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Joint Chiefs Of Staff

Joint Chiefs of Staff

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) is a panel comprising the highest-ranking members of each major branch of the armed services in any particular country. It consists of the chairman, the vice chairman, the chief of staff of the army, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the air force, and the commandant of the Marine Corps. The chairman is the principal military adviser to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council (NSC). The Joint Chiefs of Staff has no executive authority to commit combatant forces. The following information refers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces, but similar arrangements are common in other nations.

Origin of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

At the beginning of WWII, President Roosevelt created a committee of U.S. staff commanders to coordinate operational strategy for the armed services. It was established as the American component of the Combined Chiefs of Staff of Great Britain and the United States, which prepared and implemented Allied strategy. The group became known as the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The members of the new JCS were the counterparts of the British Chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Royal Air Force. The first members of the JCS were Adm. William D. Leahy, President Roosevelt's special military advisor, with the title of Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, who presided over the JCS; Gen. George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army; Adm. Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet; and Gen. Henry H. Arnold, Deputy Army Chief of Staff for Air and Chief of the Army Air Corps. Each member was promoted to five-star rank in December 1944, when the new grades were established. The National Security Act of 1947 formally established the Joint Chiefs of Staff and laid the foundation for a series of legislative and executive changes that produced today's defense organization. After the 1986 reorganization of the military undertaken by the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the Joint Chiefs of Staff do not have operational command of U.S. military forces. Responsibility for conducting military operations goes from the President to the Secretary of Defense directly to the heads of the Unified Combatant Commands and thus bypasses the Joint Chiefs of Staff completely. Today, their primary responsibility is to ensure the readiness of their respective military services. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also act in an advisory military capacity for the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense. In addition, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acts as the chief military advisor to the President and the Secretary of Defense.

Current Joint Chiefs of Staff

Note:
- General Pace is the first U.S. Marine to achieve the Chairmanship. On his nomination, Pace said, "This is an incredible moment for me. It is both exhilarating and humbling. It's exhilarating because I have the opportunity, if confirmed by the Senate, to continue to serve this great nation. It's humbling because I know the challenges ahead are formidable."

Chronology of Chairmen

Note:
- On July 20, 1942, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy became the Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. He was not technically the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That post was established and first held by General of the Army Omar Bradley in 1949.

External link

- [http://www.jcs.mil/ Official site]

Franklin D. Roosevelt

:FDR redirects here. For other uses, see FDR (disambiguation). Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), 32nd President of the United States (1933-1945), is best known for his leading the U.S. through the Great Depression via his New Deal, his building a powerful political coalition, the New Deal Coalition, that dominated American politics for decades, and for leading a grand coalition that defeated Germany and Japan and created the United Nations. Born to wealth and privilege, he overcame a crippling illness to place himself at the head of the forces of reform. Universally called FDR, he was controversial in his day but now is considered in the top tier of American presidents.

Early life

Franklin Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, at Hyde Park, in the Hudson River valley in upstate New York. His father, James Roosevelt (1828–1900), was a wealthy landowner and vice-president of the Delaware and Hudson Railway. The Roosevelt family (see Roosevelt family tree) had lived in New York for more than 200 years: Claes van Rosenvelt, originally from Haarlem in the Netherlands, arrived in New York (then called Nieuw Amsterdam) in about 1650. In 1788, Isaac Roosevelt was a member of the state convention in Poughkeepsie which voted to ratify the United States Constitution - a matter of great pride to his great-great-grandson Franklin. In the 18th century the Roosevelt family had divided into two branches, the "Hyde Park Roosevelts", who by the late 19th century were Democrats, and the "Oyster Bay Roosevelts", who were Republicans. President Theodore Roosevelt, an Oyster Bay Republican, was Franklin's fifth cousin. Despite their political differences, the two branches remained friendly: James Roosevelt met his wife, at a Roosevelt family gathering at Oyster Bay, and Franklin was to marry Theodore's niece. Roosevelt's mother Sara Ann Delano (1854–1941) was of French Protestant (Huguenot) descent, her ancestor Phillippe de la Noye having arrived in Massachusetts in 1621. Her mother was a Lyman, another very old American family. Franklin was her only child, and she was an extremely possessive mother. Since James was an elderly and remote father (he was 54 when Franklin was born), Sara was the dominant influence in Franklin's early years. He later told friends that he was afraid of her all his life. He was home schooled under her supervision. Roosevelt grew up in an atmosphere of privilege. He learned to ride, to shoot, to row and to play polo and lawn tennis. Frequent trips to Europe made him conversant in German and French. The fact that his father was a Democrat, however, set him apart to some extent from most other members of the Hudson Valley aristocracy. The Roosevelts believed in public service, and were wealthy enough to be able to spend time and money on philanthropy. Roosevelt went to Groton, an elite Episcopal boarding school near Boston. He was heavily influenced by the headmaster, Endicott Peabody, who preached the duty of Christians to help the less fortunate and urged his students to enter public service. Roosevelt graduated from Groton in 1900, and naturally progressed to Harvard University, where he enjoyed himself in conventional fashion and graduated with an A.B. (arts degree) in 1904 without much serious study. While he was at Harvard his fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt became President, and his vigorous leadership style and reforming zeal made him Franklin's role model. In 1903 he met his future wife Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore's niece, at a White House reception. (They had previously met as children, but this was their first serious encounter). Roosevelt next attended the Columbia Law School. He passed the bar exam and completed the requirements for a law degree in 1907 but did not bother to actually graduate. In 1908 he took a job with the prestigious Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, dealing mainly with corporate law. Meanwhile he had become engaged to Eleanor, despite the fierce resistance of Sara Delano Roosevelt, who was terrified of losing control of Franklin. They were married in March 1905, and moved into a house bought for them by Sara, who became a frequent house-guest, much to Eleanor's mortification. Eleanor was painfully shy and hated social life, and at first she desired nothing more than to stay at home and raise Franklin's children, of which they had six in rapid succession: Anna Eleanor (1906–1975), James (1907–1991), Franklin Delano, Jr. (March to November 1909), Elliott (1910–1990), a second Franklin Delano Jr. (1914–1988), and John Aspinwall (1916–1981). The five surviving Roosevelt children all led tumultuous lives overshadowed by their famous parents. They had between them fifteen marriages, ten divorces and twenty-nine children. All four sons were officers in World War II and were decorated, on merit, for bravery. Their postwar careers, whether in business or politics, were disappointing. Two of them were elected briefly to the House of Representatives but none attained higher office despite several attempts. One even became a Republican.

