Mark Perry’s book The Pentagon’s Wars will be released in October. @markperrydc.

There was a time in U.S. history, and not so long ago, when General John “Black Jack” Pershing was the most famous American alive.

Feted by presidents, revered by soldiers, celebrated as a military genius by his followers and the subject of salacious gossip columnists (he was handsome, a widower—and available), Pershing was a legend in his time. Large numbers of Americans would have been able to recite the Missouri farm boy’s life story: A West Point graduate, Pershing was an officer in the African-American 10th Cavalry Regiment during the Indian Wars, participated in the Battle of San Juan Heights (where Teddy Roosevelt served as a Rough Rider), served as a key officer during the Moro Rebellion in the southern Philippines (from 1909 to 1913) and served a governor there, chased Pancho Villa around northern Mexico (starting in 1914), then led the American Expeditionary Force to victory in World War I.


In 1919, after Pershing returned from Europe to public acclaim, the Congress named him general of the Armies—only George Washington still outranks him.

Ironically, Black Jack, whose fame has faded in the seven decades since his death, is still celebrated among military scholars, but not for what he did—but for what he didn’t : and he most certainly didn’t take 50 bullets, dip them in pigs blood and execute 49 Muslims in retaliation for Islamic terrorism, as Donald Trump has repeatedly told us. Trump’s claim, first aired at a February 19, 2016 campaign rally in South Carolina, cited Pershing as “a rough guy”—a personality trait that, it seems, the president very much admires. After this week’s attack in Barcelona, Trump tweeted: “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”

It was an allusion to a fictional yarn the president told on the campaign trail. According to candidate Trump, during his time fighting the Muslim Moro tribesmen in the southern Philippines, Pershing “caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage ... and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood. You heard about that? He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pig’s blood. And he had his men load up their rifles and he lined up 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem.” The fable, like all such, gets more grandiose with the telling: During a campaign rally in March 2016, Trump’s initial 25 years became 42.

The story seems to have been kicking around the fever swamps of the internet for years. “I’ve been hearing this story since 9/11,” says historian Brian Linn, the author of a much-admired book on the Philippine insurrection (The Philippine War, 1899-1902), “and it’s no truer now than it was when I first heard it. It’s almost as if people want it to be true. But when you dig into it, when you try to find specifics, you realize the story is nonsense.”

Linn remains unsatisfied with simply debunking a well-worn myth. It’s not only that the public should be aware that their president is repeating a story about Pershing that isn’t true, he argues, what is true is actually more interesting—and instructive. In fact, while American soldiers occasionally responded to the Moro insurgency by burying the tribesmen they killed with dead pigs, Pershing thought the practice was, at best, a deterrent; he never adopted it as a useful policy, or instructed his subordinates to practice it. It was, as Pershing understood, going to take a lot more to convince knife-wielding Moro assassins (they called themselves juramentados), than burying them with pigs—or urinating on their Qurans. For Pershing, Muslim resistance was only tangentially related to religion; what he was dealing with, he thought, were disaffect tribes fearful of losing their way of life. He’d not only seen this before—he empathized with it.

“Pershing would have never described the Moro violence as terrorism,” Linn says. “For him, the problem was banditry and endemic violence, which had comparatively little to do with Muslims versus Christians. This was tribal. Pershing knew the U.S. wasn’t going to solve this problem with more and more American soldiers, and more and more violence. Instead, he applied the lessons he learned when dealing with native Americans on the Plains.”

Which is to say that, while Pershing never recoiled from using force, he adopted a military strategy that would later be reinvented as FM 3-24, the famous counterinsurgency manual written by David Petraeus and James Amos and applied in Iraq. Pershing brought down the levels of violence (which had been used liberally, and to little effect, by his predecessors), recruited Filipinos to carry out law enforcement duties, simplified the provincial court system, designated government land for the building of mosques, took a go-slow approach to changing tribal customs (which included polygamy), reformed the laws governing contract labor, put aside more money for the building of schools and established trading posts to rebuild the Moro economy. Pershing also diligently provided a personal example for his soldiers by learning the Moro dialect, getting to know local Muslim leaders and reading the Quran. In essence, he became a kind of Lawrence of the Philippines—a Moro Whisperer.

