Part 3: The Cult of The Presidency...The Age of The Heroic Presidency

THE CULT OF THE PRESIDENCY

By Gene Healy

3. 

The Age of the Heroic Presidency 

First and foremost, I think there’s the concept that many of us acquire as students of the Presidency. . . . This is the belief— it certainly was dominant in academic circles when I was a student—that a strong Presidency was a good Presidency. We looked at and rated the American presidents in terms of their ability to accumulate power in the oval office. 

—Then Rep. Dick Cheney, 

speaking to college students 

studying the presidency 

(March 23, 1984) 

By the postwar era, Washington’s humble term ‘‘chief magistrate’’ could no longer adequately describe an office that in power and responsibility had expanded far beyond Hamiltonian hopes or Jeffersonian fears. The president was now the great leader of the Progressives’ dreams, Herbert Croly’s ‘‘Thor wielding with power and effect a sledge-hammer in the cause of national righteousness’’—or perhaps, with the arrival of the atomic age, a figure better described as a Zeus, capable of launching city-flattening thunderbolts. God metaphors abound in mid-century scholars’ descriptions of the presidency. In 1960, the University of Chicago’s Herman Finer declared that the presidency was ‘‘the incarnation of the American people in a sacrament resembling that in which the wafer and the wine are seen to be the body and blood of Christ,’’ the office rightly belonging ‘‘to the offspring of a titan and Minerva husbanded by Mars.’’1 

Superman Comes to the Supermarket 

In a remarkable speech given not two weeks after he’d announced for the presidency, Senator John F. Kennedy captured the prevailing mood: 

The history of this Nation—its brightest and its bleakest pages—has been written largely in terms of the different views our Presidents have had of the Presidency itself. This history ought to tell us that the American people in 1960 have an imperative right to know what any man bidding for the Presidency thinks about the place he is bidding for, whether he is aware of and willing to use the powerful resources of that office; whether his model will be Taft or Roosevelt, Wilson or Harding. 

In case it needs explaining, for JFK, Taft and Harding were the patsies, Roosevelt and Wilson, history’s winners. Kennedy went on to quote Wilson’s line in Constitutional Government, ‘‘The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can,’’ and complain that ‘‘President Woodrow Wilson discovered that to be a big man in the White House inevitably brings cries of dictatorship.’’ (Perhaps that had something to do with Wilson’s tendency to incarcerate people who opposed his policies.) 

After a few digs at Eisenhower’s placidity, JFK maintained that the country could no longer afford ‘‘a Chief Executive who is praised primarily for what he did not do, the disasters he prevented, the bills he vetoed.’’ Rather, the presidency required ‘‘extraordinary strength and vision,’’ because it was 

the center of moral leadership—a ‘‘bully pulpit,’’ as Theodore Roosevelt described it. For only the President represents the national interest. And upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country, all departments of the Government, all nations of the world.2 

The public agreed; mid-century Americans placed enormous faith in the federal government. For five decades, researchers associated with the University of Michigan have been asking Americans: ‘‘How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right—just about always, most of the time or only some of the time?’’ In 1958, the first year of the survey, 73 percent of respondents said ‘‘most of the time’’ or ‘‘just about always’’; by 1964, over three-quarters placed themselves in the most trusting categories.3 

Above all, Americans trusted the president. In a 1959 national poll, researchers posed the following question: ‘‘Some people say the president is in the best position to see what the country needs. Other people think the president may have good ideas about what the country needs, but it is up to the Congress to decide what ought to be done. How do you feel about this?’’ Only 17 percent picked  The Age of the Heroic Presidency Congress—61 percent of Americans said the president should decide.4 

Their children, adolescents and undergraduates, studied textbooks that described the president in terms more appropriate for the bulletproof son of Krypton who, as fans of the George Reeves television series heard weekly throughout the 1950s, ‘‘fights a never ending battle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.’’ In his 1970 essay, ‘‘Superman: Our Textbook President,’’ presidential scholar Thomas Cronin surveyed political science textbooks for college students from 1955 to 1970 and found a near-uniform portrayal of ‘‘presidential omnipotence’’ and ‘‘moralistic-benevolence,’’ in which ‘‘by symbolizing the past and future greatness of America and radiating inspirational confidence, a president can pull the nation together while directing us toward the fulfillment of the American dream.’’ Moreover, ‘‘if, and only if, the right man is placed in the White House, all will be well, and, somehow, whoever is in the White House is the right man.’’5 

Little wonder, then, that small children raised in that environment imbibed the view that those wielding political power were almost invariably benevolent, and none more benevolent, or more powerful, than the president. In 1960, political scientist Fred Greenstein reported on the results of his extensive survey research on the political socialization of children. Greenstein found children’s view of political authority ‘‘strikingly favorable,’’ especially with regard to the presidency. He found it almost impossible to elicit any skepticism from the children he interviewed, despite ‘‘a variety of attempts to evoke such responses.’’ Far more typical were statements like ‘‘he [the president] has the right to stop bad things before they start.’’6 

This pattern of ‘‘juvenile idealization of the President’’ persisted in subsequent studies of children throughout the 1960s.7 One such study quoted a Houston mother, who said that after JFK’s assassination, ‘‘When my little girl came out of school she told me someone killed the President, and her thoughts were—since the President was dead, where would we get our food and clothes from?’’8 

As with children, so too with leading scholars of the era. Clinton Rossiter’s veneration for the presidency was utterly typical among postwar academics, few of whom had major qualms about the powers the modern president had commandeered. In 1960, Richard E. Neustadt, who would go on to found Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, declared, ‘‘What is good for the country is good for the president and vice versa.’’ Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who helped establish the national pastime of ranking presidents, wrote in 1962 that ‘‘every one’’ of the great presidents ‘‘left the Executive branch stronger and more influential than he found it.’’9 Pulitzer Prize– winning presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns echoed that view in his 1963 book The Deadlock of Democracy, urging Americans to get beyond the ‘‘Madisonian dread of a man on horseback.’’10 Much like the young Woodrow Wilson, Burns understood the Constitution to have established an ‘‘anti-leadership system,’’ and Burns was no happier with that fact than Wilson had been.11 Checks on presidential power had to be broken down because, Burns said, ‘‘The stronger we make the Presidency, the more we strengthen democratic procedures.’’12 

Human nature being what it is—what the Founders said it was— disappointments were in store for those who had made the office the focus of national hopes and dreams. Presidential romantics awoke in the 1970s with throbbing headaches, smeared lipstick, and no small sense of shame. Presidential lies, a disastrous war, and serial abuses of authority stretching across several administrations made many Americans rue the loss of republican virtue.

This chapter and the next trace that arc of disillusionment. We begin with a discussion of the midcentury president’s imposing job description, then turn to the enormous unilateral powers that the president had accrued in hopes of meeting the job’s ever-increasing demands. 

Here, as before, war was the health of the presidency. ‘‘There is considerable political advantage to the administration in its battle with the Kremlin,’’ wrote Truman advisers Clark Clifford and James Rowe in a 1948 memo to the president, ‘‘The worse matters get up to a fairly certain point—real danger of imminent war—the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his president.’’13 

Up, Up, and Away 

Yet, even in areas far removed from foreign policy, the midcentury president had amassed powers and responsibilities largely unknown to his 19th-century predecessors. Again, Clinton Rossiter’s 1956 book The American Presidency is a good starting point for exploring several of the modern president’s expanded roles. 

