Archives for the 'Executive Power' Category
Situational Constitutionalism on the Right
Sam Tanenhaus has a sidebar in today’s NYT Week in Review section called “When Reining in an Imperial President Was the Conservatives’ Cause.” “Odd though it may seem, ideological conservatives used to be fierce critics of “executive supremacy,” he writes.
Tanenhaus, a longtime student of conservative intellectual history, is absolutely right. In Cult, I have a section entitled “How Conservatives Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imperial Presidency,” that covers the ideological shift in detail. For a taste, click here.
The right-wing intellectuals who coalesced around William F. Buckley’s National Review associated powerful presidents with activist liberalism: the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society. Therre was a time when you could hear conservative heroes like Barry Goldwater say the sort of things that would get Sean Hannity to call for treason trials today. Goldwater wrote in 1964 that:
Some of the current worship of powerful executives may come from those who admire strength and accomplishment of any sort. Others hail the display of Presidential strength … simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power. This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means…. If ever there was a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.
Heck, it wasn’t too long ago that you could hear John Yoo complain about “The Imperial President Abroad” in the Clinton years.
“The All-Powerful Presidency”
Friend and fellow Hoya Jerry Russello has a nice review of Cult of the Presidency at InsideCatholic.com. Jerry’s the editor of the University Bookman, and the author of the highly praised Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk.
Forked-Tongue Express
Anybody reading McCain’s answers to an executive-power questionairre published in the Boston Globe last December could be excused for thinking that a McCain administration would represent at least a slight departure from the Bush team’s extravagant theories of presidential prerogative. “I don’t think the president has the right to disobey any law,” he said when asked about FISA. Alas, it seems that McCain has lately discovered the wondrous penumbras and emanations that supposedly issue from Article II. Charlie Savage has the goods.
With a Little Help from My Friends, Cont.
Jeremy Lott references the book in his column for the Politico this week: “Obama: Peacenik or Untested Warmonger?”
Shawn Macomber has an interview with me on the American Spectator online, “Narcissists with Nukes,” and my smug-looking mug is the weekend cover.
Presidential Book Recommendations
The NYT Sunday Book Review editors asked a gaggle of writers and intellectuals to recommend books for the candidates (and, by extension, the next president). The only one that stood out to me as particularly useful was a recommendation by Steven Pinker. He offers Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), in which “renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong.” And that’s true–everyone else I know is exactly like that. Anyway, I thought I’d join others in blogland and offer my own recommendations.
It would be pompous to recommend my own book (which you’ll buy if you love America even a little bit). So instead I’ll offer a few in the spirit of the Pinker rec. These are books that influenced me a lot in writing my own. And there’s at least some chance they’d help anyone taking office to keep their bearings, assuming that person isn’t delusional, which is probably not a safe assumption because if so why are they running for president.
In any event, the first is Twilight of the Presidency by former LBJ aide George Reedy. Here’s what I wrote about it in my book:
In his 1970 book The Twilight of the Presidency, George Reedy warned that the environment surrounding the chief executive was enough to make even a well-grounded person delusional. Reedy arrived at that conclusion through close observation, having served as Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary from 1964-65 and later as special assistant to the president in 1968. It seems that Reedy did not entirely enjoy the experience. As a boss, Johnson was a “colossal son of a bitch,” oscillating unpredictably between sadistic abuse and kindness. Reedy has left us a painfully honest—and, at times, bitterly funny— depiction of the sociology of power. Former Nixon aide John Dean, who knows something about the darker side of the West Wing environment, calls Twilight “the best book on the presidency.”
As Reedy writes in Twilight:
There is no position in the United States in which the isolation from equals is so complete as the presidency. To be the absolute superior in status to everyone else encountered throughout the day is an effective form of isolation…. In many respects, it is an even more effective form of isolation than physical confinement. The prisoner doing a spell in solitary knows that he is cut off from other human beings. The president, however, is surrounded by large, adoring groups that give him the illusion of human contact when all they really do is act as an echo chamber for his thoughts.
Gerald Ford recognized that Groupthink and the Arrogance of Power were threats to a sanely administered presidency, and required that his top staffers read the book as a cautionary tale. Alas, given that two of his top staffers were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, it seems not to have worked.
My second recommendation is hard to find: Bruce Buchanan’s The Presidential Experience: What the Office Does to the Man (1978). The psychological analysis in it is dated, long-distance, and not performed by a psychiatrist. But it’s an interesting exploration into/speculation about, the various pathologies that can accompany becoming “the most powerful man in the world” and still finding yourself powerless to meet expectations.
Finally, Theodore J. Lowi’s The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (1985). I hadn’t read Lowi’s book until halfway through my own, and discovered that he’d said almost everything that needed to be said about the modern presidency. Luckily he’d said it over two decades ago. Here’s a good summary of Lowi’s thesis:
In his new book Mr. Lowi shrewdly describes the Presidency as an increasingly ”plebiscitary” office. Its occupant uses television and polls to commune directly with the masses, bypassing such mediating institutions as Congress and the political parties. Having given our Presidents big power, we expect big things of them - especially in terms of ‘’service delivery,” which, Mr. Lowi writes, has displaced representation as the test of democracy and legitimacy. Despite the aggrandizement of the executive branch at Congress’s expense, though, there are still ”built-in barriers to presidents’ delivering on their promises.” The result is a dangerous cycle - substantive failure, followed by frantic White House efforts to create false images of success, followed by adventurism abroad, followed by further public disillusion - all of which forces the next President to turn the rhetorical heat up even higher.
Is it really too much to ask the candidates to check out these three books? I don’t think so. After all, our current prez reads around 90 books a year!
…How He Chooses to Run the Country Is between Him and His God
“It’s not for me to second-guess the president of the United States.”