For all of that, there are some things not to like about Pershing. He could be imperious, opinionated, short-tempered, stubborn and something of a martinet. In later years, senior officers would note that he seeded the U.S. military with his acolytes, which Douglas MacArthur (who disliked him, and intensely) called the “Pershing Mafia.” He got his nickname “Black Jack” while serving as a drill instructor at West Point, where the cadets resented his manner and took to calling him “N----- Jack,” which was later softened to “Black Jack.” Additionally, like Teddy Roosevelt (who, as president, admired and promoted him), he had an unbending belief in white America’s civilizing influence—a kind of default position for that era. During the Plains Wars, he forcibly deported large numbers of Cree Indians from their ancestral lands to Canada and, despite his celebrated leadership of the 10th Cavalry, he readily agreed to the continued segregation of African-American soldiers from white troops during World War I.

But by the standards of his age, Pershing was fairly enlightened. When he fought the Moros at what has gone down in history as the Battle of Bud Bagsak (in June 1913), Pershing proved adept at implementing tactics that would dampen Philippine (and U.S.) casualties: He recruited local leaders to denounce the uprising, attempted to negotiate a political agreement with the rebels, then waited them out (which siphoned off their strength) before attacking. Despite this, Bud Bagsak resulted in the deaths of approximately 500 Moro tribesmen and 13 Americans. “The fighting was the fiercest I have ever seen,” he later wrote. “They [the tribesmen] are absolutely fearless, and once committed to combat they count death as a mere incident.”

Nor surprisingly, while Trump’s ill-advised monologues and tweets on Pershing have focused the public on swine blood and the treatment of terrorists (including the blinkered notion that if you bury ISIS fighters with pigs, their paradise-loving co-religionists will surrender), Pershing’s legacy has almost nothing to do with his service fighting Moros and everything to do with his command of U.S. troops in World War I. In 1917, when America entered the war, Woodrow Wilson named Pershing to head the U.S. forces—a perfect if surprising choice, as it turned out. Pershing not only had absolute faith in America’s military prowess, he had little regard for British and French commanders who’d spent the previous three years sending their soldiers “over the top” in useless slugging matches with well-armed Germans.

When British and French commanders insisted that U.S. troops be disbursed among European units (they had little regard for the green “doughboys,” but liked the idea of using their numbers to succeed in doing what they’d failed to do for three years), Pershing dug in his heels. He eschewed the constant frontal assaults preferred by his European peers and not only insisted that U.S. troops be commanded by Americans, but that the U.S. be given its own front on the allied lines—where they would attack the Germans as a single American Army. The British and French finally relented, but Pershing’s stubborn insistence influenced a generation of American officers who would not only fight in Europe as a part of an Allied coalition in World War II, but command them. And among the leaders of that effort were senior soldiers whom Pershing had trained—including the legendary George Marshall, who revered him.

“Pershing is a seminal figure,” historian Linn says, “who’s been too long forgotten. In a sense, I suppose, you might consider him a transitional figure, but that’s not to diminish what he accomplished. He transformed the U.S. Army from a constabulary force sitting in forts on the frontier into a world-class military. He was also an officer of immense moral courage, and would it be a great disservice to Pershing’s memory, and to the honor of the United States Army, that this malicious lie be allowed to stand without challenge.”

Trump’s generals—McMaster, Mattis, Kelly and Dunford—almost certainly agree. While not as celebrated as later commanders like Eisenhower or Patton, Pershing holds a prominent place in U.S. military history, his visage visible in a Pentagon portrait, his tactics studied at West Point. Then too, each of Trump’s generals are not only steeped in history, they understand its first and most important lesson: that to learn from it, you must first get it right.