‘‘Chief Legislator’’ 

We saw in Chapter 1 that the Founding-era norm was one of presidential deference. It was Congress’s job to set the national direction in terms of policy; the president’s role was to inform, suggest, and, when necessary, defend the Constitution from legislative overreaching. In contrast, as Rossiter noted, by the middle of the 20th century, Americans expected the president to guide Congress—and to use the ‘‘bully pulpit’’ to appeal directly to the people if Congress refused to go along. 

In the early part of the 20th century, some presidents resisted the growing expectation that the president should twist arms and pound podiums unceasingly until Congress capitulated. Characteristically, Calvin Coolidge commented that he ‘‘never felt it was my duty to attempt to coerce Senators or Representatives, or to make reprisals. The people sent them to Washington. I felt I had discharged my duty when I had done the best I could with them.’’14 But after FDR’s historic ‘‘100 Days,’’ there was no escaping the Chief Legislator’s burden. During his first year in office, President Eisenhower declined to submit a legislative program, and got pilloried for it in the press.15 Ike learned a lesson from that, and included a detailed legislative agenda in his 1954 State of the Union.16 Yielding to the reality that Coolidge-style restraint was no longer politically feasible, Eisenhower also created the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, dedicated to moving legislation on the Hill. 

As the president became increasingly responsible for setting the nation’s policy direction, the Executive Office of the Presidency metastasized; from FDR’s second term to Ike’s, it quintupled in size, passing 2,500 employees by the late 1950s. By the end of Nixon’s first term, the EOP employed over 5,500 people, with some 660 on the White House office staff alone.17 

‘‘Manager of Prosperity’’ 

One of the core responsibilities of the president and his new army of functionaries was ‘‘managing’’ the economy. The Employment Act of 1946 played a key role in the growth of that responsibility. That act created the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, required the president to submit an annual economic report, and committed the government to ‘‘promoting maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.’’ The original version of the bill, the Full Employment Act, came close to guaranteeing a job to every American who wanted one, codifying Keynesian economic management by commanding the federal government to make ‘‘such volume of federal investment and expenditure as may be needed . . . to assure continuing full employment.’’ Conservative Democrats and Republicans helped kill that bill, fearing enhanced presidential power over the economy and a continuation of wartime regimentation.18 Yet, the bill that passed still stoked the growing public belief that the president was responsible for protecting Americans from the fluctuations of economic life. 

From the post–World War II era on, national discourse has often proceeded on the implicit view that the president sits in the cockpit of the national economy, pulling levers and adjusting dials to produce ‘‘maximum employment,’’ minimum inflation, and rollicking growth. It is now nearly impossible to picture a modern president behaving as Ulysses Grant did, when in the teeth of the panic of 1873, he declared, ‘‘It is the duty of Congress to devise the method of correcting the evils which are acknowledged to exist, and not mine.’’19 

‘‘Protector of the Peace’’ 

The Constitution empowers the president to keep the country secure from insurrections and invasions (when Congress has called up the militia) and the states secure from ‘‘domestic violence’’ (when requested to do so by the state legislature, or the governor when the legislature cannot be convened).20 But by the mid-20th century, the president’s obligations had expanded far beyond putting down occasional bursts of lawlessness or rebellion. ‘‘Is Maine scourged by forest fires? Is Texas parched with drought? Is Kansas invaded by grasshoppers?’’ Clinton Rossiter wrote, ‘‘then in every instance, the President must take the lead to restore the normal pattern of existence.’’21 

Earlier presidents periodically resisted the notion that it was their job to protect Americans from the hazards of bad luck. Vetoing a bill to relieve Texas farmers suffering from the drought of 1887, President Grover Cleveland declared, ‘‘I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution; and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadily resisted.’’22 

But with the advent of the modern presidency, resistance was useless. Coolidge was the last president to show any real reluctance to provide federal relief for the perils of bad weather. Authority for disaster relief became increasingly centralized and governed by executive whim. The Disaster Relief Act of 1950 authorized federal agencies ‘‘in any major disaster . . . when directed by the President, to provide assistance,’’ making what had been an ad hoc, congressionally driven process into a matter of presidential responsibility.23 

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the president’s role as Protector of the Peace would expand still further. In response to Sen. Barry Goldwater’s attempt to make ‘‘violence in our streets’’ a major campaign issue, President Lyndon Baines Johnson told reporters that ‘‘the Constitution provides that responsibility for law and order should be vested in the States and in the local communities.’’ But after trouncing Goldwater in the 1964 election, LBJ inaugurated what has been a four-decade drive to expand the federal criminal code, supporting and signing, among other bills, the Drug Abuse and Control Act (1965), the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (1965), and the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (1968).24 Here too the war metaphor played a central role in presidential rhetoric, as when LBJ, upon signing the latter act, urged support for ‘‘the law enforcement officers, and the men who wage the war on crime day after day in all the streets and roads and alleys in America.’’25 

‘‘World Leader’’ 

By Professor Rossiter’s era, the modern president had become protector of the peace abroad as well as at home. In his famous oration on the Fourth of July, 1821, proclaiming that America ‘‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,’’ John Quincy Adams expressed what was the consensus foreign policy in the early Republic: America was ‘‘the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,’’ but she would be ‘‘champion and vindicator only of her own.’’26 

No longer. The reserve of the Old Republic had given way to the bold promises of the New Frontier: ‘‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge— and more.’’27 (And more?) As Rossiter recognized in The American Presidency, the modern president had become ‘‘President of the West’’ as well as president of the United States.28 That perceived responsibility for the freedom of man would make it easier to mistake a setback for liberty anywhere for a threat to freedom everywhere. It would make it harder to define American interests soberly, and to refrain from battle where it was prudent to refrain. 

‘‘Voice of the People’’ 

In their public rhetoric, postwar presidents embraced all four roles—Chief Legislator, Manager of Prosperity, Protector of the Peace, World Leader—and more. By loudly and incessantly promising great things, they encouraged the view that the president is responsible for most of the good or ill that befalls the nation. Talk may be cheap, but in the modern era, talk is central to the president’s job. 

After FDR’s revolutionary presidency, the chief executive had become, in Rossiter’s words, ‘‘the Voice of the People, the leading formulator and expounder of public opinion in the United States.’’ From his perch at Princeton in 1908, Woodrow Wilson had foreseen this development, and rejoiced at the promise it held, for the country and, no doubt, for himself. ‘‘If [the president] rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it,’’ Wilson wrote in Constitutional Government, ‘‘he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest for action so much as when its President is of such insight and caliber.’’29 

Constrained by the ‘‘rhetorical common law’’ of the time, the 19th century president spoke only rarely, and even more rarely on specific policy matters. But by the 1960s, the president couldn’t manage to keep quiet for very long.30 He was as uncomfortable with silence as his predecessors were with speechifying. 

With the erosion of the Founding’s rhetorical tradition, the president’s major forms of public address, the inaugural address and the State of the Union, had changed dramatically from their earlier incarnations. The Framers had seen the State of the Union as a means of communicating useful information to the legislature; but modern presidents, responding to and shaping public expectations, made it yet another means of direct communication with the American people. Woodrow Wilson’s decision to deliver the address in person moved the 20th-century State of the Union closer to the plebiscitary model, and Harry S. Truman changed the nature of the address still more fundamentally by delivering it via television in 1947. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson moved the speech to prime-time viewing hours, the better to reach a national audience.