Political career

House of Representatives In 1910 he ran as a machine Democrat for the New York State Senate from the district around Hyde Park, which had not elected a Democrat since 1884. The Roosevelt name, a lot of Roosevelt money and the big Democratic sweep of that year were enough to get him elected. In the state capital Albany, he became leader of a group of reform Democrats who opposed the Irish-American Tammany Hall machine which dominated the state Democratic Party. Roosevelt was young (30 in 1912), tall, handsome, and well spoken, and soon became a popular figure among New York Democrats. When Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912, Roosevelt was offered the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt was more interested in elective office: in 1914 he ran for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, but was handily defeated in the primary by Tammany Hall-backed James W. Gerard. Nevertheless the Navy post was to be the making of his career. Between 1913 and 1917 Roosevelt campaigned to expand the Navy (in the face of considerable opposition from pacifists in the administration such as the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan), and founded the United States Navy Reserve to provide a pool of trained men who could be mobilized in wartime. He was also involved in the frequent American interventions in the affairs of Central American and Caribbean countries: he personally wrote the constitution which the U.S. imposed on Haiti in 1915. When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, Roosevelt became the effective administrative head of the United States Navy, since the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, had been appointed mainly for political reasons and was widely considered to be not up to the job. Roosevelt soon developed a life-long affection for the Navy. He also showed great administrative talent, and quickly learned to negotiate with Congress and other government departments to get budgets approved and a rapid expansion of the Navy pushed through. He became an enthusiastic advocate of the submarine, and also of means to combat the German submarine menace to Allied shipping: he proposed building a mine barrage across the North Sea from Norway to Scotland. In 1918 he visited Britain and France to inspect American naval facilities — during this visit he met Winston Churchill for the first time. With the end of the war in November 1918, he was in charge of demobilization, although he opposed plans to completely dismantle the Navy. The 1920 Democratic National Convention chose Roosevelt as the candidate for Vice-President of the United States on the ticket headed by Governor James M. Cox of Ohio. After eight years of Democratic government and twenty years of progressivism, however, the country was ready for a change, and the Cox-Roosevelt ticket was heavily defeated by Republican Warren Harding's Return to Normalcy. Roosevelt then retired to a New York legal practice, but few doubted that he would soon run for public office again.

Private crises

Return to Normalcy]] Roosevelt was a charismatic, handsome and socially active man, while his wife Eleanor was shy and retiring, and furthermore was almost constantly pregnant during the decade after 1906. Roosevelt soon found romantic outlets outside his marriage. One of these was Eleanor's social secretary Lucy Mercer, with whom Roosevelt began an affair soon after she was hired in early 1914. In September 1918, Eleanor found letters in Franklin's luggage which revealed the affair. Eleanor was both mortified and angry, and confronted him with the letters, presenting Franklin with an ultimatum: stop seeing Lucy or get a divorce. Franklin's mother Sara Roosevelt soon learned of the crisis, and decisively intervened. She argued that a divorce would ruin Roosevelt's political career, and pointed out that Eleanor would have to raise five children on her own if she divorced him. Since Sara was financially supporting the Roosevelts, this was a strong incentive to preserve the marriage. Eventually a deal was struck. The facade of the marriage would be preserved, but sexual relations would cease. Sara would pay for a separate home at Hyde Park for Eleanor, and she would also fund Eleanor's philanthropic interests. When Franklin became President—as Sara was always convinced he would—Eleanor would be able to use her position to support her causes. Eleanor accepted these terms, and in time Franklin and Eleanor developed a new relationship as friends and political colleagues, while living separate lives. Franklin continued to see various women, including his secretary Missy LeHand. In August 1921, while the Roosevelts were vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada Roosevelt was stricken with poliomyelitis, a viral infection of the nerve fibers of the spinal cord, probably contracted while swimming in the stagnant water of a nearby lake. The result was that Roosevelt was totally and permanently paralyzed from the waist down. At first the muscles of his abdomen and lower back were also affected, but these eventually recovered. Thus he could sit up and, with aid of leg-braces, stand upright, but he could not walk. Unlike in other forms of paraplegia, his bowels, bladder and sexual organs were not affected. Although the paralysis resulting from polio had no cure (and still does not, although the disease is now very rare in developed countries), for the rest of his life Roosevelt refused to accept that he was permanently paralyzed. He tried a wide range of therapies, but none had any effect. Nevertheless, he became convinced of the benefits of hydrotherapy, and in 1926 he bought a resort at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he founded a hydrotherapy center for the treatment of polio patients which still operates as the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation (with an expanded mission), and spent a lot of time there in the 1920s. This was in part to escape from his mother, who tried to resume control of his life following his illness. At a time when media intrusion in the private lives of public figures was much less intense than it is today, Roosevelt was able to convince many people that he was in fact getting better, which he believed was essential if he was to run for public office again. (The Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, says that "by careful exercises and treatments at Warm Springs he gradually recovered", although this is quite untrue). Fitting his hips and legs with iron braces, he laboriously taught himself to walk a short distance by swiveling his torso while supporting himself with a cane. In private he used a wheelchair, but he was careful never to be seen in it in public, although he sometimes appeared on crutches. He usually appeared in public standing upright, while being supported on one side by an aide or one of his sons. Despite his known dislike of being seen in a wheelchair, a statue of him in a wheelchair has been placed at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Governor of New York

By 1928 Roosevelt believed he had recovered sufficiently to resume his political career. He had been careful to maintain his contacts in the Democratic Party. In 1924 he had attended the Democratic Convention and made a presidential nomination speech for the Governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith. Although Smith was not nominated, in 1928 he ran again, and Roosevelt again supported him. This time he became the Democratic candidate, and he urged Roosevelt to run for Governor of New York. To gain the Democratic nomination, Roosevelt had to make his peace with Tammany Hall, which he did with some reluctance. At the November election, Smith was heavily defeated by the Republican Herbert Hoover, but Roosevelt was elected Governor by a margin of 25,000 votes out of 2.2 million. As a native of upstate New York he was able to appeal to voters outside New York City in a way other Democrats could not. Roosevelt came to office in 1929 as a reform Democrat, but with no overall plan for his administration. He tackled official corruption by sacking Smith's cronies and instituting a Public Service Commission, and took action to address New York's growing need for electricity through the development of hydroelectricity on the St. Lawrence River. He reformed the state's prison administration and built a new state prison at Attica. He had a long feud with Robert Moses, the state's most powerful public servant, whom he sacked as Secretary of State but kept on as Parks Commissioner and head of urban planning. When the Stock Market Crash in October ushered in the Great Depression, Roosevelt showed his usual energy and imagination in responding. The Hoover administration took the traditional Republican view that the federal government should not interfere with the free operations of the economy, and that the states and cities should carry the burden of unemployment relief. Roosevelt therefore asked the state legislature for $20 million in relief funds, which he spent mainly on public works in the hope of stimulating demand and providing employment. Aid to the unemployed, he said, "must be extended by Government, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty." Roosevelt knew little about economics, but he took advice from leading academics and social workers, and also from Eleanor, who had developed a network of friends in the welfare and labor fields and who took a close interest in social questions. On Eleanor's recommendation he appointed one of her friends, Frances Perkins, as Labor Secretary, and there was a sweeping reform of the labor laws. He established the first state relief agency under Harry Hopkins, who became a key advisor, and urged the legislature to pass an old age pension bill and an unemployment insurance bill. The main weakness of the Roosevelt administration was the blatant corruption of the Tammany Hall machine in New York City, where the Mayor, Jimmy Walker, was the puppet of Tammany boss John F. Curry and where corruption of all kinds was rife. Roosevelt had made his name as an opponent of Tammany, but he needed the machine's goodwill to be re-elected in 1930 and for a possible future presidential bid. Roosevelt fell back on the rather feeble line that the Governor could not interfere in the government of New York City. But as the 1930 election approached Roosevelt acted by setting up a judicial investigation into the corrupt sale of offices. This eventually resulted in Walker resigning and fleeing to Europe to escape prosecution. But Tammany Hall's power was not seriously affected. In 1930 Roosevelt was elected to a second term by a margin of more than 700,000 votes.

