Giving the Military Establishment Some Credit

A recent article in The New Yorker provides chilling details about Trump's ignorant brutality, the  threat he posed to national integrity, and how the country's military leaders saw the threat building on the eve of January 6th.  Trump ignored the advise of his top military advisors at nearly every opportunity, and he kept replacing them in an effort to get unquestioning support for a wide range of strategic and political issues including the constitutionally prohibited use of the military within the borders of the U.S. 

Trump's relationship with the military may have been the most egregiously fraught in our history, but it was not the first time that a President of the United States ignored the strategic expertise and ethical concerns of the top brass.

In 1945 Harry Truman went ahead with dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in spite of the contrary opinions of many of the historically recognized military leaders of those times.  Here is a sampling of those opinions as reported in Wikipedia:

...Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his memoir The White House Years:

In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.^[109]

Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur,^[110][111] Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet), Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr.(Commander of the US Third Fleet), and even the man in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, then-Major General Curtis LeMay:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.

— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, ^[102]

The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950, ^[112]

The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

— Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945, ^[113]

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. 

— Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946,...