honor and privilege to introduce to you professor Charles Calhoon from the eastern Carolina University to talk on grants presidency. With that, will turn it over to him at this time. Hold all your questions until the end. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all for being here today. I would like also to thank Professor John scott who could not be here today. He is in hawaii missing the snow here in rhode island. I know he did a lot of background work on this as well. As the professor indicated, im going to be talking today about the presidency of grant. His leadership in the white house. And i have a couple of caveats to share with you before i begin the meat of the talk. First of all, i am a political historian, not a military historian. Most of you in this room know more about grants military career, particularly after taking this course, than i do. My specialty is late 19th century american politics. The second caveat is the fact that im writing a book on the presidency of ulysses s. Grant for the University Press of kansas. It is still very much a work in progress. I havent figured out everything about this man in the white house. Perhaps thats an impossibility. So some of things i will be saying today are tentative in nature, shall we say. We dont have time today to go through an entire chronology of the events in grants very busy two terms in the white house. Instead, what i would like to do today is to raise a few points about how to look at the grant presidency. First to Say Something about history, how has he been treated in the past. I will be brief about that. Then take a look at some of the problems confronting the country when he became president. Some endured during his presidency. Then i would like to discuss with you a bit about some of the assets that he brought to the office of president that helped him succeed. Not only person assets but also some imbedded in the culture in which he was operating. The flip side of that, i would like to talk a little bit about some of the liabilities that he confronted both personal and conte contextual as well. And say a few words about his achievements in the white house and then a little bit about his impact on the evolution of the office of president. First of all, grant has had a fairly bad press as president ever since he was in the white house. The view really started even before he took office. The standard view was that he performed badly and was criticized. The truth of the matter is that there were some people who were ready to criticize him even before he became president. I could name names here. One is Charles Sumner who may have been disappointed he wasnt appointed secretary of state of the he was a critic of grant until he died in 1874. He was always criticizing grant for things that he thought were not being handled properly. Another critic was henry adams. He was turned off by the Johnson Administration and even before grant became president he had vowed to write articles exposing corruption in the government. So he was ready for bear even before grant put his hand on the bible on march 4, 1869 to become president. Throughout his term, henry adams wrote quite critical articles about him. If you have ever had the education of henry adams, you know grant comes off there very badly as well. These men thought that grant was a liar, he was vulgar, he was low in his instincts, he was stupid, he was conniving. Very nasty portrait of grant in the white house. He also suffered i would say the president did from the partisan journalism of the time. Thats par for the course for a president. But it was severe in grants time. Some of the newspapers, particularly democratic newspapers, gave him a very hard time. Congressional investigations, again, once the democrats got control of the house of representatives, severely investigated and criticized grants performance. The significance of this is that these critics comments and notions about grant became imbedded in the literature the historical literature of the most of the 20th century. Historians doing their work in the first 75 or so years of the 20th century began when they looked back at the Grant Administration, they tended to pay more attention to what his enemies said about him than really about what he had accomplished in the white house. If you look at the president ial polls that were conducted at the beginning of 1948, these were polls conducted among historians and political scientists, journalists and others. You see that grant tended to rank quite low in those polls. Never rock bottom. That was reserved for Andrew Johnson or james buchanan, but nonetheless quite low. Reflecting the scholarly image of grant over the years, the scholarly criticism of him. About 25, 30 years ago, there began to be something of a rehabilitation of the scholarship on grant, grants reputation in the scholarship. That was due largely i think to the civil rights movement, the developments in civil rights in the 20th century. Grant came to be seen in many historians views and others as a defender of civil rights. Hence his estimate has tended to rise ever since that time. Again, if you look at those president ial assessment polls, if you will, you can see grant in the latter ones ranking somewhere in the middle. Never into the top five or even the top ten. But certainly doing much better than he had when the polls were first beginning around the middle of the 20th century. So grant has had an evolving impression or reputation, shall we say, among historians and other scholars. What kind of problems