Election and first term as president

The 1932 presidential election campaign was conducted under the shadow of the Great Depression. Hoover was widely perceived as not doing enough to fight the Depression. During the campaign Roosevelt said: "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people", coining a slogan that was later adopted for his legislative program. Roosevelt and his Vice Presidential running mate, John N. Garner of Texas, won 57 percent of the vote and carried all but six states. In February 1933, while he was President-elect, Roosevelt had a brief holiday in Florida. In Miami an unemployed bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at Roosevelt, missing him but killing the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. Zangara, who was later executed, said he had shot at Roosevelt because "the capitalists killed my life." When Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933 the U.S. was in the depths of the worst depression in its history. Some 13 million people, a third of the workforce, were unemployed. Industrial production had fallen by more than half since 1929. In a country with few government social services, millions were living on the edge of starvation, and two million were homeless. The banking system seemed to be on the point of collapse. There were occasional outbreaks of violence, but most observers considered it remarkable that such an obvious breakdown of the capitalist system had not led to a rapid growth of socialism, communism, or fascism (as happened for example in Germany). Instead of adopting revolutionary solutions, the American people had turned to the Democrats and to a leader who had grown up in privilege. Roosevelt indeed had few systematic economic beliefs. He saw the Depression as mainly a matter of confidence—people had stopped spending, investing and employing labor because they were afraid to do so. As he put it in his inaugural address: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He therefore set out to restore confidence through a series of dramatic gestures. He called a "bank holiday" to prevent a threatened run on the banks and called an emergency session of Congress to stabilize the financial system. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created to guarantee the funds held in all banks in the Federal Reserve System, and thus prevent runs and bank failures. Roosevelt's series of radio speeches known as Fireside Chats presented his proposals to the American public. During the first hundred days of his administration, Roosevelt used his enormous prestige and the sense of impending disaster to force a series of bills through Congress, establishing and funding various new government agencies. These included the Emergency Relief Administration, which granted funds to the states for unemployment relief; the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to hire millions of unemployed to work on local projects; and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, with powers to increase farm prices and support struggling farmers. Following these emergency measures came the National Industrial Recovery Act which imposed an unprecedented amount of state regulation on industry, including fair practice codes and a guaranteed role for trade unions, in exchange for the repeal of anti-trust laws and huge amounts of financial assistance as a stimulus to the economy. Later came one of the largest pieces of state industrial enterprise in American history, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built dams and power stations, controlled floods, and improved agriculture in one of the poorest parts of the country. The repeal of prohibition also provided stimulus to the economy, while eliminating a major source of corruption. In 1933, USMC General Smedley Butler reported to Congress that there had been a failed fascist coup attempt against FDR by capitalist interests in reaction to the New Deal. This alleged attempt was known as the "Business Plot" or "The White House Putsch". After the 1934 Congressional elections, which gave the Democrats large majorities in both houses, there was a fresh surge of New Deal legislation, driven by the "brains trust" of young economists and social planners gathered in the White House, including Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell and Adolf Berle of Columbia University, attorney Basil O'Connor, economist Bernard Baruch and Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School. Eleanor Roosevelt, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins (the first female Cabinet Secretary) and Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace were also important influences. These measures included bills to regulate the stock market and prevent the corrupt practices which had led to the 1929 Crash; the Social Security Act, which established Social Security and promised economic security for the elderly, the poor and the sick; and the National Labor Relations Act, which established the rights of workers to organize unions, to engage in collective bargaining and to take part in strikes in support of their demands. The net effect of these measures was to restore confidence and optimism, allowing the country to begin the long process of recovery from the Depression. The popular belief is that Roosevelt's programs, collectively known as the New Deal, cured the Great Depression. Historians and economists debate over the extent to which this is true. It is widely accepted that the New Deal implemented many of the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, which advocated an interventionist government policy using fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate economic recessions and depressions. However, it is unknown whether Roosevelt was influenced by these theories directly, and questionable whether he really understood them. After a meeting with Keynes he once remarked that "He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist." The extent to which the large appropriations that Roosevelt extracted from Congress and spent on relief and assistance to industry provided a fiscal stimulus to revive the U.S. economy is also controversial. The economy recovered significantly during Roosevelt's first term, but fell back into recession 1937 and 1938 before making another recovery in 1939. While Gross National Product had surpassed its 1929 peak by the outbreak of World War II, unemployment remained about 15%. Some argue that this was mainly because the high tariff barriers erected in response to the Depression were not removed, and without a revival of international trade there could be no full recovery. It took the massive growth in government spending during World War II to fully eliminate the effects of the Depression and reduce unemployment to pre-Depression levels.

The second term

unemployment In the 1936 presidential election, Roosevelt campaigned on his New Deal programs against Kansas governor Alfred Landon, who accepted much of the New Deal but objected that it was hostile to business and involved too much waste. In a lopsided year, he won 61 percent of the vote and carried every state except Maine and Vermont. The New Deal Democrats won enough seats in Congress to outvote both the Republicans and the conservative Southern Democrats (who supported programs which brought benefits for their states but opposed measures which strengthened labor unions). Roosevelt was backed by a coalition of voters which included traditional Democrats across the country, small farmers, the "Solid South", Catholics, big city machines, labor unions, northern African-Americans, Jews, intellectuals and political liberals. This coalition, frequently referred to as the New Deal coalition, remained largely intact for the Democratic Party until the 1960s. The Roosevelt ascendancy also prevented the growth of both communism and fascism. Roosevelt's second term agenda included an act creating the United States Housing Authority (1937), a second Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which created the minimum wage. When the economy began to deteriorate again in late 1937, Roosevelt responded with an aggressive program of stimulation, asking Congress for $5 billion for relief and public works programs. With the Republicans powerless in Congress, the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court was the only obstacle to Roosevelt's programs. During 1935 the Court ruled that the National Recovery Act and some other pieces of New Deal legislation were unconstitutional. Roosevelt's response was to propose enlarging the Court so that he could appoint more sympathetic judges. This "court packing" plan was the first Roosevelt scheme to run into serious political opposition, since it seemed to upset the separation of powers which is one of the cornerstones of the American constitutional structure. Eventually Roosevelt was forced to abandon the plan, but the Court also drew back from confrontation with the administration by finding the Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act to be constitutional. Deaths and retirements on the Supreme Court soon allowed Roosevelt to make his own appointments to the bench. Between 1937 and 1941 he appointed eight justices to the court, including liberals such as Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, reducing the possibility of further clashes.

Foreign policy 1933-41

The rejection of the League of Nations treaty in 1919 marked the dominance of isolationism in American foreign policy. Despite his Wilsonian background, Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, acted with great care not to provoke isolationist sentiment. The main foreign policy initiative of Roosevelt's first term was the Good Neighbor Policy, a re-evaluation of American policy towards Latin America, which ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had been seen as an American sphere of influence. American forces were withdrawn from Haiti, and new treaties with Cuba and Panama ended their status as American protectorates. At the Seventh International Conference of American States in Montevideo in December 1933, Roosevelt and Hull signed the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, renouncing the assumed American right to intervene unilaterally in the affairs of Latin American countries. Nevertheless, the realities of American support for various Latin American dictators, often to serve American corporate interests, remained unchanged. It was Roosevelt who made the often-quoted remark about the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza: "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany aroused fears of a new world war. In 1935, at the time of Fascist Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, Congress passed the Neutrality Act, applying a mandatory ban on the shipment of arms from the U.S. to any combatant nation. Roosevelt opposed the act on the grounds that it penalized the victims of aggression such as Abyssinia, and that it restricted his right as President to assist friendly countries, but he eventually signed it. In 1937 Congress passed an even more stringent Act, but when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937 Roosevelt found various ways to assist China, and warned that Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were threats to world peace and to the U.S. When World War II in Europe broke out in 1939, Roosevelt became increasingly eager to assist Britain and France, and he began a regular secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, in which the two freely discussed ways of circumventing the Neutrality Acts. In May 1940 Germany attacked France and rapidly occupied the country, leaving Britain vulnerable to German air attack and possible invasion. Roosevelt was determined to prevent this and sought to shift public opinion in favor of aiding Britain. He secretly aided a private body, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and he appointed two anti-isolationist Republicans, Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox, as Secretaries of War and the Navy respectively. The fall of Paris shocked American opinion, and isolationist sentiment declined. In August, Roosevelt openly defied the Neutrality Acts with the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, which gave 50 American destroyers to Britain and Canada in exchange for base rights in the British Caribbean islands. This was a precursor of the March 1941 Lend-Lease agreement which began to direct massive military and economic aid to Britain.

