WASHINGTON -- After a ragged start, President Bill Clinton has finally mastered the snappy military salute he might have learned in the first week of that Arkansas ROTC course he declined to take.
But that likely won't be enough to bridge the estrangement between him and the troops he leads. Nor is it even certain that the recent 'tradition' of a saluting chief executive will last.
Clinton's rookie uncertainty about how to cope with expert salutes from the ramrod crew chief of his helicopter, Marine One, were instantly captured by television and subsequently subjected to the kind of minute photoanalysis usually reserved for precision bombing missions.
The president's initial failure to return the salute at all -- followed by subsequent sloppy attempts to do so -- provoked outrage among the U.S. military and its extensive alumni.
'How rude can one get?' huffed retired Air Force Col. Edward S. Nugent of Marietta, Ga., in a typical letter to the Air Force Times. 'Yet what can you expect from a person who dodged the draft, never served and supports a gay military?'
Clinton soon so improved his salutes that television networks recorded his progress with 'before' and 'after' comparison footage.
This did little to mollify his military critics. During a recent visit to the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, one of his sharper salutes was met with grumbling below decks, amidship and even in corners of the bridge itself.
The great salute flap is merely a symptom -- and a superficial one at that -- of theprofound cultural and policy differences that separate Clinton from the bulk of the forces he commands.
Clinton's active opposition to the Vietnam War while studying as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, his avoidance of the draft and his moves to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military rub a raw nerve in the military establishment.
The president also has pledged to slash the armed forces by 200,000 troops beyond 550,000-member cut begun by the Bush administration. Then there is the military salary freeze he has proposed for next year, as well as subsequent limits on cost-of-living increases.
To cope with all this at the Pentagon management level, exactly two members of Clinton's team are nominated and confirmed: Defense Secretary Les Aspin, who was hospitalized twice in his first two months on the job with heart trouble, and his deputy, William Perry.
The rest are awaiting vetting -- reportedly to ensure adequate representation of women and minorities. This in a career field where, for better or worse, the available pool of experienced people has historically been predominately white and male.
In itself, the military correctness of Clinton's salutes is meaningless. In fact, according to Navy Capt. Jay Yakeley, the senior officer in the White House military office, under law, regulation or even tradition, 'there is no set protocol for a presidential salute.'
Yakeley, who oversees such support to the president as Marine One and Camp David, and who has served both presidents Bush and Clinton, says, 'A president can 'salute' merely by standing at attention.'
Interviews with current and former White House officials and a review of memoirs and other documents going back to the Franklin Roosevelt administration found no traceable pattern of military saluting by presidents.
The practice apparently began with Ronald Reagan, an actor by trade who recognized the dramatic potential of popping a snappy 'high ball' during White House photo opportunities.
Reagan, whose World War II military service was confined to making Army Air Corps training films at the Hal Roach studios in Culver City, Calif., clearly loved his culminating role as commander in chief. His troops, electrified by the performance, reciprocated in kind.
George Bush, an authentic World War II hero, continued the practice of saluting, but much less consistently. 'He didn't salute all the time,' recalls Yakeley. 'Sometimes he would just wave.'
The most distingushed military man to occupy the White House in this century, former Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, adopted a strictly civilian demeanor. 'He didn't salute in a military manner,' recalled retired Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, one of Ike's closest confidants who succeeded him as NATO commander.
'To the best of my knowledge,' Goodpaster said, 'he responded in an informal manner, a wave, a nod of the head, a half-salute perhaps.'
That, say many officers, is all that is really expected from civilian leaders. Retired Capt. Edward Beach, who was Eisenhower's Navy aide, recalls encountering then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt by chance on a street in New York years before his own White House service.
'I saluted her,' Beach recalled, 'and in response she said, 'Why, good morning, commander.' She even got my rank right. It made my day.'
Military people like to think of the hand salute as something uniquely theirs. It is said to derive from the motion with which a medieval knight snapped opened his helmet visor when encountering an ally. The action revealed the identity of the knight as friendly and, notincidentally, removed his right hand from proximity to whatever weapons he might be carrying.
A commonly accepted civilian substitute for the salute is placing the right hand over the heart. This usage is followed by Aspin in those frequent Pentagon ceremonies in which his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Colin Powell, simultaneously renders a military salute.
Back when no civilian was considered fully dressed without a snap- brim fedora, the custom was to remove the hat and place it over the heart. That practice is dramatically illustrated by a photo taken at the 1943 Casablanca Conference of Allied leaders. Roosevelt, who is reviewing his troops, holds his hat over his heart while the troop commander, Maj. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., salutes just to his rear.
There is little in the record to guide a contemporary president on salutes. Feisty Harry Truman's dealings with the military, particularly his encounters with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Korean War commander he later fired, occurred off-camera, as did their October 1950 meeting on Wake Island in the Pacific.
At the time, the two described the meeting as 'cordial,' but years later the former National Guard artillery captain, whose personal example stemmed a retreat after his battery came under German fire during World War I, remembered things differently. 'I just want you to know I don't give a good goddamn what you do or think about Harry Truman,' he said he told the general, 'but don't you ever again keep your commander in chief waiting.'
President John Kennedy, who held the first televised news conference, was never subjected to such intense scrutiny either. Although he too was a war hero and granted the Army Special Forces their prized green berets over the objections of the Pentagon brass, he appears to have recorded no salutes himself. The most memorable salute of the Kennedy era was that which his little son John rendered at his murdered father's funeral.
Lyndon Johnson's highly publicized visit to his troops at Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War was intensely physical, with handshakes, pats on the back and medals pinned on almost anyone who would stand still long enough. But no one who accompanied the khaki-clad commander in chief on that journey could remember a single salute.
Nixon's most publicized salute came when he took leave of the presidency, turning to face a mixed honor guard with rifles with fixed bayonets held perpendicular in the formal salute known as 'present arms.' 'I raised my arms in a final salute,' Nixon recalled. 'I smiled. I waved goodby. I turned into the helicopter.'
But an examination of the photographs taken at the time show that Nixon did not salute in the conventional military sense. Rather he raised both arms in an ironic V-for-victory sign.
In the end, the White House's Yakeley feels that presidents should simply do whatever comes naturally to them. 'You should do whatever common sense dictates and what you feel comfortable with,' he said. 'The object is to greet the other person. Sometimes, 'Good morning, Marine,' will do just fine.'NEWLN:
