Commanders in Chief without military experience

The Constitution sets relatively few requirements for holding the office of president of the United States: One must be a "natural born citizen" of the United States and must be 35 years old or older and must have resided in the United States for 14 years.

Few jobs in America have such a short list of job requirements, yet the country has survived for these 229 years since the adoption of the Constitution with presidents meeting only minimal job requirements. A college education is not required. Many of our most admired presidents — Lincoln, Washington, Truman, for example — would have been disqualified by such a requirement. No job experience is required, and the way we choose a president has little application to the overwhelming difficulty of managing a federal workforce in the millions, dealing with foreign countries, both friendly and adversarial, dealing with Congress, and serving as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. That's far different from traveling around the country asking people to vote for him/her.

A week of mourning for Sen. John McCain has brought to mind that last responsibility of the president. If military experience counted, McCain might have reached his dream of being elected president. He was the son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals and had served with distinction as a Navy aviator.

For much of American history, service in the armed forces was a common trait among presidents. Washington, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Harrison, U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Franklin Pierce, William Henry Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and others served in combat. In my own lifetime, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush — every president until Clinton's election in 1992 — served in the military either in combat or stateside. Voters have not elected a military veteran, with the exception of George W. Bush, who only served in the Reserves and was never deployed, since the first President Bush lost the 1992 election to Clinton.

Although it's not a requirement for office, it's fair to ask what presidents without military experience are missing in their resumes. Military service teaches discipline, motivation, management, service, sacrifice and patriotism. It also exposes Americans to people with different backgrounds, advantages or disadvantages. In the years of a military draft, well-bred, well-connected college graduates rubbed shoulders with high school dropouts, and they learned to depend on these soldiers or sailors who were very different from themselves.

That experience would certainly enlighten the resident of the White House faced with a decision on military intervention or troop deployment. Presidents such as Washington, Jackson, Grant and others, who had experienced war up close and had been responsible for orders that resulted in deaths of brave, obedient soldiers, certainly would recognize the gravity of their actions in a way that someone without military experience would not.

In today's America, with only a small percentage of Americans voluntarily choosing a military career, it is difficult to find presidential aspirants with a military background. Veterans dominated the White House and congressional leadership from 1945 to the end of the century, but veterans are much rarer now in the halls of power.

Military experience does not inoculate presidents from bad decisions. George W. Bush foolishly ordered U.S. troops to invade Iraq in 2003 in search of non-existent "weapons of mass destruction." But President Kennedy, still scarred by injuries suffered when a Japanese ship sank his PT boat, rejected the advice of his generals and chose a successful blockade of Cuba in 1962 instead of an invasion to destroy Russian missiles there, a strategy that would result in high casualties and could escalate into nuclear war. Unlike the younger Bush, Kennedy had experienced combat and seen good men die all around him.

Best qualified presidential candidate ever?

President Obama said it during the Hillary Clinton campaign stop in Charlotte Tuesday. He said Hillary Clinton is the best qualified person ever to run for president. That sort of thing has been claimed before with surprisingly little contradiction -- No one has ever run for president, they've claimed, with more experience than Hillary Clinton.

I beg to differ, not to dispute that HRC has experience or that she is qualified for the presidency, at least in terms of experience. But the most qualified ever? Really?

A few candidates from the not-too-distant past had experiences that could match or surpass the former one-term senator and secretary of state. Franklin Roosevelt had been governor of a large state (New York) and had served as secretary of the Navy. Lyndon Johnson had served in the House and the Senate, had been on congressional staff, and had been perhaps the most effective majority leader of the Senate in the upper chamber's history. He also served nearly four years as vice president. George H.W. Bush had been a member of Congress, ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice president for two terms. Dwight D. Eisenhower was light on Washington experience, but he had successfully managed the largest, most complex and probably most difficult military alliance in history. Richard Nixon had been a member of the House and the Senate and held key congressional leadership posts, and he served two terms as vice president. (All of which goes to prove that experience isn't everything.)

Some presidents' successful terms help prove that experience isn't everything. Harry Truman had little to recommend him in 1945, when he inherited the presidency after FDR's sudden death. He had been a machine politician from Missouri with a slim record of congressional accomplishments. He had served only a few months as vice president and had been so out of the loop that he didn't even know about the atomic bomb. He was not a college graduate. But many historians now consider Truman one of our best presidents.

And then there's Abraham Lincoln, a one-term congressman and failed candidate for Senate. He was elected president only because of a catastrophic split in the Democratic Party and was so detested by many of his countrymen that they withdrew from the Union before he was even inaugurated. His strategy to keep the country united failed and resulted in a tragic, four-year war that killed 600,000 or more. He second-guessed his generals and frequently fired them. He was expected to lose his 1864 re-election bid (against a general he had fired) and was saved only by a change in battlefield success. Despite all the failures and lack of solid experience, Lincoln is considered one of the two or three best presidents in history.

Let's grant Hillary Clinton the fact that she has experience as a cabinet secretary, a senator and as first lady (which should count for something). But is she the "most experienced ever"? Not by a long shot.