Changes in the form of the address (from written to spoken—and televised) and its intended audience (from Congress to the American public at large) had significant effects on the State of the Union’s content. By the second half of the 20th century, the SOTU had become the speech we know today: a passel of promises and demands on the public fisc, greeted with repeated standing ovations from members of a coordinate branch. The policy agenda outlined therein had become both more specific and far more ambitious, with presidents promising to do such things as educate the nation’s children, heal the sick, and bring democracy to the world. 

In the journal Presidential Studies Quarterly in 2002, political scientist Elvin T. Lim tracked the evolution of presidential rhetoric through two centuries of State of the Union and inaugural addresses. Lim found that the substance and the tone of presidential rhetoric had shifted radically. The content of modern public addresses reflects the president’s growing role as national father-protector, responsible for the well-being of the dependents in his charge. The word ‘‘help’’ first appeared in the State of the Union in 1859, and the inaugural in 1889, but ‘‘it appears 110 times in the two genres between 1859 and 1932, and 784 times after.’’ During the period before 1932, when the United States was, by contemporary standards, a poor country, the word poverty appeared only 17 times in the two categories of address, but it has appeared 95 times since then, reflecting the president’s increased responsibility to provide for the poor.31 

Early inaugural addresses often took the form of meditations on the oath of office and the constitutional role of the president. That too has declined over time. Fourteen of the first 19 inaugurals contain promises to defend the Constitution, the Union, or both. Only 1 of the last 18 does so.32 References to the Constitution and ‘‘constitutional’’ have declined significantly; likewise, republican rhetoric— including terms such as ‘‘republic’’ and ‘‘citizen’’—has nearly vanished, and references to ‘‘leader,’’ ‘‘people,’’ and ‘‘reform’’ have soared.33 

In keeping with the activist orientation of the modern executive, Professor Lim noted ‘‘an increasing lack of humility’’ on the part of the president. The words ‘‘providence’’ and ‘‘fate,’’ so prevalent in 19th-century presidential speeches, had essentially disappeared by the late 20th century, replaced by assertive, ‘‘can-do’’ rhetoric. For a president to publicly agonize about his fitness for the job, as Washington did in his first inaugural, noting at the outset that ‘‘no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of [assuming the presidency],’’ would be unthinkable in the modern era. FDR’s bold ‘‘I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people’’ is more in keeping with the contemporary spirit.34 

Interestingly, references to ‘‘God’’ became far more prevalent in the supposedly more secular 20th century than they were in the 19th. In the rhetoric of the 19th-century presidency, God appears, but He’s less often invoked by name. Instead, He plays the role of a ‘‘providence’’ whose blessings are humbly sought, rather than demanded as of right.35 

In their rhetoric and public behavior, modern presidents encouraged (and still encourage) this grandiose view of presidential capabilities by promising to protect Americans from economic dislocation, to shield them from natural disasters and all manner of hazards, and, increasingly, even to provide the moral leadership that could deliver them from spiritual malaise. By midcentury, thanks in part to soaring presidential oratory, public visions of presidential responsibility had become too great for a constitutionally constrained office to meet. And so constraints fell, to make way for the presidency unbound. 

The postwar president had accumulated vast powers at home and abroad. Abroad, the decision to go to war was now his, and his alone. He could topple governments, bomb cities, and launch full scale land invasions of other countries—he might even launch a war that could destroy the world—all without ever having to seek congressional authorization. At home, the president had amassed enormous unilateral authority to make law via executive order, and his ability to gather intelligence on Americans was virtually unchecked. 

Truman’s advisers were right when they told him that the American citizen could be counted on to back up his president in times of crisis. With the cold war as a backdrop, Professor Rossiter could state, ‘‘We have placed a shocking amount of military power in the President’s keeping, but where else, we may ask, could it possibly have been placed?’’36 The amount of military power commandeered by the modern president was indeed shocking, and the events of the latter half of the 20th century would lead many Americans to an assessment much less sanguine than Rossiter’s. 

Unilateral Powers Abroad 

By the middle of the 20th century, through a combination of presidential aggrandizement and congressional acquiescence, the question of war and peace was entirely in the hands of the executive. Though prior presidents had stretched their commander-in-chief authority, when it came to major wars, they still observed the constitutional forms. But the Korean War marked a constitutional Rubicon—the first major conflict in which a U.S. president explicitly took the position that he did not need congressional authorization to launch a full-scale war. 

The Korean War 

Before dawn on June 25, 1950, without warning, North Korean forces began artillery bombardment of Seoul. Over 130,000 troops crossed the 38th parallel, aiming to unify Korea under the communist dictatorship of General Secretary Kim Il-Sung. On June 27, President Truman announced that he had committed American air and sea forces to support the embattled Republic of Korea, with land forces to follow. Two days later, at a press conference, Truman maintained ‘‘we are not at war,’’ preferring to adopt a reporter’s suggestion that it was ‘‘a police action under the United Nations.’’37 By August, ROK troops and the U.S. Eighth Army were trapped in the ‘‘Pusan Perimeter,’’ in the southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula. 

Congress almost certainly would have authorized the use of force, but Truman refused to ask. Secretary of State Dean Acheson assured the president he had the authority to commit U.S. forces anywhere in the world without permission from Congress, and ordered the State Department to prepare a legal memorandum to that effect. The Truman administration seemed to believe that securing United Nations approval was far more important than getting approval from Congress. Yet, the Security Council’s sign-off could not substitute for congressional authorization either under the terms of the UN Charter or, more importantly, the U.S. Constitution.38 

Though he supported military action in Korea, Sen. Robert A. Taft, President Taft’s son, had serious qualms about the precedent being set for executive-initiated war. In a June 28 speech on the Senate floor, Taft called Truman’s action ‘‘a complete usurpation by the President of the authority to use the Armed Forces of this country.’’ ‘‘If the President can intervene in Korea without Congressional approval,’’ Taft argued, ‘‘he can go to war in Malaya or Indonesia or Iran or South America.’’ If the principle advanced by the president were allowed to stand, Taft concluded, ‘‘we would have finally terminated for all time the right of Congress to declare war.’’39 

Some five months later, with the war in Korea going poorly and Truman preparing to send more troops to bolster NATO forces in Europe, Taft objected again to the president’s usurpation of congressional authority. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the man who later popularized the phrase ‘‘Imperial Presidency,’’ and who, throughout his long career had a recurring romance with that institution, jumped into the debate. In a letter to the New York Times, Schlesinger called Taft’s complaints about presidential war ‘‘demonstrably irresponsible,’’ and defended the (Democratic) president’s prerogative to put troops in a war zone and start wars without authorization. This was Situational Constitutionalism at its worst. But 22 years later, during the Nixon administration, Schlesinger apologized. Taft, it turned out, had a point.40 

Yet, the principle Taft feared was allowed to stand, completing the reduction of Congress to the status of advisory body at best on matters of war and peace. At a press conference in March 1951, Truman generously allowed that Congress had the right to express itself on the Korean War question: ‘‘I don’t mind their talking about anything they want to. This is a free country. They can make any number of speeches they want . . . but that does not mean that it helps the relations with the rest of the world.’’41 Talk all you want, Truman said, but the ultimate decision would rest with the president.

In the end, after a terribly unpopular war that on several occasions nearly escalated into a broader land war in Asia, the United States managed to restore the pre-1950 status quo on the Korean peninsula.  Over 33,000 American soldiers, conscripts and volunteers, died without the courtesy of an up-or-down vote on the war from their representatives in Congress. And, in a sense, what was left of Congress’s power to declare war died with them. 