The path to war

At the 1938 Congressional elections the Republicans staged their first comeback since 1932, gaining seats in both Houses and reducing Roosevelt's ability to pass legislation at will. Roosevelt's campaign to have conservative Democratic Senators such as Walter F. George of Georgia replaced by pro-Administration candidates was defeated. This increased speculation that Roosevelt would retire in 1940. No American President had ever sought a third term in office, following a precedent set by George Washington (it was to become more than a precedent when the 22nd Amendment, which "limits Presidential service to two terms", was ratified in 1951). During 1940, however, with the international situation growing increasingly threatening, Roosevelt decided that only he could lead the nation through the coming crisis. Republicans (and some others) said that this was a sign of his increasing arrogance. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's huge personal popularity allowed him to be re-elected with 55 percent of the vote and 38 of the 48 states, defeating Indiana lawyer Wendell Willkie. A shift to the left within the Administration was shown by the adoption of Henry A. Wallace as his Vice President in place of the conservative Southerner John N. Garner. Roosevelt's third term was dominated by World War II, first in Europe and then in the Pacific. The massive re-armament program begun in 1938, partly to expand and re-equip the United States Army and Navy and partly to support Britain, France, China and other friendly states, finally provided the Keynesian economic stimulus which was needed to revive the economy. From 1939, unemployment fell rapidly, as the unemployed either joined the armed forces or found work in arms factories. By 1941 there was actually a labor shortage in the arms manufacturing centers of Chicago and Detroit, accelerating the Great Migration of African-American workers from the Southern states. The most pressing issue was the urgent necessity of assisting Britain, whose financial resources were exhausted by the end of 1940. Congress, where isolationist sentiment was in retreat, passed the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, allowing Britain to "lease" huge amounts of military equipment on the basis of a promise that they would be paid for after the war. Britain was also forced to agree to dismantle preferential trade arrangements that kept American exports out of the British Empire. This underlined the point that the war aims of the U.S. and Britain were not the same. Roosevelt was a lifelong free trader and anti-imperialist, and ending European colonialism was one of his objectives. This did not prevent the forming of a close personal relationship with Churchill, who became British Prime Minister in May 1940. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Roosevelt extended Lend-Lease to the Soviets. During 1941 Roosevelt also agreed that the U.S. Navy would escort Allied convoys as far east as Iceland, and would fire on German ships or submarines if they attacked Allied shipping within the U.S. Navy zone. Thus by mid-1941 Roosevelt had committed the U.S. to the Allied side with a policy of "all aid short of war." Roosevelt met with Churchill on August 14, 1941 to develop the Atlantic Charter in what was to be the first of several strategic war conferences.

Pearl Harbor

conferences Roosevelt was less keen to involve the U.S. in the war developing in East Asia, where Japan occupied French Indo-China in late 1940. He authorized increased aid to China, and in July 1941 he restricted the sales of oil and other strategic materials to Japan, but also continued negotiations with the Japanese government in the hope of averting war. Through 1941 the Japanese planned their attack on the western powers, including the U.S., while spinning out the negotiations in Washington. The "hawks" in the Administration, led by Stimson and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, were in favor of a tough policy towards Japan, but Roosevelt, emotionally committed to the war in Europe, refused to believe that Japan might attack the U.S. and favored continued negotiations. The U.S. Ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, passed on warnings about the planned attack on the American Pacific Fleet's base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, but these were ignored by the State Department. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, damaging most of it and killing 3,000 American personnel. The American commanders at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and General Walter Short, were taken completely by surprise, and were later made scapegoats for this disaster. The fault really lay with the War Department in Washington, who since August 1940 had been able to read the Japanese diplomatic codes and had thus been given ample warning of the imminence of the attack (though not of its actual date). In later investigations, the War Department claimed that it had not passed warnings on to the commanders in Hawaii because its analysts refused to believe that the Japanese would really have the effrontery to attack the United States. Conspiracy theories have abounded that Roosevelt knew of the planned attack on Pearl Harbor but did nothing to prevent it so that the U.S. could be brought into the war as a result of being attacked. It wasn't until the 1990's that documents such as the McCollum memo (of 1940) were declassified, showing that the Roosevelt administration did actively seek to enter into a war with Japan, in order to ally themselves with the British against Germany. Due to strong isolationist sentiment among the U.S. populace, the administration sought to provoke the Japanese to attack, by using British and Dutch military bases in Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, aiding the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek, sending cruisers and submarines to the Pacific, keeping the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands, and bringing about a trade embargo to Japan, particularly on oil. On 5 December the Cabinet discussed the mounting intelligence evidence that the Japanese were mobilizing for war. Navy Secretary Knox told the Cabinet of the decoded messages showing that the Japanese fleet was at sea, but stated his opinion that it was heading south to attack the British in Malaya and Singapore, and to seize the oil resources of the Dutch East Indies. Roosevelt and the rest of the Cabinet seemed to accept this view. Japanese messages of an attack on Pearl Harbor were intercepted, and there is evidence that Roosevelt was made aware of them. Unresponsiveness in the face of an imminent Japanese attack was attributed to delays in translating and passing on these messages through the inefficient War Department bureaucracy. The Japanese took advantage of their pre-emptive destruction of most of the Pacific Fleet to rapidly occupy the Philippines and all the British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia, taking Singapore in February 1942 and advancing through Burma to the borders of British India by May, thus cutting off the overland supply route to China. Pearl Harbor was followed immediately by declarations of war on the U.S. by Germany and Italy. Isolationism evaporated overnight and the country united behind Roosevelt as a wartime leader. Despite the wave of anger that swept across the U.S. in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt decided from the start that the defeat of Nazi Germany had to take priority. Fortunately, in a major foreign policy blunder, Nazi Germany played directly into Roosevelt's hands when it declared war against the USA on December 11 which removed any meaningful opposition to fighting the Third Reich. He met with Churchill in late December and planned a broad alliance between the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union, with the objectives of, first, halting the German advances in the Soviet Union and in North Africa; second, launching an invasion of western Europe with the aim of crushing Nazi Germany between two fronts, and only third turning to the task of defeating Japan. Although Roosevelt was constitutionally the Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces, he had never worn a uniform and he did not interfere in operational military matters in anything like the way Churchill did in Britain, let alone take direct command of the forces as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin did. He placed great trust in the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, and later in his Supreme Commander in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, and left almost all strategic and tactical decisions to them, within the broad framework for the conduct of the war decided by the Cabinet in agreement with the other Allied powers. He had less confidence in his commander in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, who he rightly suspected of planning to run for President against him. But since the war in the Pacific was mainly a naval war, this did not greatly matter until later in the war. Given his close personal interest in the Navy, Roosevelt tended to intervene more in naval matters, but strong Navy commanders like Admirals Ernest King in the Atlantic theater and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific enjoyed his confidence.

