The assassination of President Kennedy has brought out, in an agonizing : way, the realities of the American Presidency and has again demonstrated its unique function as a political organism. The first truth to be asserted about this great office is that the President of the United States is a monarch. The Constitution, in deliberately ambiguous terms, entrusts to him the whole executive power of the Union and in addition confers on him the separate ollice of Commander in Chief with complete control of the armed forces. This, of course, does not mean the President is an absolute monarch. He has to share power with Congress (as President Kennedy painfully discovered in his three years in the White House); and both he and Congress share power with the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, it is important again to insist on the monarchical character of the American Presidency. It is monarchical in two ways: monarchical because of the concentration of power in the hands of one man, monarchical because he, more than any other institution (and every President is an institution), embodies “We the People of the United States.” In the President, in any President, the American people see their embodied power and see their own driving force personified.

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