The Vietnam War 

Lyndon Johnson’s attitude toward Congress echoed Truman’s imperiousness. As LBJ told an audience in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1966: ‘‘Now there are many, many who can recommend, advise, and sometimes a few of them consent. But there is only one that has been chosen by the American people to decide.’’42 That appeared to be Congress’s attitude as well, even as it authorized the use of force in Vietnam. 

On August 5, 1964, in response to what he described as two unprovoked attacks on U.S. naval vessels operating off the North Vietnamese coast, President Johnson asked Congress for a resolution approving military action. Two days later, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, stating that ‘‘Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.’’43 

Many in Congress denied that they were voting for full-scale war. Sen. J. William Fulbright, who would come to rue his vote for the resolution and would become a key critic of our Vietnam policy, shepherded the resolution to passage. Asked on the floor of the Senate whether the proposed resolution could be construed to ‘‘authorize or recommend or approve the landing of large American armies in Vietnam,’’ Fulbright declared that a full-scale land war in Asia was ‘‘the last thing we would want to do. However, the language of the resolution would not prevent it. It would authorize whatever the Commander in Chief feels is necessary.’’ The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed with less than nine hours of debate in the Senate, most before a chamber only two-thirds full. The House took only 40 minutes to approve the measure. 

The Johnson administration secured the resolution under false pretenses—not the first or last time that would occur in the modern practice of presidential war-making. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara assured Congress that the attack was ‘‘unprovoked’’: ‘‘Our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any.’’45 

In fact, the destroyer USS Maddox had been in the Gulf of Tonkin as part of a coordinated effort to gather intelligence on North Vietnamese defenses. South Vietnamese naval commandos, using boats provided by the U.S. Navy, would hit coastal targets selected by the Central Intelligence Agency, in order to ‘‘light up’’ North Vietnamese radar for the Maddox. The Maddox did come under fire from NVA torpedo boats on August 2, but its damage was limited to a single half-inch bullet hole.46 And despite Secretary McNamara’s assertion that there was ‘‘unequivocal proof’’ of another attack two days later, no such proof existed, and it’s now clear that the second attack never happened.47 LBJ suspected as much at the time, telling Undersecretary of State George Ball a few days after the resolution’s passage: ‘‘Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!’’48 Nonetheless, Johnson seized on the opportunity to secure congressional approval for any action he deemed necessary in Southeast Asia. 

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was broadly worded enough to allow the president alone to make the final decision about war. Johnson compared it to ‘‘grandma’s nightshirt’’ because it ‘‘covered everything.’’49 The president did not immediately use the authority granted him. But six months later, after he defeated Goldwater in the November election, LBJ ramped up the war with the ‘‘Rolling Thunder’’ bombing campaign in North Vietnam and the introduction of large numbers of American ground troops in the south. 

The principal rationale behind the Vietnam War was containment of communist aggression. Yet, in a larger sense, it was a Progressive war, reflecting an exalted view of the president’s role and America’s historic mission. In it, we can see something of the sentiments of Progressive senator Albert J. Beveridge, who told his colleagues in 1900 that ‘‘God has marked the American people as his chosen Nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.’’50 In his book Promised Land, Crusader State, Walter McDougall calls Vietnam the ‘‘Great Society War.’’ McDougall wasn’t the first to make the connection: as Vice President Hubert Humphrey put it in a 1966 television interview, ‘‘There is a tremendous new opening here for realizing the dream of a great society in Asia, not just here at home.’’51 

With his legislative blitzkrieg on the home front—pushing through bills on health care, civil rights, and poverty—Johnson exhibited the Progressive’s boundless faith in government’s ability to solve complex social problems. ‘‘We have the power to shape the civilization that we want,’’ Johnson declared in his May 1964 Great Society speech at the University of Michigan.52 

That faith applied abroad as well as at home: the daunting task of nation-building in South Vietnam could be achieved by setting loose the social workers, planners, and social scientists: ‘‘McNamara put more than a hundred sociologists, ethnologists, and psychologists to work ‘modeling’ South Vietnamese society and seeking data sufficient ‘to describe it quantitatively’ and simulate its behavior on a computer.’’ McDougall quotes soldier and military analyst Colonel Harry Summers: ‘‘Vietnam was the international version of our domestic Great Society programs where we presumed that we knew what was best for the world in terms of social, political and economic development and saw it as our duty to force the world into the American mold—to act not so much as the World’s Policeman as the World’s Nanny.’’53 

‘‘Dammit,’’ Johnson exclaimed to aide Jack Valenti in 1966, ‘‘we need to exhibit more compassion for the Vietnamese plain people. . . . We’ve got to see that the South Vietnamese government wins the battle . . . of crops and hearts and caring.’’54 Crops and hearts and caring—and massive civilian loss of life. Though estimates of civilian casualties are murky, they range from 195,000 to 430,000 in South Vietnam alone from 1965 to 1974. In North Vietnam, the numbers are even less certain, but given that the volume of bombing in Vietnam surpassed the 2.7 million tons dropped by all Allied forces in all of World War II, ‘‘high civilian casualties were an inevitable feature of the nature of the war and the sheer volume of firepower used by the American military.’’55 As for the costs to America, Vietnam became our longest and second most expensive war, and one of our bloodiest, with some 58,000 killed. 

A Close-Run Thing 
Despite the tragedy of Vietnam, Americans tend to associate the cold war with some of the modern presidency’s greatest triumphs. But with nearly two decades’ distance from the fall of the Soviet Union, it’s difficult to appreciate what a close-run thing the cold war was, how much worse it could have gone.

During that ‘‘long twilight struggle,’’ the president’s control of the powers of war and peace extended well beyond cases of open warfare employing U.S. troops. He also claimed broad powers to force regime change through covert action. As General James Doolittle put it in a top-secret report to President Eisenhower in 1954, 

If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘‘fair play’’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.56 

Under Eisenhower’s direction  the CIA toppled the democratically elected leftist governments of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala. The agency also began training Cuban exiles for an invasion of Cuba aimed at removing the Castro regime. 

The Cuban operation, planned under the Eisenhower and carried out under Kennedy, did not go nearly as smoothly as its predecessors. Lacking promised U.S. air support, the invasion force never got off the beach, and the bulk of the 1,500 exiles were captured by Cuban forces. 

After the Bay of Pigs debacle, top military officials developed a plan to foment a war with Cuba by blaming Cuba for attacks on Americans that the military itself would stage. On March 13, 1962, Army General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s defense secretary, with a memo detailing ‘‘Operation Northwoods’’: a plan to covertly engineer various ‘‘pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.’’57 Those pretexts would include ‘‘a ‘Remember the Maine’ incident’’—staging the explosion and sinking of a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay. Though no U.S. personnel were to be killed in the incident, phony casualty lists would be supplied, which ‘‘in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.’’58 The memo also contemplated faking a Cuban attack on ‘‘a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United  States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela,’’ and staging a phony 

Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the point of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible [Cuban] government.59 

The plan, signed off on by all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was apparently vetoed by Defense Secretary McNamara.60 

The short-term effect of the botched landing at the Bay of Pigs— combined with repeated CIA-sponsored attempts to assassinate Castro—helped make the Cuban dictator receptive to the Soviet offer to place medium- and intermediate-range missiles on Cuban soil. That in turn led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world ever came to thermonuclear war. 