Japanese-American internment

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War, Roosevelt came under immediate pressure to remove or intern the estimated 120,000 people of Japanese origin or descent living in California, two-thirds of which were American-born, on the grounds that they were a threat to security. Pressure came from Democratic Governor of California Culbert Olson, the Hearst newspapers and General John L. DeWitt, the U.S. Army Commander in California, whose simple attitude was that "a Jap is a Jap." Opponents of the suggestion were Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, Attorney-General Francis Biddle and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who said that there was no evidence of Japanese-American involvement in espionage or sabotage. To date, none has ever been proved. [http://www.army.mil/CMH-PG/BOOKS/70-7_05.htm] On February 7, 1942 Biddle met with Roosevelt and set out the Justice Department's objections to the proposal. Roosevelt then ordered that a plan be drawn up to evacuate the Japanese-Americans from California in the event of a landing or air attacks on the West Coast by Japan, but not otherwise. But on February 11 he met with Secretary of War Stimson, who persuaded him to approve an immediate evacuation. There was evidence of espionage on behalf of Japan in the U.S. before and after Pearl Harbor; code-breakers decrypted messages to Japan from agents in North America and Hawaii. These MAGIC cables were kept secret from all but those with the highest clearance, such as Roosevelt, lest the Japanese discover the decryption and change their code. On February 19, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to relocate people from "combat zones" (such as California) on security grounds, without specifically mentioning the Japanese-Americans. As a result, 120,000 people, half of them U.S. citizens, were interned without charge or trial. Roosevelt also wanted the 140,000 Japanese-Americans in Hawaii deported to the mainland, but the territorial authorities, including the Army, objected on the grounds that they were indispensable to the Islands' economy, and the plan was dropped. Japanese-Americans continued to serve in the U.S. armed forces throughout the war; the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was composed almost entirely of formerly interned Japanese-Americans and remains the most highly decorated unit in U.S. military history. Conditions in the camps, in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, were tolerable by most accounts (and quite pleasant according to others ), but detainees naturally resented being detained and there were repeated disturbances in the camps, which resulted in 15,000 people being interned in a higher-security center at Tule Lake, California. In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the executive order, which remained in force until December of that year. By contrast, there was no mass internment of German-Americans or Italian-Americans. Out of 60 million Americans of German descent, only 11,000, some American citizens, were placed in internment camps. As well, about 4,000 German nationals were deported from Central American countries for internment in the U.S. Interior Secretary Ickes lobbied Roosevelt through 1944 to release the Japanese-American internees, but Roosevelt did not act until after the November presidential election. A fight for Japanese-American civil rights would have meant a fight with influential Democrats, the Army, and the Hearst press and would have endangered Roosevelt's chances of winning California in 1944. Critics of Roosevelt's actions believe they were motivated in part by racism. In 1925 he had written about Japanese immigration: "Californians have properly objected on the sound basic grounds that Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population... Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European and American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results." But when activating the 442nd RCT on February 1, 1943, Roosevelt said, "No loyal citizen of the United States should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship, regardless of his ancestry. The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry."

Civil rights and refugees

Roosevelt's attitudes to race were also tested by the issue of African-American (or "Negro", to use the term of the time) service in the armed forces. The Democratic Party at this time was dominated by Southerners who were opposed to any concession to demands for racial equality. During the New Deal years, there had been a series of conflicts over whether African-Americans were eligible for the various government benefits and programs. Typically, the young idealists who ran the programs tried to make these benefits available regardless of race. Southern Governors or Congressmen would then complain to Roosevelt, who would to keep his party together intervene to uphold segregation. The Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, for example, segregated their work forces by race at Roosevelt's insistence after Southern governors protested at unemployed whites being required to work alongside blacks. Roosevelt's personal racial attitudes were conventional for his time and class. He was not a visceral racist, but he accepted the common stereotype of African-Americans (whom he had little contact with in his entire life) as lazy, if good-natured, children just as they were shown in popular entertainment. He did little to advance civil rights, despite prodding from Eleanor and liberals in his Cabinet such as Frances Perkins. Roosevelt explained his reluctance to support anti-lynching legislation in a conversation with Walter White of the NAACP. "I did not choose the tools with which I must work. Had I been permitted to choose then I would have selected quite different ones. But I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk." Despite Roosevelt's apparent inability to support civil rights, he was still perceived as a black-friendly threat in the American South. A popular anti-Roosevelt song declared: "You kiss the niggers / I'll kiss the Jews / We'll stay in the White House / As long as we choose." The war brought the issue to the forefront. The armed forces had been segregated ever since the Civil War. African-Americans in the Army served only in rear-echelon or service roles, the Navy was almost entirely white and the Marine Corps wholly so. Neither the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, nor the Navy Secretary, Frank Knox, were Southerners (Stimson came from a New York abolitionist family), but they were aware that the officer corps of both services were drawn heavily from Southern military families,

William D. Leahy

For information about the Boston College president see William P. Leahy, SJ. William Daniel Leahy (May 6, 1875 – July 20, 1959) was an American naval officer and the first such officer ever to hold the rank of Fleet Admiral and the first ever to hold five-star rank in the U.S. armed forces. Leahy was born in Hampton, Iowa and educated at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, from which he graduated in 1897. Leahy saw service in the Spanish-American War (1898), the Philippines (1899-91), China (1900), Nicaragua (1912), Haiti (1916) and Mexico (1916). During the First World War Leahy was captain of the dispatch boat used by future U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The two men became close friends for the rest of their lives. By 1936 Leahy had reached the rank of admiral and the following year he became Chief of Naval Operations and held the post until he retired from the United States Navy in August 1939. From September 1939 until November 1940, Leahy served as Governor of Puerto Rico. After the surrender of France, Leahy was appointed American ambassador to Vichy France, the regime ruling over the south of France and the French overseas empire. Leahy's goal was to persuade the Vichy government to rejoin the war against Hitler, but he was entirely unsuccessful. He was recalled in May 1942. After the United States entered World War II, President Roosevelt decided he needed a senior military officer as personal adviser and point of contact with his three service chiefs, Admiral Ernest King of the Navy, General George Marshall of the Army and General Henry Arnold of the Army Air Forces. The service chiefs resisted this move until Marshall suggested that only Leahy would be accepted in this post. On July 6, 1942, Leahy was appointed Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief, U.S. Army and Navy, the President of the United States. He was effectively the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he held during most of World War II. However, his actual title was Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. The first person to formally be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was Leahy's successor, General of the Army Omar Bradley. Leahy was appointed the first US Fleet Admiral on December 15, 1944. He was critical of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that in his eyes were "of no material assistance in our war against Japan". His feeling was that "in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." Leahy resigned in March 1949 and the following year published his war memoirs, I Was There. Fleet Admiral Leahy died at Bethesda Naval Hospital on July 20, 1959. Leahy's name resurfaced in early April 2004 when it was discussed in the media whether or not National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice should testify in front of a congressional panel investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks. This resulted from a photo of Leahy testifying in 1945 to a congressional panel investigating the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, thus demonstrating a precedent for Rice's testimony.

