As alluded to in both the Introduction and Preface of this book, the scorecard for the seven legendary Washington wars examined herein was a lot closer than you probably anticipated for a nation where the presidency has attained such pre-eminence in national consciousness and political power. But nonetheless, four to three in favor of the Presidents was the final tally, with the chief executives having come out on top in the Bank war, the Red Menace accusations, in support of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Panama Canal giveaway, while senators ultimately held sway in the pre–Civil War Bleeding Kansas controversy, the all-too-brief Reconstruction period, and the League of Nations deliberations at the end of World War I. By any historic measure and despite the obvious advantage of the presidential Bully Pulpit, those would be the accepted results handed down by American historians in their judgment of each—the whys, what happened, and immediate outcomes.
The presidential winners, Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter, were ironically all Democrats, while the senators who came out on top, Stephen Douglas, Charles Sumner, and Henry Cabot Lodge, did so by claiming the political high ground versus stubborn, overreaching presidents unwilling to compromise regardless of the political or personal consequences. While each individual winner would not necessarily benefit politically from the Washington war they waged, most of the losers, Henry Clay, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Russell, would all pay a price politically at the time or to their legacies. Only Paul Laxalt, the proxy for Ronald Reagan, could be judged a winner even in defeat by virtue of the next election cycle (1980).