John Yoo, the Imperial Presidency’s most prominent modern defender, sees the Cuban Missile Crisis as one of executive unilateralism’s finest hours. In a debate at the Federalist Society’s 2006 Lawyers’ Convention, Yoo argued that 

in the Cold War period, presidents often used their authority unilaterally in ways that we have come to admire and praise. . . . We put up a blockade around Cuba, which is an act of war, in order to forestall a serious change in the balance of power. President Kennedy not only put up a blockade unilaterally, but he determined all of the rules of engagement, he made all the tactical and strategic decisions, as a commander-in-chief would, and we all think of this as the greatest moment of Kennedy’s leadership in his presidency.61 

It’s astonishing that Yoo can be so upbeat about the standoff that brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to a nuclear exchange. In fact, the missiles did not represent ‘‘a serious change in the balance of power.’’ Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted  as much at the first meeting of the Executive Committee set up by Kennedy to explore possible responses to the Soviet action. ‘‘A missile is a missile.’’ Placing missiles in Cuba did nothing to change the United States’ overwhelming nuclear deterrent to a Soviet first strike.62 Nonetheless, in large part because of domestic political considerations, Kennedy rejected out of hand any option that involved leaving the missiles in place, even if doing so could avoid the risk of nuclear war. 

If there’s anything to praise about JFK’s leadership during the crisis, it’s that he resisted efforts to get him to escalate the conflict still further. Thomas Power, head of the Strategic Air Command, and Curtis Lemay, the Air Force chief of staff, both tried to push the Cuban Missile Crisis into a full-scale war with the Soviets. Both men, like much of the military establishment at the time, were enamored with the concept of preventive war, in which the United States would kill off its superpower rivals before they grew too strong. When Lemay had served as head of SAC from 1948 to 1957, he hoped to provoke an incident that would allow him to deliver his ‘‘Sunday Punch,’’ 750 nuclear bombs in a few hours, leading to an estimated 60 million Russian dead. Without authorization, in 1954 Lemay ordered B-45 overflights of the Soviet Union, commenting to his aides, ‘‘Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.’’63 General Power, Lemay’s successor at SAC, and a man that even Lemay considered ‘‘a sadist,’’ chastised a colleague at a 1960 briefing on nuclear strategy, yelling, ‘‘Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. . . . Look: at the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!’’ The colleague replied, ‘‘Well, you’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.’’64 

At the height of the Missile Crisis, Power allowed the pre-scheduled test launch of an Atlas ICBM, in an apparent attempt to spook the Soviets into action.65 Lemay in turn repeatedly challenged Kennedy’s courage, urging the president to approve air strikes on the missile installations. That action would likely have led to the nuclear exchange Lemay had long lusted after. As we later learned, during the crisis, the Soviets had 20 operational, nuclear-armed medium range ballistic missiles in Cuba, as well as nine tactical nuclear weapons that Russian field commanders had been authorized to use in the event of an attack.66 In his book Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, historian Richard Rhodes writes, ‘‘If John Kennedy had followed Lemay’s advice, history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible Holocaust. Ours would have been the historic omnicide.’’67 

That presidents advised by such men had in their hands the means to kill millions should be unsettling to people of normal human sensibilities. That presidents showed restraint while in possession of such power gives us cause for thanks, but it is, at best, an uneasy source of comfort. 

Unilateral Powers at Home 
Presidential arrogance and deception, congressional cowardice, high-minded rhetoric in the service of disastrous wars—the pattern established in the cold war may seem all too familiar from a post 9/11 vantage point. And as with the War on Terror, the communist threat led to enhanced secrecy and greatly increased executive power at home. 

‘‘Who in this year 1948,’’ Professor Rossiter asked in his book Constitutional Dictatorship, ‘‘would be so blind as to assert that the people of the United States, or of any other constitutional democracy, can afford again to be weak and divided and jealous of the power of their elected representatives?’’ ‘‘If the crisis history of the modern democracies teaches us anything,’’ Rossiter continued, ‘‘it teaches us that power can be responsible, that strong government can be democratic government, that dictatorship can be constitutional.’’68 The 26-year-old William F. Buckley Jr. echoed that sentiment when he wrote in 1952 that ‘‘we have got to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.’’69 


‘‘Totalitarian bureaucracy’’? ‘‘Dictatorship’’? If it never came to that, we have our congenital anti-statism to thank. Even during an uncharacteristic period of high trust in government, Americans proved resistant to the idea of a garrison state.70 Not resistant enough, however, to prevent disturbing abuses of power. Some of the worst would be carried out in secret, but even in the open, presidents pressed extraordinary theories of executive power and were checked only intermittently and imperfectly by Congress and the Court.

In fact, more than once Congress forced on a president powers he’d rather not have, as in 1950, when Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act. The emergency detention provisions of that act allowed the president, during an ‘‘internal security emergency,’’ to incarcerate anyone he believed likely to engage in ‘‘acts of espionage or sabotage.’’ To his credit, President Truman vetoed the act, but Congress overrode his veto.71 The government readied six detention camps, including one at Tule Lake, California, which had been used to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. Altogether the camps could hold up to 15,000 people, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintained lists of potential subversives, totaling close to 40,000 names, who might be confined in the event an emergency was declared.72 Though the camps were never used, they were maintained by the government until the 1960s.73

The Steel Seizure Case 
The McCarran Act veto was an uncharacteristic display of self control by President Truman, who rarely shrank from authoritarian methods. In May 1946, nearly a year after V-J Day, in the midst of a nationwide railroad strike, Truman announced that he would use the military to break the strike, and went to Congress for authority to draft the strikers into the army if they refused to return to work; ‘‘We’ll draft them and think about the law later,’’ Truman snapped when his attorney general brought up the Constitution. Not surprisingly, the strike was settled on the president’s terms.74 

In 1952, two years into the Korean War, Truman took a similarly hard line facing down a nationwide steelworkers’ strike. With Executive Order 10340, he ordered Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to seize the steel mills and operate them for the government.75 This time, however, the Supreme Court pushed back. 

In an April 8 radio and television address, Truman characterized his action as a war measure: ‘‘If steel production stops, we will have to stop making the shells and bombs that are going directly to our soldiers at the front in Korea.’’ This was TR’s Stewardship Theory on steroids. Citing his powers as president and authority as commander in chief of the U.S. Army, Truman announced that the steel companies would be nationalized and production continued until the strike could be settled. At an April 17 press conference, a reporter asked the president whether his theory would allow a president to ‘‘seize the newspapers and/or the radio stations.’’ Truman would say only that ‘‘under similar circumstances, the President of the United States has to act for whatever is for the best of the country.’’76 

The steel companies sought a preliminary injunction on the grounds that the president had acted without legal authority. Assistant Attorney General Holmes Baldridge fought the injunction with arguments as sweeping as any that the Bush administration’s legal team has employed in the post-9/11 legal environment:

Judge Pine: So you contend the Executive has unlimited power in time of an emergency? 

Baldridge: He has the power to take such action as is necessary to meet the emergency. 

Judge Pine: If the emergency is great, it is unlimited, is it? 

Baldridge: I suppose if you carry it to its logical conclusion, that is true. . . . 

Judge Pine: And that the Executive determines the emergencies and the courts cannot even review whether it is an emergency. Baldridge: That is correct.