External link

- [http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/paw/192.html President Roosevelt to the Appointed Ambassador to France (Leahy) December 20, 1940]
- [http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/documents/index.php?pagenumber=2&documentid=49&documentdate=1945-08-02&studycollectionid=abomb&groupid= Chronology regarding Truman and the a-bomb from 8/2/45 - 8/10/45 with Smyth report on atomic bomb released, August 6, 1951]
- [http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq36-2.htm US Navy Historic Center biography of William Leahy] Leahy, William Leahy, William Leahy, William Leahy, William Leahy, William Leahy, William Leahy, William ja:ウィリアム・リーヒ

Ernest J King

Fleet Admiral Ernest Joseph King (November 23, 1878 – June 25, 1956) was Commander in Chief, United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations (COMINCH-CNO) during World War II. As such, he was in charge of all the United States Navy's operations, planning, and administration and was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was Chester Nimitz's immediate superior but was himself subordinate to Secretaries of the Navy Frank Knox and James Forrestal.

Career

King was born in Lorain, Ohio. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy from 1897 until 1901. During that period, he also served a stint aboard the USS San Francisco during the Spanish American War. During the early years of the 20th century through to the end of World War I he held various positions which gave him an in-depth knowledge of the battleships and surface fleet strategies. Between 1919 and 1925 he held a number of posts which placed him in intimate contact with submarine operations. In 1926 he took command of the aircraft tender USS Wright with additional duties as Senior Aide on the Staff of Commander Air Squadrons, Atlantic Fleet. In January of 1927 he began flying lessons and was designated Naval Aviator 3368 in May of that year, when he resumed command of the Wright. He remained in command of her, with a brief interlude to command the salvage operations of USS S-4, until 1929 when he was assigned command of the Naval Air Station, Norfolk, Virginia. In June 1930, he went to sea in command of the carrier USS Lexington which he commanded for the next two years. In 1932 he spent a year in the senior officers' course at the Naval War College. In 1933 he was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral, and as a great proponent of the aircraft carrier, he was assigned to the position of Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. In 1936 until 1940 commanded various aircraft forces. During this time in 1938 he was promoted to Vice Admiral. In 1940 he spent a year on the General Board and in February 1941, he was promoted to the rank of Admiral and assigned as Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet. This was the position he held when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the U.S. On 30 December 1941 he became Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet. On 18 March 1942 he took on the additional duties of Chief of Naval Operations when he relieved Admiral Stark of the position. He is the only person to hold this combined command. On 17 December 1944 he was advanced to the newly created rank of Fleet Admiral. He retired a year later, on December 15, 1945.

Dates of rank

- Naval Cadet: 1897
- Passed Midshipman: 1901
- Ensign: June 7, 1903
- Lieutenant Junior Grade: Not Held
- Lieutenant: June 7, 1906
- Lieutenant Commander: July 1, 1913
- Commander: July 1, 1917
- Captain: September 21, 1918
- Commodore: Not Held
- Rear Admiral: November 1, 1933
- Vice Admiral: January 29, 1938
- Admiral: February 1, 1941
- Fleet Admiral: December 17, 1944 At the time of Ernest King's promotion to Rear Admiral, the U.S. Navy did not maintain a one star rank. King was thus promoted directly from Captain to Two Star Admiral. Admiral King also never held the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade although, for administrative reasons, his service record annotates his promotion to Lieutenant, and Lieutenant J.G., on the same day.

Awards and decorations

- Navy Cross
- Navy Distinguished Service Medal (w/two gold stars)
- Spanish Campaign Medal
- Sampson Medal
- Mexican Service Medal
- World War I Victory Medal (w/Atlantic Fleet campaign clasp)
- American Defense Service Medal (w/Atlantic Device)
- American Campaign Medal
- World War II Victory Medal
- National Defense Service Medal Fleet Admiral King was also the recipient of several foreign awards and decorations.

Analysis

King was intelligent and extremely capable. He is considered by some to have been one of the greatest admirals of the 20th century. On the other hand, he was rude and incredibly abrasive; as a result, King was loathed by the officers with whom he served.

He was... perhaps the most disliked Allied leader of World War II. Only British Field Marshal Montgomery may have had more enemies... King also loved parties and often drank to excess. Apparently, he reserved his charm for the wives of fellow naval officers. On the job, he "seemed always to be angry or annoyed." (John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan, ISBN 0-87249-972-3).

There was a tongue-in-cheek remark carried about by Naval personnel at the time that "Admiral King was the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy: He was angry 100% of the time!"
Roosevelt once described King as "... a man who shaves with a blow torch". At the start of US involvement in World War II King made the decision not to request blackouts on the eastern seaboard and not to convoy ships. Instead of convoys, King had the U.S Navy and Coast Guard go out on regular patrols; because these patrols occurred on a regular schedule, the U-boats learned the schedule, submerged when the patrols were out and came out when the patrols were in port. Leaving the lights on had the effect of illuminating merchant ships to the U-Boats. As a result of these policies the attacks by the German U-boats on U.S. coastal shipping during the Second Battle of the Atlantic became known by German crews as the "second happy time". It was not until convoys were introduced in May 1942 that the "second happy time" came to an end, with the loss of seven U-boats. This proved that King's initial decision in this matter was flawed. Many blame King's Anglophobia for these decisions as the convoys and turning off the city's lights were British ideas, and King was loath to have his much-beloved U.S Navy adopt any ideas from the Royal Navy. Of all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, King was absolutely the most dedicated to immediate victory in the Pacific, and the greatest critic of the "Europe first" strategy. He constantly argued that resources should be diverted to the Pacific War, hence his reputation as an anglophobe. Following Japan's defeat at the Battle of Midway, while the other Joint Chiefs urged that the Allies should fight a holding action to concentrate resources against Germany, King advocated the invasion of Guadalcanal. He won the argument, and the invasion went ahead. It was ultimately successful, and was the first time the Japanese lost ground during the War. General Hastings Ismay, chief of staff to Winston Churchill, described King as:

"tough as nails and carried himself as stiffly as a poker. He was blunt and stand-offish, almost to the point of rudeness. At the start, he was intolerant and suspicious of all things British, especially the Royal Navy; but he was almost equally intolerant and suspicious of the American Army. War against Japan was the problem to which he had devoted the study of a lifetime, and he resented the idea of American resources being used for any other purpose than to destroy Japanese. He mistrusted Churchill's powers of advocacy, and was apprehensive that he would wheedle President Roosevelt into neglecting the war in the Pacific."

Other

The USS King (DL-10) was named in his honor. Also, a major high school in his hometown of Lorain, Ohio bears his name -- Admiral King High School.

External links

- [http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq36-3.htm Ernest King biography on Official US Navy website] King, Ernest King, Ernest King, Ernest King, Ernest King, Ernest King, Ernest King, Ernest ja:アーネスト・キング

National Security Act of 1947

The National Security Act of 1947 signed July 26, 1947 by U.S. President Harry S. Truman realigned and reorganized the United States' armed forces, foreign policy, and Intelligence Community apparatus in the aftermath of World War II. It merged the United States Department of War and the United States Department of the Navy into the United States Department of Defense headed by the Secretary of Defense. It was also responsible for the creation of a separate United States Air Force from the existing United States Army Air Forces. Initially, each of the three branches maintained quasi-cabinet status through their individual secretaries, but the act was amended in 1949 to assure their subordination to the Secretary of Defense. Aside from the military reorganization, the act established the National Security Council, a central place of coordination for national security policy in the Executive Branch, and the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States' first peacetime intelligence agency. The act and its changes, along with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, were major components of the Truman administration's Cold War strategy. Category:Legal history of the United States Category:National Security Council Category:Espionage Category:1947 in law