did grant face when he became president . The most significant domestic problem, of course, was the question of reconstruction. What to do about the south and what to do about Race Relations in the south. Grant liked to refer to this problem as the efforts to secure the results of the war. This was a question of enormous difficulty. Not only because of the problems in the south, but also because the approach to reconstruction in the immediate postwar years was the subject of great ra wrangl wrangling between the president and Andrew Johnson. Looking at this as an institutional struggle between the president and congress. One of the tasks grant confronted was not only trying to fortify reconstruction efforts of the south to uphold the rights of the former slaves and so forth, but also to try to rebalance and recalibrate the relations with the congress. And that was a very tall order. Another problem that resulted from the civil war related to the nations finances. During the civil war, the United States government, of course, needed to raise very large sums of money. And it passed a tremendous new load of taxes, tariffs were raised, internal taxes were raised, excise taxes and income tax, inheritance taxes. Federal government taxed anything that moved during the civil war. Wasnt enough to cover the cost of the war. So the government also engaged in heavy borrowing, selling bonds and so the National Debt was Something Like 2 billion at the end of the war. Which seems like chicken feed to us today. But it was an enormous sum of money at that time. The question was, what kind of program could the government put in place to begin to pay that back . Borrowing wasnt even enough either if the government got into the business of simple printing money, the socalled green backs, unbacked by gold or silver. The question remains, what are we going to with that money . Are we going to get it back to where we would pay gold and silver for it . The question was there. There are Financial Issues related to the war that grant would confront in the white house. There were problems on the frontier, of course, with native americans. The indians. This was as old as the country. There was nothing new in grants era. In grants time, the mistreatment of the indians was continuing. You had the clashes between white settlers moving westward and indians clinging to the their traditional ways. This was something that grant felt very deeply about and was one of the major problems that he tried to deal with as president. In dealing with the problems, i submit that grant did have available to him a Certain Group of assets that he could bring to bear. Some of them were personal to himself. Others i think were more institutional or contextual, if you will. We will take a look at the personal ones first. First of all, grant had experience as an administrator. That came from his war years. Not only the civil war but in the mexican war. In the mexican war, he was in the Quarter Master corps and learned how to organize in that situation, learned how to learned the value of supply lines and so forth. This was important. He honed his Organizational Skills in that role. But of course the most important experience was his command during the civil war. Those commands became larger until, of course, the last year or so he was head of all the union armies. This is very important experience for him to carry into the white house. He learned how to run a huge organization. He learned how to see the big picture. He learned how to delegate tasks to achieve his goals. When he was running for president in 1868, the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial and compared him to other candidates who had, say, legislative experience in the congress or judicial experience in the Supreme Court justice people were thinking about for president. They said, grant was superior to them because of his military experience. The reason for that was that his military experience was primarily executive. Not judicial, not legislative, but executive. Thats what was needed in the white house. So that was an important asset for him. He also had a great sense of determination to see things through to a successful conclusion. This is something that was with him all his life. If you had a chance to read his memoirs, you see that he states that he never liked retracing his steps. He never liked going backward. He always wanted to move forward toward his goal. He would try to find alternative routes to get there if necessary. You can see that perhaps during the war years. During the war, grant also showed that he could be a great judge of men. He could assess mens strengths. He could assess their weaknesses. This was his reputation during the war. It was born out by experiences with great lieutenants such as sherman and sheridan and so forth. Theres some question about how well he translated that into civilian life. It took him some time, i think, to do that. He did it, i think, primarily when he realized that the Republican Party in his time during his term was sort of the army that he was now commanding. And his lieutenants were not only some of his people in the cabinet but also some key figures in the congress. These were important senators who helped grant achieve his goals, doing the same kind of thing that a sherman or sheridan did during the war to help him achieve his goals in wartime. Grant also, a little more abstract sense, had a great commitment to the fundamental democratic ideals of the United States. He was a dedicated patriot. He wants the union army