Later, Pine asked Baldridge: ‘‘So, when the sovereign people adopted the Constitution, it enumerated the powers set up in the Constitution, but limited the powers of the Congress and limited the powers of the judiciary, but it did not limit the powers of the Executive. Is that what you say?’’ Baldridge replied, ‘‘That is the way we read Article II of the Constitution.’’ 

The Supreme Court, however, disagreed with the proposition that the Constitution granted unlimited power to the chief executive. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, by a 6–3 vote, the Court affirmed Judge Pine’s ruling and held the seizure invalid. Justice Black’s majority opinion categorically rejected the Truman theory of executive power, noting that ‘‘in the framework of our Constitution, the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.’’77 Justice Robert Jackson’s influential concurrence evaluated claims of presidential power through the lens of congressional authorization: with such authorization, the president’s authority was at its maximum; but when he acts against the express or implied will of Congress, it is at its ‘‘lowest ebb’’—as it was in this case, Congress having considered and rejected property seizure as a means of settling labor disputes. According to Jackson, the expansive emergency authority the president claimed had no constitutional basis. The Framers ‘‘knew what emergencies were’’ and ‘‘knew how they afford a ready pretext for usurpation.’’ Other than allowing Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in times of rebellion or invasion, they did not provide emergency powers allowing the suspension of liberties. ‘‘I do not think we rightfully may so amend their work,’’ Jackson wrote.78

Executive Orders 
But Youngstown did not appreciably reduce the growing practice of rule by executive order. In the first century of the Republic, with Congress still serving as the country’s principal lawmaker, presidents issued only about 300 executive orders. Yet, as the president’s responsibilities expanded, so too did his power to make public policy unilaterally, with TR, Wilson, and FDR combined issuing over 6,500. Though no successor came close to FDR’s record of 3,723, presidents from Truman through Nixon issued over 2,400 such orders.79 Moreover, during this period, executive orders became increasingly indistinguishable from legislative acts. Where most of the executive orders issued by Coolidge and Hoover related to administrative matters such as civil service rules, with no more than 10 percent ‘‘policy-specific,’’ by the 1960s, executive orders making national policy and affecting private rights ‘‘reached 50% and never declined.’’80 As the president’s responsibility for the welfare of the nation grew, his power grew accordingly.

When carried out pursuant to legislative or constitutional authority, executive orders are unobjectionable. Thus, when President Truman desegregated the armed forces with the stroke of a pen in 1948, he acted pursuant to his powers as commander in chief and corrected an offense that violated constitutional equality before the law.81 Yet, many of the orders issued by modern presidents lack such authority and justification. By combining legislative and executive powers, they put the president in the constitutionally dubious position of both making and enforcing the law. Such orders cannot be squared with the Madisonian scheme of separation of powers. Montesquieu, who was for Madison ‘‘the oracle who is always consulted’’ on separation of powers, maintained that ‘‘there can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.’’82

The most infamous example of that dynamic occurred when FDR authorized the mass internment of over 110,000 innocent Japanese Americans via Executive Order 9066. A less notorious example, but one that did lasting damage, was Truman’s 1951 Executive Order 10290, which greatly expanded federal officials’ ability to classify information they deemed ‘‘necessary . . . to protect the security of the United States.’’ Where before classification powers had rarely extended to nonmilitary agencies, Truman’s order extended the authority to all civilian federal agencies and did not limit its exercise to wartime.83 Truman declined to cite any specific legislative authority as the basis for the order, resting simply on ‘‘the authority vested in me by the Constitution and statutes, and as President of the United States.’’84 

President Eisenhower tightened the criteria for classification somewhat, but not enough to prevent some hideous abuses. Among the worst were the government-sponsored radiation tests carried out until the mid-1970s, often without the consent of the subjects. In one study, federal researchers irradiated prison inmates’ testicles to test the effects of radiation exposure. In 1994 the Los Angeles Times obtained a 1963 memorandum detailing the proposed study. On it, one scientist had written, ‘‘I’m for support at the requested level, as long as we are not liable. I worry about possible carcinogenic effects of such treatments.’’85

Even where executive orders affect citizens’ rights less directly, they place vast power in the president’s hands, power that can be used to shape public policy without the inconvenient and messy process of convincing a majority of the people’s representatives that legislative action is necessary. One man makes the decision to establish a new agency, implement an affirmative action plan, or impose a new regulation on private conduct, and then, should legislators object, it is up to them to change the law. 

That turns the Constitution on its head: the Framers erected significant barriers to the passage of legislation in an attempt to curb ‘‘the facility and excess of lawmaking.’’86 Under the Constitution, a law must meet with the approval of the representatives of three different constituencies: the House, the Senate, and the president. But when the executive branch makes the law, those constitutional hurdles then obstruct legislative efforts to repeal it. For that reason, executive orders have proved especially popular at the end of presidents’ terms. As two leading scholars of executive orders note: ‘‘When presidential command over the legislative process reaches its low point, presidents regularly strike out on their own, set vitally important public policies, and leave it up to Congress and an incoming administration to try and recover an old status quo.’’87 That Congress is most often unable to do so points to the enormous unchecked power commandeered by the modern president.

Political Surveillance 
One of the most significant—and least constrained—powers the postwar president exercised was the power to spy on American citizens. Under the rubric of national security, postwar presidents of both parties routinely gathered intelligence on their political adversaries. Presidents and their aides used the FBI to investigate and wiretap presidential critics and anyone they viewed as possibly threatening to their interests. Despite some qualms, the FBI complied ‘‘unquestioningly’’ with the requests.88 

John F. Kennedy was among the most zealous of the modern presidents in his abuse of wiretap powers. JFK’s attorney general, brother Bobby, ordered wiretaps on New York Times and Newsweek reporters, along with various congressmen and lobbyists.89 In 1962, when U.S. Steel and other steel corporations raised prices by some $6 a ton, JFK invoked the crises in Berlin and Southeast Asia, and accused the companies of ‘‘a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest.’’90 Privately, Kennedy was more colorful: the steel executives ‘‘fucked us, and now we’ve got to fuck them.’’91 To that end, JFK and RFK ordered wiretaps on the heads of the companies and had FBI agents carry out dawn raids on the steel executives’ homes. 

At a 1962 dinner party attended by the Washington Post’s Benjamin Bradlee, who would later, as executive editor, help bring down the Nixon presidency, the Kennedys felt free to joke about their abuse of wiretapping authority in the dispute over steel prices. Toasting Bobby, President Kennedy recounted a conversation with Thomas F. Patton, the president of Republic Steel, who complained that the attorney general had wiretapped the steel executives and enlisted the Internal Revenue Service to bully them. ‘‘Of course,’’ JFK said, ‘‘Patton was right.’’ RFK stood up and cracked, ‘‘They were mean to my brother. They can’t do that to my brother!’’92 

Later that year, when JFK celebrated his 45th birthday in a little ceremony at Madison Square Garden with 15,000 in attendance, Marilyn Monroe, clad in a flesh-colored, rhinestone-bedazzled dress she’d had to be sewn into, closed her steamy version of ‘‘Happy Birthday’’ with a couple of lines sung to the tune of ‘‘Thanks for the Memories’’: 

Thanks, Mr. President 
For all the things you’ve done 
The battles that you’ve won 
The way you deal with U.S. Steel 
And our problems by the ton 
We thank you so much. 

