Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

LEARNING FROM HISTORY: THE MONROE/HARRISON PRESIDENTIAL TOMES
by Terry Heath, 2006

Two new biographies in ‘The American Presidents’ series by Times Books that are edited by famed historian Arthur Schlesinger have been issued in recent months. These latest volumes focus on the presidencies of James Monroe and Benjamin Harrison, two American leaders who are now barely remembered by the American public, since they served in high office in the 19th Century. Yet both ruled in a similar fashion to the tenure of today’s George W. Bush by promoting a tough national security policy in the aftermath of a just concluded war and the need to change the structure of our commerce as the economies of the world underwent a massive structural change.

The biography on Monroe, the nation’s fifth president, was written by former Colorado U.S. Senator Gary Hart and the tome on Harrison, our 23rd president, was written by Charles Calhoun who is a professor of history at East Carolina University.

Only students of American political history will recognize the names of these two long-forgotten chief executives. Monroe is best remembered today as the architect of the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ in which the United States, instead of Europe, would be the major influence of opinion in the Americas. Harrison is solely known for being the one-term president who served between rival Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive stints in office. But each author goes into detail to explain how these two leaders from those forgotten times contributed to the legacy of the presidency itself and to this country and how our current president has taken certain aspects of each of those two in his own style of governing.

James Monroe was elected in 1816 as this nation’s fifth chief executive for two terms just when the nation was recovering from the aftermath of our second war with Britain in a thirty-five year timespan. He previously served in the Revolutionary War as an officer under George Washington and was immortalized in Emanuel Leutze’s painting ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’ as the figure directly behind the famed general who was holding the flag as they prepared to battle the British.

Monroe was obviously influenced by his predecessor’s actions in office to rule the country as our nation’s first president, especially since the people’s moods had split into two factions once Washington left office in 1797 and died two years later. The Federalists, as led by John Adams, believed in federal authority (national government) on all matters while the Republicans (the modern day Democratic Party) under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison emphasized each state’s unique sovereignty over federal control on most issues facing the fledgling nation as those two and Monroe hailed from Virginia and all three recognized the need for the thirteen states to keep from being dominated by the federal government.

Hart writes that Monroe, in addition to his hero Washington, was obsessed with the defensive security of the new country’s borders and wanted to prevent another attack from a foreign power as it struggled to maintain its sovereignty while growing in land size and population. He increased funding to the War Department for securing additional property in Florida and west towards the Pacific Ocean to better stabilize the nation’s defenses against potential invaders from some other country wishing to get the spoils of these new lands that still did not possess a standing army and depended on volunteers for civil defense in times of a national emergency.

He issued an edict in December, 1823 on U.S. foreign policy that would resonate for the next two centuries as implied fact that became known as the ‘Monroe Doctrine.’ The statement said that the Americas, not Europe, and especially the United States would take the lead on setting policy in North and South America and would not tolerate outside (i.e. European) influence on the two continents in the new world.

His second-term proclamation became the cornerstone of American foreign policy and has remained that way for these last 180 years, with many treaties with our American neighbors to the north and south leading up to and including NAFTA and CAFTA to ensure our mandate in this hemisphere stays that way. Hart declares in the biography that Monroe’s insistence of no outside jurisdiction in our domain ensured that no Americans were to be killed by foreign attackers on our native soil until September 11, 2001.

The most important challenge to that doctrine came four decades after Monroe left office when England and France proposed to recognize the sovereignty of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. But President Abraham Lincoln was able to invoke Monroe’s declaration and the threat of American military response against both European nations in forcing them to back down and staying out of the struggle between the states which was internally resolved in 1865.

It can be argued that the long-standing precedence of that doctrine was co-opted by President George W. Bush when he made a fundamental shift in American foreign policy after the 9/11 terror attacks when he instituted a ‘strike first’ initiative against our perceived enemies in that we would attack those opponents pre-emptively so we could be safe from prospective devastation by groups opposed to our way of life. Yet one has to wonder if the Monroe Doctrine of cooperation among the countries of this hemisphere was sacrificed to this Bush edict that has alienated so many of the other countries of the world as we appear to go our own way on how to keep in check perceived ‘rogue nations’ opposing our viewpoints.

Benjamin Harrison was elected for one term in 1888 by defeating incumbent Grover Cleveland. He then lost to Cleveland four years later in a re-match over pretty much the same issues once the president’s popularity dropped when the nation’s economy tanked in a recession so he was shown the White House door by the voters.

Harrison’s time in the White House more resembles the tenure of George Herbert Walker Bush, the current incumbent’s father, who was also a somewhat popular president yet got tossed out after one term when it appeared he was out of touch with the public. The younger Bush seemed to have learned the lessons from the defeat of Harrison, his father and other one-term presidents who lost their second term chances by making sure he attacked first on the issues in his re-election contest instead of being put on the defensive to criticism of his administration by Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 election.

Harrison grew up with privilege, just like the current officeholder, being the grandson of a chief executive and a descendant to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He ably served in the Civil War, then entered politics against the advice of his father to rise through the ranks of political positions until he was the Republican Party presidential nominee of 1888.

That contest was a close race and Harrison won the electoral count for the win even though Cleveland actually got more votes from the public in the same manner the younger Bush did in his 2000 election triumph over Al Gore. And he took office with his party controlling both houses of Congress just like our current leader.

But the Republicans of the late 1880’s were complete opposites to the GOP politicians of today. Then, they were in favor of tariffs on imported goods from other countries to pay for government services. Today, they encourage open borders and the constant arrival of foreign-made products to power the economy and the elimination of all government interference in global commerce to the detriment of American manufacturers who must now compete with cheap labor outside our country and are forced to keep wages as low as possible to the American worker in order to stay in business.

Most of the money coming into the U.S. Treasury in those years was through the fees raised by tariffs on those imports. Harrison campaigned in the 1888 election against Cleveland to keep those protective tariffs in place since there was no federal income tax on citizens to raise government revenues at that time. His strategy was successful and he defeated the first Democrat to be elected to the presidency since 1856. But things began to immediately go wrong for the Indiana politician upon arriving in Washington and taking the oath of office.

Calhoun makes the argument that Harrison’s presidency soured when he tried to please too many special interest groups of his own party as the nation had its first billion dollar peacetime budget and Harrison’s Republican Party subsequently lost control of both houses of Congress in the 1890 mid-term contest as a result of voter dissatisfaction. An ill-advised attempt to annex Hawaii as part of the growing nation and the constant fighting between his administration and both parties in Congress led to his sliding popularity as his upcoming re-election approached.

His opponent in the 1892 contest would be former President Grover Cleveland who was trying to win his job back. A lackluster campaign on Harrison’s part plus the death of his wife two weeks before Election Day took away all of his interest in keeping the presidency so only got 43 percent of the vote and left office a dispirited man.

Harrison paid the price from a scorned populace by trying to please too many special business interests when the country was becoming less agrarian and relying more on manufacturing to spur economic growth in order to compete with the other nations of the world. Compare that to today’s globalists who want a one-world economy and are doing their best to eliminate all tariffs on imported goods. And it’s apparent that our most recent chief executives have been doing their best to make sure NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT and the proposed future union of Canada, Mexico and the United States goes through despite the cries of the millions of affected citizens of the three countries.

The current president and his future successors may have to also answer to an equally scorned public in the years to come if the placing of the United States into this global economy brings grief to all of us.

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com