Goldwater-Nichols Act

The Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 (PL 99-433) focused the chain of command in military operations undertaken by the United States Department of Defense from the President through the Secretary of Defense directly to unified combat commanders, bypassing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are assigned an advisory role. It passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 383-27 and the Senate by a vote of 95-0. It was signed into law by President Reagan on October 1, 1986. The bill is named after Senator Barry Goldwater and Representative Bill Nichols and furthered the reorganization of the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense begun with the National Security Act of 1947. The Goldwater-Nichols act of 1986 completely reorganized the United States military command structure in the most far-reaching organizational change since the creation of the Air Force as a separate entity in 1947. The Goldwater-Nichols Act was motivated by major problems that inter-service rivalry had caused during United States military operations in the 1970s and 1980s. These had emerged as a problem during the Vietnam War, had contributed to the catastrophic failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission in 1980, and were still evident in the invasion of Grenada in 1983. Until 1947, there were two independent lines of command from the President, one through the Secretary of the Navy to naval forces, and the other through the Secretary of War to land forces. World War II provided many examples where interservice rivalry caused problems, and in 1947 there was a reorganization by which all military forces including the newly formed United States Air Force would report to a single civilian Secretary of Defense. However, the United States military was still organized along lines of command that reported to their respective service chiefs (Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Air Force, and Chief of Naval Operations). These chiefs in turn made up the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff elected a Chairman to communicate with the civilian government. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in turn reported to the Secretary of Defense, the civilian head of the military. Both the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense reported to the President of the United States, who holds the position of commander-in-chief of all U.S. armed forces. This system led to serious counter-productive inter-service rivalry. Peacetime activities (such as procurement and creation of doctrine, etc.) were tailored for each service in isolation. Just as seriously, wartime activities of each service were planned, executed, and evaluated independently. These practices resulted in division of effort, the inability to profit from economies of scale, and inhibited the development of modern warfare doctrine. The formulation of the AirLand Battle doctrine in the late 1970s and early 1980s laid bare the difficulty of coordinating efforts among various service branches. AirLand Battle attempted to synthesize all of the capabilities of the service arms of the military into a single doctrine. The system envisioned ground, naval, air, and space based systems acting in concert to attack and defeat an opponent in depth. The structure of the armed forces effectively blocked realization of this ideal. The US invasion of Grenada in 1983 further exposed the problems with the military command structure. Although the United States forces easily prevailed, its leaders expressed major concerns over both the inability of the different service branches to coordinate and communicate with each other, and the consequences of a lack of coordination if faced with a more threatening foe. Under the Goldwater-Nichols Act, military advice was centralized in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as opposed to the service chiefs. The Chairman was designated as the principal military advisor to the President of the United States, National Security Council and Secretary of Defense. The act also established the position of Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and simplified the chain of command. It increased the ability of the Chairman to direct overall strategy, but provided greater command authority to "unified" and "specified" field commanders. The Chairman may not exercise military command over the Joint Chiefs of Staff or any of the armed forces. (section 152c of the Act) Goldwater-Nichols changed the way the services interact. Rather than reporting to a service chief, each service reported to a commander responsible for a specific function (Transportation, Space, Special Operations), or a geographic region of the globe (Europe, Middle East, etc.), known as the commander-in-chief (CINC) (pronounced "sink"). The combined arms commander then fielded a force capable of employing AirLand Battle doctrine (or its successors) using all assets available to the military. The restructuring afforded a combination of effort, integrated planning, shared procurement, and a reduction or elimination in inter-service rivalry between commanders. It also provided unity of command, comporting with Military Science. Individual services changed from war fighting entities into organizational and training units, responsible for readiness. Thus CENTCOM (Central Command) for example, would be assigned air, ground, and naval assets in order to achieve its objective, not the inefficient method of individual services planning, supporting, and fighting the same war. Shared procurement allowed the various branches to share technological advances such as stealth and smart weapons quickly and provided other ancillary benefits (such as the interoperability of radios between services, heretofore unknown in the military). Joint implementation of new technology allowed for joint development of supporting doctrine. The first successful test of Goldwater-Nichols was the 1991 Gulf War ("Operation Desert Storm"), where it functioned exactly as planned, allowing the U.S. commander, Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, to exercise full control over Army, Air Force and Navy assets without having to negotiate with the individual services. On October 29, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the functional and regional commanders be referred to not as CINC but as "combatant commander" when applied to to "unified" regional organizations (e.g., USCENTCOM), or "commander" when talking about "specified" units such as the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). Rumsfeld's reason was his belief that the use of the term CINC drew unfavorable comparisons to the President of the United States, enshrined in the Constitution as the only Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Changing the title was designed to properly clarify the military's role vis-à-vis the civilian government.

External links

[http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/congress/title_10.htm Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986] Category:1986 in law

President of the United States of America

The President of the United States (unofficially abbreviated "POTUS") is the head of state of the United States. Under the U.S. Constitution, the President is also the chief executive of the federal government and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. The full title is President of the United States of America. Because of the superpower status of the United States, the American President is widely considered to be the most powerful person on Earth, and is usually one of the world's best-known public figures. During the Cold War, the President was sometimes referred to as "the leader of the free world," a phrase that is still invoked today. The United States was the first nation to create the office of President as the head of state in a modern republic. Today the office is widely emulated all over the world in nations with a presidential system of government. Many countries with a parliamentary system also have an office named "president", but the roles of this office vary widely, and the President in such systems usually has far more limited powers than the Prime Minister. The 43rd and current President of the United States is George W. Bush. His first term ran from January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2005; his second term began on January 20, 2005 and ends on January 20, 2009; and President Bush is constitutionally barred from a third term.

Requirements to hold office

Section One of Article II of the U.S. Constitution establishes the requirements one must meet in order to become President. The president must be a natural-born citizen of the United States (or a citizen of the United States at the time the U.S. Constitution was adopted), be at least 35 years old, and have been a resident of the United States for 14 years. The natural-born citizenship requirement has been the subject of controversy. Critics argue that this requirement arbitrarily excludes some highly qualified candidates for the Presidency. They also charge that supporters fail to appreciate the contributions made by immigrants to American society. Proponents of the requirement argue that the requirement helps to ensure that the President fully understands and is a part of the American people and their outlook. Proponents also argue that the clause helps protect the country from foreign interference—another country could send an emigrant to the United States and through subterfuge get them elected. Many prominent public officials, such as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA; born in Austria) and Governor Jennifer Granholm (D-MI; born in Canada), are barred from the presidency because they were not natural-born citizens. Constitutional amendments are occasionally proposed to remove or modify this requirement, but none have been successful.

Election

Presidential elections are held every four years. Presidents are elected indirectly, through the Electoral College. The President and the Vice President are the only two nationally elected officials in the United States. (Legislators are elected on a state-by-state basis; other executive officers and judges are appointed.)

Old system

Originally, each elector voted for two people for President. The votes were tallied and the person receiving the greatest number of votes (provided that such a number was a majority of electors) became President, while the individual who was in second place became Vice President.

Current system

The Amendment XII in 1804 changed the electoral process by directing the electors to use separate ballots to vote for the President and Vice President. To be elected, a candidate must receive a majority of electoral votes, or if no candidate receives a majority, the President and Vice President are chosen by the House of Representatives and Senate, respectively, as necessary.

Campaign

The modern Presidential election process begins with the primary elections, during which the major parties (currently the Democrats and the Republicans) each select a nominee to unite behind; the nominee in turn selects a running mate to join him on the ticket as the Vice Presidential candidate. The two major candidates then face off in the general election, usually participating in nationally televised debates before Election Day and campaigning across the country to explain their views and plans to the voters. Much of the modern electoral process is concerned with winning swing states, through frequent visits and mass media advertising drives.