Respected federal judge Laurence H. Silberman didn’t sew himself into a rhinestone-studded dress when he addressed a conservative gathering at Washington’s University Club in October 2005. Yet, he managed to unsettle the audience nonetheless. That night, Silberman recounted his experiences as a deputy attorney general in 1974, when the House Judiciary Committee asked him to review secret files kept by J. Edgar Hoover. Silberman discovered a scandalmonger’s treasure trove of ‘‘nasty bits of information on various political figures—some still active.’’ According to Silberman, ‘‘Lyndon Johnson was the most demanding’’ when it came to requisitioning FBI political intelligence.93 In 1964, after D.C. police arrested LBJ aide Walter Jenkins for homosexual conduct in a YMCA bathroom, special assistant to the president Bill Moyers ordered Hoover to find something similar on Barry Goldwater’s campaign staff. 

During the 1964 contest, the Johnson administration also used the CIA to keep Goldwater campaign officials under surveillance and to procure advance copies of the candidate’s speeches.94 And at Johnson’s request, the FBI bugged Goldwater’s campaign plane. In a 1971 conversation with Robert Mardian, an assistant attorney general under Nixon, Hoover admitted having the plane bugged. Why did he do it? Hoover explained to Mardian that ‘‘you do what the President of the United States orders you to do.’’95 

In Richard Nixon’s view, there were very few things that a president couldn’t order his subordinates to do. ‘‘When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,’’ he told David Frost in a 1977 interview.96 That put it pretty starkly, but Nixon’s constitutional theory wasn’t dramatically more imperial than any postwar president’s, save possibly Eisenhower’s. And there was some truth to the conservative complaint that Nixon was deposed for attempting what JFK and LBJ got away with with some regularity—that is, using federal intelligence agencies against the president’s political enemies. 

That point is usually offered as a defense of Nixon, as in conservative historian Paul Johnson’s History of the American People, in which he writes, hilariously, that Nixon’s impeachment 

was an ugly moment in America’s story and one which future historians, who will have no personal knowledge of any of the individuals concerned and whose emotions will not be engaged either way, are likely to judge a dark hour in the history of a republic which prides itself in its love of order and its patient submission to the rule of law.97 

But the ‘‘everybody does it’’ defense offered by Johnson and other conservatives merely pointed to the systematic erosion of checks and balances and the abuses it made possible. In the early 1970s, Americans were learning a lot about those abuses, and what they learned reawakened their native skepticism about power.

