American Rifle - Alexander Rose [137]
Within six months of taking office, Root’s first annual report (taking its cue from the French system) recommended that line officers be rotated to staff positions for three-year tours. The nucleus of the German concept of a general staff can be found in his proposal to establish a War College to allow young officers to undertake professional study. Presumably they would then join the staff, though for the moment Root steered clear of openly advocating such a scheme, owing to its explosive implications.12
Roosevelt, among others, cheered Root’s report (“It does look as if at last light was breaking for the Army now that you have charge of it,” he wrote), and it found some adherents among the younger men and up-and-comers.13 But the report alarmed staffers and line officers alike. By introducing the principle of rotation, it threatened to break up the cozy arrangement by which staffers held their positions permanently; and by hinting at the creation of a general staff, Root was signaling that the era of the autonomous commanding general was passing, to be replaced by a chief of staff reporting to the secretary of war.
After the deranged anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated McKinley in September 1901, Roosevelt became president, and Root’s position was strengthened. Roosevelt went on record to announce that there must be not only a general staff but “freer flow and closer touch between the line and the staff.” In February 1902, consequently, Root submitted a bill calling for the army’s two heads to be united.
Correctly anticipating trouble from Miles (who claimed that he had always gotten by without a staff but that now he would have to “get around a dozen or more majors” to execute the smallest decision), Root took care to offer the proud old man a choice of exits: either the general staff would be born immediately after he stepped down (Miles’s mandatory retirement date was scheduled as August 8, 1903, when he would be sixty-four), or he could become the first chief of staff on the understanding that he would soon step aside. Roosevelt was rather less appeasement-minded than Root on the matter. He felt Miles was so selfishly ambitious that he “ought to be employed only when we are certain that his own interests and the interests of the country” coincided.14 But Root persuaded the president to let Miles resign rather than spark a riot by sacking him.
Some fire still burned in Miles’s aged belly. In front of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, which was heavily packed with the general’s comrades from the Civil War, Miles declared, in a flash of rhetorical brilliance, that the general staff concept was “more adapted to the monarchies of the old world” than to the republic of the new. He would never, he grandly announced in the best tradition of the martyr, truckle to the new un-American “despotism” of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
At a stroke, Miles had reversed the perception of the Root reforms from being laudably progressive to being sinister harbingers of Euro-autocracy. The Washington Post accordingly headlined a report from Berlin “Roosevelt His Own Warlord” and devastatingly quoted German officers as saying that the president “means to be head of the American Army de facto just as the Kaiser is his own minister of war.” Root’s reform bill suddenly stalled.15
Roosevelt, livid