Inauguration and oath of office

mass media Since 1933, with the ratification of Amendment XX, a newly elected President, or a re-elected incumbent, is sworn into office on January 20 of the year following the election, an event called Inauguration Day. Although the Chief Justice of the United States usually administers the presidential oath of office, the Constitution does not specify any requirements; thus, anyone with the legal authority to administer oaths can perform the duty. In accordance with Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 8 of the Constitution, upon entering office, the President must take the following oath or affirmation: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Only presidents Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover have chosen to affirm rather than swear. The oath is traditionally ended with, "So help me God," although for religious reasons some Presidents have said, "So help me", or "and thus I swear." On Inauguration Day, following the oath of office, the President customarily delivers an inaugural address which sets the tone for his administration. These addresses can reach the level of high oratory, from such stand-alone lines as Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," to entire speeches, such as Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.

Term(s) of office

Under the Constitution, the President serves a four-year term. Amendment XXII (which took effect in 1951 and was first applied to Dwight D. Eisenhower starting in 1953) limits the president to either two four-year terms or a maximum of ten years in office should he have succeeded to the Presidency previously and served two years at most completing his predecessor's term. Since then, three presidents have served two full terms: Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Incumbent President George W. Bush would become the fourth if he completes his current (and second) term in 2009. (Richard Nixon was elected to a second term but resigned before completing it.)

Succession

The United States presidential line of succession is a detailed list of government officials to serve or act as President upon a vacancy in the office due to death, resignation, or removal from office (by impeachment and conviction). impeachment, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy]] The line of 17 begins with the Vice President and ends with the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Legislation to add the Secretary of Homeland Security to the line of succession is pending in Congress. The Constitution provided that, if a President were to die, resign, or be removed from office, the "powers and duties" of the office would devolve upon the Vice President, Article II, Section 1 (which seems to imply the position of acting president), and that he [Vice President] shall "exercise the office of President of the United States," Article I, Section 2 (which seems to imply actual assumption of the presidency itself). People did not agree as to the exact meaning and intention of the text, and whether the Vice President would succeed to the office of President or merely act as President. After the death of William Henry Harrison, however, Vice President John Tyler asserted that he had become the President, not merely Acting President, and this precedent was followed in all subsequent cases. The 25th amendment eliminated this ambiguity by confirming that the Vice President fully becomes President, not Acting President, if the presidency becomes vacant. It sets the Vice President first in the line of succession and spells out a process for him to serve as Acting President should the President become temporarily disabled. A provision of the United States Code () establishes the rest of the succession line. To date, no officer other than the Vice President has been called upon to act as President.

Powers

The President, according to the Constitution, must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." To carry out this responsibility, the president presides over the executive branch of the federal government; a vast organization of about 4 million people, including 1 million active-duty military personnel. A President-elect will make as many as 6,000 appointments to government positions, including appointments to the federal judiciary. The Senate must consent to all judicial appointments as well as the appointments of all principal officers. The President may veto laws made by the United States Congress but cannot personally initiate laws. Congress can overturn the veto with a two-thirds majority in both houses. He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The President may make treaties, but the Senate must ratify them by a two-thirds supermajority. The political scientist Richard Neustadt said, "Presidential power is the power to persuade and the power to persuade is the ability to bargain". He was commenting on the fact that the President's domestically constitutional power is limited, despite the modern expectation of Presidents to have a legislative program, and successful bargaining with Congress is usually essential to Presidential success.

Presidential salary and benefits

Salary

The First U.S. Congress voted to pay George Washington a salary of $25,000 a year—a significant sum in 1789. (Washington, already a successful man, refused to accept his salary.) Traditionally, the President is the highest-paid government employee. Consequently, the President's salary serves as a traditional cap for all other federal officials, such as the Chief Justice. A raise for 2001 was approved by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1999 because other officials who receive annual cost-of-living increases had salaries approaching the President's. Consequently, to raise the salaries of the other federal employees, the President's salary had to be raised as well. While far higher than the median wage in the United States, in modern times the President's salary is paltry compared to the Chief Executive Officers of many publicly-listed companies, and indeed modern Presidents have typically earned far more in the corporate world after the end of their term than they did as President.

Residences

Chief Executive Officer Among the many non-salary benefits are living and working in the White House mansion in Washington, DC The President's principal workplace and official residence is the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW in Washington, DC. His official vacation or weekend residence is Camp David in Maryland. Many presidents have also had their own homes.

Travelling

While travelling, the President is able to conduct all the functions of the office aboard several specially built Boeing 747s, known as Air Force One. The President travels around Washington in an armored Cadillac limousine, often referred to informally as "Cadillac One," equipped with bullet-proof windows and tires and a self-contained ventilation system in the event of a biological or chemical attack. When traveling longer distances around the Washington area or on presidential trips, the President travels aboard the presidential helicopter, Marine One. The President also has the use of: Army One, Coast Guard One, Executive One, and Navy One. Additionally, the President has full use of Camp David in Maryland, a retreat which is occasionally used as a casual setting for hosting foreign dignitaries.

Secret Service

The President and his family are always protected by a Secret Service detail. Until 1997, all former Presidents and their families were protected by the Secret Service until the President's death. The last President to have lifetime Secret Service protection is Bill Clinton; George W. Bush and all subsequent Presidents will be protected by the Secret Service for a maximum of 10 years after leaving office.

Benefits after Presidency

Presidents continue to enjoy other benefits after leaving office such as free mailing privileges, free office space, the right to hold a diplomatic passport and budgets for office help and staff assistance. However, it was not until after Harry S. Truman (1958) that Presidents received a pension after they left office. Additionally, since the presidency of Herbert Hoover, Presidents receive funding from the National Archives and Records Administration upon leaving office to establish their own presidential library. These are not traditional libraries, but rather repositories for preserving and making available the papers, records, and other historical materials for each President since Herbert Hoover.

Officeholders

: See: List of Presidents of the United States.

Timeline

- Martin Van Buren, born December 5, 1782, was the first president born after the Declaration of Independence and was thus arguably the first president who was not born a British subject. Interestingly, he is also the first president not of Anglo-Celtic origin.
- John Tyler, born March 29, 1790, was the first president born after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. All presidents born before him were eligible to be president because they were citizens at the time the Constitution was adopted. (Zachary Taylor was born on November 24, 1784, before the Constitution was adopted).
- Franklin Pierce, born November 23, 1804, was the first president born in the 19th century. (Millard Fillmore was born January 7, 1800, the last year of the 18th century.)
- Warren Harding, born November 2, 1865, was the first president born after the American Civil War. Robert E. Lee surrendered April 9, 1865.
- John F. Kennedy, born May 29, 1917, was the first person born in the 20th century to become president (1961).
- Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, was born on August 27, 1908. Three other Presidents who followed Johnson in office were a

Joint Chiefs of Staff

Origin of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Current Joint Chiefs of Staff

Chronology of Chairmen

External link

Further reading

See also

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Early life

Political career

Private crises

Governor of New York

Election and first term as president

The second term

Foreign policy 1933-41

The path to war

Pearl Harbor

Japanese-American internment

Civil rights and refugees

William D. Leahy

External link

Ernest J King

Career

Dates of rank

Awards and decorations

Analysis

Other

External links

National Security Act of 1947

Goldwater-Nichols Act

External links

President of the United States of America

Requirements to hold office

Election

Old system

Current system

Campaign

Inauguration and oath of office

Term(s) of office

Succession

Powers

Presidential salary and benefits

Salary

Residences

Travelling

Secret Service

Benefits after Presidency

Officeholders

Timeline