next
Hero Takes a Fall

notes
Chapter 3 
1. Michael Nelson, ‘‘Evaluating the Presidency,’’ in The Presidency and the Political System, 5th ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 1998), p. 5. 
2. John F. Kennedy, ‘‘The Presidency in 1960,’’ National Press Club, Washington, D.C., January 14, 1960. 
3. Table 5A.1 ‘‘Trust the Federal Government 1958–2004,’’ ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, http://www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/ tab5a_1.htm. 
4. Roberta S. Sigel, ‘‘Image of the American Presidency—Part II of an Exploration into Popular Views of Presidential Power,’’ Midwest Journal of Political Science 10 (February 1966): 128. 
5. Thomas Cronin, ‘‘Superman: Our Textbook President,’’ Washington Monthly (October 1970): 50. Chapter 2 of Cronin’s 1975 book The State of the Presidency, ‘‘The Cult of the Presidency: A Halo for the Chief,’’ expands on his 1970 essay and touches on other themes I explore in this book. Cronin, The State of the Presidency (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975), pp. 23–51. 
6. Fred I. Greenstein, ‘‘The Benevolent Leader: Children’s Images of Political Authority,’’ American Political Science Review 54 (December 1960). 
7. Fred I. Greenstein, ‘‘More on Children’s Images of the President,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly 25 (Winter 1961): 648–54.
8. Roberta S. Sigel, ‘‘An Exploration into Some Aspects of Political Socialization,’’ American Political Science Review 62 (March 1968). 
9. Neustadt and Schlesinger quoted in Nelson, The Presidency and the Political System, pp. 4–5. 
10. James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 337. 
11. Peter Augustine Lawler, ‘‘The Federalist’s Hostility to Leadership and the Crisis of the Contemporary Presidency,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 17 (Fall 1987): 721, fn. 9; James MacGregor Burns, The Power to Lead (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 17. 
12. Burns, The Power to Lead, p. 330. 
13. David McCollough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 591. 
14. Quoted in James T. Patterson, ‘‘The Rise of Presidential Power before World War II,’’ Law and Contemporary Problems 40 (Spring 1976): 52. 
15. Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–1998, 3rd ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 1999), pp. 288–89. 
16. Ibid., p. 293. 
17. Lyn Ragsdale and John J. Theis III, ‘‘The Institutionalization of the American Presidency, 1924–92,’’ American Journal of Political Science 41 (October 1997): 1296. 
18. William P. Quigley, ‘‘The Right to Work and Earn a Living Wage: A Proposed Constitutional Amendment,’’ New York City Law Review 2 (Summer 1998). 
19. Ulysses S. Grant, Sixth Annual Message, December 7, 1874. 
20. Article I, Section 8, Cl. 15, Art. IV, Sec. 4. 
21. Rossiter, The American Presidency (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1956, 1987), p. 21. 
22. 18 Cong. Rec. 1875 (1887). For an argument that such refusals were a rarity, and that constitutional constraints played little role in early debates over federal relief policy, see Michele L. Landis, ‘‘Let Me Next Time Be ‘Tried by Fire’: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State 1789–1874,’’ Northwestern University Law Review 92 (Spring 1998). 
23. See Henry B. Hogue and Keith Bea, ‘‘Federal Emergency Management and Homeland Security Organization: Historical Developments and Legislative Options,’’ CRS Report for Congress RL33369, April 19, 2006. 
24. Willard M. Oliver, The Law and Order Presidency (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2003), pp. 72–74. 
25. Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘‘Statement by the President upon Signing the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968,’’ June 19, 1968. 
26. William Henry Seward, ed., Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams (New York: C. M. Saxton, Barker & Co., 1860), p. 132. 
27. John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961. 
28. Rossiter, The American Presidency, p. 27. 
29. Quoted in Rossiter, American Presidency, p. 18. 
30. The phrase ‘‘rhetorical common law’’ is from Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 61. 
31. Elvin T. Lim, ‘‘Five Trends in Presidential Rhetoric: An Analysis of Rhetoric from George Washington to Bill Clinton,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 32 (June 2002): 343. 
32. David F. Ericson, ‘‘Presidential Inaugural Addresses and American Political Culture,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly (Fall 1997): 739. Ericson notes that some of the prevalence of this theme in early addresses can be attributed to the fact that the integrity of the Union was less secure before the Civil War. 
33. Lim, p. 339. 
34. George Washington, First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789; Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933. 
35. Lim, ‘‘Fire Trends in Presidential Rhetoric,’’ p. 335, 337. 
36. Rossiter, The American Presidency, p. 11. 
37. Quoted in Louis Fisher, ‘‘The Korean War: On What Legal Basis Did Truman Act?’’ American Journal of International Law 89 (January 1995): 33–34. 
38. Under the charter, commitment of troops would be undertaken by means of ‘‘special agreements’’ between participating nations and the Security Council, and those agreements would be issued pursuant to member nations’ ‘‘respective constitutional processes.’’ Moreover, the UN Participation Act makes those agreements ‘‘subject to the approval of the Congress by appropriate Act or joint resolution.’’ See John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 11, n. 60; Louis Fisher, Presidential War Powers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 80. 
39. Quoted in Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975), p. 174. 
40. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973), p. 139. 
41. Norman A. Graebner, ‘‘The President as Commander in Chief: A Study in Power,’’ Journal of Military History 57 (January 1993): 124. 
42. Quoted in Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 291. 
43. P.L. 88-408 (August 10, 1964). 
44. John Hart Ely, ‘‘The American War in Indochina, Part I: The (Troubled) Constitutionality of the War They Told Us About,’’ Stanford Law Review 42 (April 1990): 886, 888. 
45. Quoted in John Prados, ‘‘Essay: 40th Anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,’’ George Washington University National Security Archive, August 4, 2004, http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/essay.htm. 
46. ‘‘Gulf of Tonkin, USS Maddox Reports for 2 and 4 August 1964,’’ Selected Naval Documents: Vietnam, http://www.history.navy.mil/docs/vietnam/tonkin-2.htm; also, it seems that the Maddox shot first. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 241. 
47. Robert J. Hanyok, ‘‘Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,’’ Cryptologic Quarterly (approved for Release by NSA on November 3, 2005). 
48. James P. Pfiffner, ‘‘The Contemporary Presidency: Presidential Lies,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 29 (December 1999). 
49. Jack Beatty, ‘‘The One-Term Tradition,’’ Atlantic Monthly, September 2003. 
50. Quoted in Jonathan Monten, ‘‘The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy,’’ International Security 29 (Spring 2005). 
51. Quoted in Sen. J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 53. 
52. Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘‘Remarks at the University of Michigan,’’ May 22, 1964. 
53. Quoted in Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), p. 189. Though perhaps one could call it a ‘‘New Deal War’’ as well, given Johnson’s pledge to seek funding for a TVA-style project on the Mekong River. Lyndon B. Johnson, Address at Johns Hopkins University: Peace without Conquest, April 7, 1965. 
54. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 158. 
55. Charles Hirschman, Samual Preston, and Vu Manh Loi, ‘‘Vietnamese Casualties during the American War: A New Estimate,’’ Population and Development Review 21 (December 1995): 790. 
56. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, p. 109. 
57. Quotations taken from the Operation Northwoods memo, which can be found at http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf in George Washington University’s National Security Archive at http://www.gwu.edu/ nsarchiv/. 
58. Ibid., p. 8. 
59. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 
60. William D. Hartung, ‘‘Shadow Warriors,’’ Washington Post Book World, May 27, 2001, p. T09. For further information on Operation Northwoods, see David Ruppe, ‘‘Friendly Fire Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War with Cuba,’’ ABC News.com, November 7, 2001, http://abcnews.go.com/ sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html; Michael Young, ‘‘Spy Watch: Behind Closed Doors at the National Security Agency,’’ Reason, March 1, 2002. 
61. Richard A. Epstein, Roger Pilon, Geoffrey R. Stone, John Yoo; Moderator: William H. Pryor Jr., Debate: ‘‘Federalism and Separation of Powers: Executive Power in Wartime,’’ Engage 8 (May 2007), http://www.fed-soc.org/doclib/20070503_ Engagev8i2.pdf. 
62. Quoted in Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), pp. 195–96. 
63. Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 565–66. 
64. James Carroll, ‘‘Seeds of Salvation,’’ The Boston Globe, June 26, 2006. 
65. Rhodes, Dark Sun, p. 573. 
66. Ibid., p. 575. 
67. Ibid., p. 576. 
68. Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1948, 2002), p. 314. 
69. Quoted in W. James Antle III, ‘‘Conservative Crack-Up: Will Libertarians Leave the Cold War Coalition?’’ The American Conservative, November 17, 2003. 
70. See Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 
71. Though Truman vetoed the bill on civil liberties grounds, he did not appear overly concerned with the internment provisions. His main objection was to the provisions of the act that required registration of so-called communist front organizations, provisions that ‘‘would open a Pandora’s box of opportunities for official condemnation of organizations and individuals for perfectly honest opinions which happen to be stated also by communists.’’ His objections to the internal detention provisions were tepid at best, noting that the bill might cause legal confusion because Congress hadn’t suspended habeas corpus. Harry S. Truman, ‘‘Veto of the Internal Security Bill,’’ September 22, 1950. 
72. Cornelius P. Cotter and J. Malcolm Smith, ‘‘An American Paradox: The Emergency Detention Act of 1950,’’ Journal of Politics 19 (February 1957): 20. See also Morton H. Halperin, Jerry J. Berman, Robert L. Borosage, and Christine M. Marwick, The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 111. 
73. Michael Linfield, Freedom under Fire: U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War (Boston: South End Press, 1990), p. 80. 
74. McCullough, Truman, pp. 501, 506. 
75. Executive Order 10340, ‘‘Directing the Secretary of Commerce to Take Possession of and Operate the Plants and Facilities of Certain Steel Companies,’’ April 8, 1952. 
76. Quoted in David Gray Adler, ‘‘The Steel Seizure Case and Inherent Presidential Power,’’ Constitutional Commentary 19 (Spring 2002): 161. 
77. Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 587 (1952). 
78. Youngstown, 343 U.S. at 650. 
79. William J. Olson and Alan Woll, ‘‘Executive Orders and National Emergencies: How Presidents Have Come to ‘Run the Country’ by Usurping Legislative Power,’’ Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 358, October 28, 1999, pp. 12–13. 
80. Ragsdale and Theis, ‘‘Institutionalization of the American Presidency,’’ pp. 1288–90. 
81. Executive Order 9981, July 26, 1948. 
82. Federalist No. 47, pp. 250–51. 
83. Arvin S. Quist, ‘‘Security Classification of Information, Vol. 1: Introduction, History, and Adverse Impacts,’’ September 20, 2002, http://www.fas.org/sgp/ library/quist/index.html. 
84. Quist, Chapter 3, ‘‘Classification under Executive Orders,’’ http://www.fas.org/ sgp/library/quist/chap_3.html. 
85. Melissa Healy, ‘‘Science of Power and Weakness: In the Name of the Cold War, Researchers Took the Disadvantaged and Made Them Subjects of Risky Radiation Tests,’’ Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1994. 
86. Federalist No. 62, p. 321. 
87. William G. Howell and Kenneth R. Mayer, ‘‘The Last One Hundred Days,’’ Presidential Studies Quarterly 35 (September 2005): 551. 
88. ‘‘E. Political Use of Intelligence Information,’’ Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans: Book II, Final Report, April 26, 1976. 
89. Barton J. Bernstein, ‘‘The Road to Watergate and Beyond: The Growth and Abuse of Executive Authority since 1940,’’ Law and Contemporary Problems 40 (Spring 1976): 71. 
90. John F. Kennedy, Press Conference, April 11, 1962. 
91. Victor Lasky, It Didn’t Start with Watergate (New York: Dial Press, 1977) p. 69. 
92. Ibid., p. 72. 
93. Robert Novak, ‘‘Removing J. Edgar’s Name,’’ CNN.com, December 1, 2005; Laurence H. Silberman, ‘‘Hoover’s Institution,’’ Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2005. 
94. Lasky, It Didn’t Start with Watergate, p. 171–72. 
95. Lee Edwards, Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution (Washington: Regnery, 1997), p. 310. 
96. Quoted in John Herbers, ‘‘The 37th President; In Three Decades, Nixon Tasted Crisis and Defeat, Victory, Ruin and Revival,’’ New York Times, April 24, 1994. 
97. Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 904 (emphasis added).