–Rep. Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, “reject[ing] the notion of a dramatic break with Bush.”
Eternal Vigilance, Inc.
The Style section of today’s Washington Post features a terrific article about the National Security Archive, the nonprofit group dedicated to unearthing goverment secrets. The privately funded group, about 35 strong, uses the Freedom of Information Act to collect about 75,000 documents a year, which staffers analyze and then post on the website. The Archive’s greatest hits (see, e.g., here and here) demonstrate that as Patrick Henry put it, one should “never depend on so slender a protection as the possibility of being represented by virtuous men.” Don’t trust: verify.
One of my favorite documents on the site is the Operation Northwoods Memo, prepared by the Pentagon in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster:
titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” [the memo] was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.
Sounds like tinfoil-hat stuff, I know, but thanks to FOIA and the National Security Archive, you can check for yourself [.pdf]. But if Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had had their way, you couldn’t. As top aides to Gerald Ford 34 years ago, they urged the president to veto amendments strengthening FOIA (he did, and Congress overrode his veto). The Archive has the documents on that too.
Seeing Calvin Coolidge as a Dream
John Derbyshire, author of, among other things, a very fine novel on a Chinese emigre’s obsession with our most Taoist of presidents, reviews Cult of the Presidency today on NRO. He likes it, and quotes from it liberally. Riffing off the book’s discussion of sycophantic White House staffers, he writes:
I have not so far heard that White House functionaries walk backwards away from the Presidential Presence, as is done in the royal courts of Britain and Japan, or get down on their knees and knock their heads on the floor in a full formal kowtow, as was the rule in Imperial China, but surely such protocols cannot be many years away.
That republican manners have decayed to a level of servility that would have embarrassed Elagabalus, is bad enough. That modern conservatives have accepted, even helped enable the process, is very depressing indeed. The belief in existential danger is no excuse. Even if we are all going to be murdered by fanatical terrorists, which I don’t for a moment believe, let’s at least die like free citizens of a free republic.
Derbyshire also writes
The thing most painful to recall is that when George W. Bush was running for the presidency in 2000, many of us believed and hoped that he would be an inconsequential president in the style of those bewhiskered late 19th-century snoozers. Bush’s affable mediocrity seemed well suited to another long spell of peace and prosperity.
I know exactly what he means. Part of me thinks there’s an alternate universe somewhere where the Twin Towers are standing, and George W. Bush became the sort of president about whom you could say, as Mencken did of Coolidge “he had no ideas and was not a nuisance”–that is, a great president.
Over at the Cato Blog…
…I’ve got a post on that voodoo that Yoo do so well.
Back with Book and Blog
After a half-year hiatus, I’ve relaunched my blog (with a spiffy redesign by Jerry Brito). One of the reasons for the relaunch is that I have a new book to promote, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, or, as I sometimes like to call it, “The Futility of Hope.” The official release date is May 1, but I got hard copies last week, and, after I got over being afraid to look at it for fear that “Presidency” would be misspelled on the cover, it was a great feeling (it’s my first book).
They say that when you’re writing a book, you should have a two-sentence answer at the ready in case people ask you what it’s about while you’re on the elevator. For a long time, mine was “it’s about the presidency. I’m against it.”
A somewhat longer and less flip answer is that when I started researching a couple of years ago, what I had in mind was a book about the post-9/11 Imperial Presidency. But the focus soon became much broader than that. The conventional narrative, which blames a cabal of neocons for the recent growth of executive power, seemed incomplete to me, however much I enjoy cursing neocons.
I realized early on that the story wasn’t that simple. George Bush, after all, is hardly the first president to centralize power in the face of a crisis or to take a messianic view of the presidential role: he stands on the shoulders of liberal giants in that regard. I started to think about the sorts of presidents our scholars and talking heads worship: activists and warriors almost to a man. I started to notice how current candidates talk about the job they’re applying for. Barack Obama told voters in South Carolina last fall that the president could “create a Kingdom here on earth.” John McCain holds out the execrable Teddy Roosevelt as a model because he “nourished the soul of a great nation,” as if soul-nourishing is part of the president’s job. And I started to wonder if maybe we’re getting the presidency we deserve.
The basic idea behind Cult is that Americans ask far too much of the presidency—and that’s a dangerous thing. From the academy, to pop culture, to the voting booth, Americans seem to believe that it’s the president’s role to teach your children well, protect your job, democratize the world, and save you from hurricanes. The public expects the president to be a superhero–and, apologies to Stan Lee, with great responsibility comes great power. That dynamic will continue to operate long after George W. Bush heads back to the branch to cut brush–and so long as it does, the Imperial Presidency will be a permanent fixture in American life.
The Constitution’s Framers never thought of the president as our national guardian angel. They thought of him as a constitutional officer with an important but limited job. Relimiting the presidency thus requires far more than throwing the bum out, or even passing a package of legislative reforms designed to cabin the president’s discretion. It requires recapturing the Framers’ vision–changing how we look at the presidency and what we ask of the office.
Is that possible? Beats me. But I hope that Cult makes a convincing case that it’s necessary.
Further details about the book are here, the Amazon page is here (and whenever the updates to that page go through, you’ll be able to read a sample from the book).
Meanwhile, I’ll be using this blog to comment on the horror and hilarity of our current presidential race, the view of the office that’s on display, and what it all might mean for the future of the presidency. I hope you’ll keep stopping by.
You Had Me at “Live Lobsters”
So my dad, who, like me, is a fan of pulpy noir detective novels and shows, sends me an email telling me to set my Tivo for this. I click the link and read:
In the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Edinburgh, corrupt cop Brendan McCabe is being drowned in a tank of live lobsters.
That is perhaps the best sentence I’ve ever read.
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