War & Peace Quote by R. W. Apple, Jr.

War has always been the shortest, ugliest elevator to presidential “greatness,” and Apple’s sentence treats that fact with the cool restraint of a seasoned observer rather than a flag-waver. The key verb is “underpins”: not “proves,” not “earns,” but supplies the structural support beneath the mythology. He’s pointing to how the ranking of presidents often depends less on policy competence or civic repair than on whether a commander in chief can be framed as a winner when history turns violent.

The subtext is almost accusatory: “claims to greatness” aren’t greatness. They’re arguments, constructed after the smoke clears, and war offers unusually dramatic raw material for those arguments. Victory simplifies narrative. It produces a clean arc (threat, resolve, triumph) and props for memory (parades, speeches, iconic photos). Domestic achievements, by contrast, are incremental and contested; they don’t photograph well. Apple is diagnosing a media-and-historiography problem as much as a political one: wars create the kind of story presidents can inhabit and journalists can package.

Context matters. Apple wrote across Vietnam’s disillusionment, the Cold War’s moral theater, and the post-9/11 era when wartime leadership was marketed as character. His line implicitly asks what gets lost when greatness becomes tethered to military success: the incentives to escalate, the temptation to conflate resolve with righteousness, the way catastrophe can become opportunity. It’s a journalistic warning delivered as an observation: the presidency, as judged, is biased toward presidents who had wars to “win,” and toward a public eager to call that win destiny.