Wartime role weighs heavily on president

WASHINGTON — War and tragedy are putting President Obama through the most wrenching period of his young administration.

Visibly thinner, admittedly skipping meals, he is learning every day the challenges of being a wartime president. It's the hardest part of a very hard job.

Health-care reform, climate-change legislation, repairs to the broken economy — all that is a cerebral exercise compared with the grave responsibility of being the commander in chief.

Two weeks ago, Obama flew to Dover Air Force Base for a surprise middle-of-the-night salute to the fallen as their transfer cases were unloaded from a military transport plane. He met with grieving families.

Then the Fort Hood shooting happened. Obama made his first trip as president to visit wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Tuesday he flew to Texas to speak at the memorial service. More families. More hurt soldiers. More grief.

Wednesday, the president laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns and walked the grounds at Arlington National Cemetery, talking to families who were there to visit loved ones who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"There are many honors and responsibilities that come with this job. But none is more profound than serving as commander in chief," Obama said in the cemetery's auditorium. He then mentioned the title of commander in chief a second time, and a third ("As long as I am commander in chief ... ").

Then he returned to the White House, to the Situation Room, for another Afghanistan war council, another session to contemplate sending more young men and women off to war.

"It looks to me from the outside that the reality of being a wartime president is beginning to sink in," said Eliot Cohen, a former Bush administration official and a military historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

"It's a very emotional role," said Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor of political science who worked on the National Security Council in the Clinton and Bush administrations.

"Emotional in a positive sense," Feaver said. "You have to order men and women to risk their lives. That requires a moral courage, an emotional stability. It's very different from a policy-wonk job."

Obama has been described as possessing the political magic of John F. Kennedy, but his tenure so far has similarities to that of Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson: an ambitious domestic agenda, built around a more vigorous federal government, paired with an increasingly thorny overseas war.

If Obama sends significantly more troops to Afghanistan, the political enemies of his domestic policies could become critical allies as he tries to sell his war plans to a skeptical nation.

"With this decision, he's really going to own this war, and he's going to be sending young men and women to their deaths," Cohen said. "And when that realization sets in, it's a very grim thing. He may have known it intellectually before, but what I think is happening is he's learning it viscerally."

As Obama noted in his campaign, he grew up listening to his grandfather talk about fighting in Europe in World War II, but he never served in the military. He is of a generation whose college kids generally didn't go off to war.

Critics have said Obama doesn't understand the language of warriors and too often speaks of military sacrifice rather than military victory. But he has tried to head off that kind of criticism by stocking his administration with retired military brass.

His national security adviser, James Jones, is a retired general; so are his secretary of veterans affairs, Eric Shinseki, and his ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry. His intelligence chief, Dennis Blair, is a retired admiral. And Obama kept a Bush-appointed Republican in charge at the Pentagon.

He has had chances in recent days to polish the kind of rhetoric that goes with being a wartime leader. His remarks Tuesday at Fort Hood were filled with references to courage, valor, fighting.

He disagreed with the belief that the Greatest Generation has come and gone: "We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes."

He opposed the Iraq war early and campaigned on a promise to end it. He also vowed to put new effort into the war in Afghanistan, the training ground of the Sept. 11 terrorists.

Last spring, the new administration conducted a review of Afghanistan policy and announced 21,000 new troops would be sent to that war zone. The president showed little sign then that the decision weighed on his mind or provoked much internal White House debate.

But Afghanistan degenerated, with a national election tainted by fraud, a spike in casualties and body bags arriving home by the dozen.