to succeed. He wanted his country to succeed in the postwar years. His commitment to democratic ideals initially before the war, he wasnt interested in politics. Had a suspicion of politicians. After the war, when he was in the white house, he did come to realize that the Great Potential for positive good through political action. And he did very much uphold the rights of the former slaves to vote, black suffrage. So that very much connected with his sense of democratic ideals as part of the american credo. He believed it was an important part of his responsibility to uphold the new amendments to the constitution that undergirded civil rights and right to vote. What we have to remember is that he did not undergo a lobotomy. As a general, he had exhibited a profound capacity to envision the totality of things and the details of things of operations. He manipulated his subordinates well. He showed perseverance to achieve his goals often againest heavy odds. These traits did not abandon him when went into the white house. Its fair to say it took him a little time to adjust them to peacetime usages. Those are his personal assets, some of them, i think. The list could probably go on. What about institutional assets or external assets that could aid him in his operations as president . Well, i think one of the things that was working for him was a wealth of good will in the country at large. He went into the presidency respected generally. Of course, he was the savior of the union, after all. After the death of lincoln, he was the most revered man in the United States. Certainly, in the north and in the south he was respected by many people. Not only for his treatment of lee but also for his protection of lee and other officers from trial and his sense that it would be good to get the country back together as soon as possible. So that was an important part of his it worked to his advantage. A great atmosphere of good will when he took the oath of office. Also, working to his advantage, was republican majority republican majorities in both houses ofmajorities. His party controlled both houses of congress for the first six years of his presidency. The last two years, the democrats had the house of representatives. This was important because obviously it eased grants legislative task. He could get things done a little bit more easily than would be otherwise the case, as we well know. President s who have divided government do have difficulties. Another asset that this president had and most president s of the 19th century took advantage of was thehi;w patronage power. That is to say the appointments to office of subordinates around the country, not only in the positions in washington, but in federal offices around the country. It was important because he, like other president s, would take the advice of senators and representatives about whom to appoint to those positions. And that power helped grant forth alliances with those key leaders that i was talking about earlier in the congress. Strengthened his ability to get through congress what he wanted to. On the plus side, there were a number of things working to grants advantage, both in his personal makeup, his personal experiences and in the institutional setting in which he conducted the white house. But on other side, there were liabilities. There were obstacles to his success. Factors worked against him. Once again, we can divide them into personal deficiencies and institutional or contextual ones. I think its worth noting that indeed despite his military experience and that was executive experience, he did lack political knowledge. He did lack some political experience because he had never held a Political Office before. He was in washington between 1865 and 1869 as general and chief of the army and very briefly as interim secretary of war. In that time, he learned a great deal about how washington worked. But he was still somewhat naive when he took the oath of office in the feeling that he could somehow remain above politics. He could remain above the fray. It wasnt going to work out that way. As he actually rather quickly realized that as i was saying earlier, he would need to forge those positive relationships with leaders in the congress. Another element in his personal makeup that i think perhaps worked against success to some degree was his tacitness. He didnt like public speaking. He seldom spoke as president other than just to acknowledge the greetings of a crowd. This was unfortunate, because i think grant missed the opportunity to use the presidency as a bully pulpit for the things that he believed in and that he favored. Why was he this way . I think there was something about his personal makeup that made him adverse to public speaking. Also, it was a reaction to Andrew Johnson who grant believed had made a fool of himself during several of his speaking tours. Grant accompanied him on one in 1866 in which Andrew Johnson really got into shouting matches with people in the crowd and really sort of brought the presidency low. Grants idea was, not for me. Im not going to that kind of thing. Could he speak effectively . Yes, on occasion he did. In 1875, he made a speech used effectively in the ohio Gubernatorial Campaign that got hayes reelected that year and positioned him to run for president the following year. In a sense, thats the exception that proves the rule on grant. About public speaking. Its too bad he didnt do more of it. When he went abroad after his presidency, he discovered he was a pretty good speaker and came to enjoy it. But not during