June 14, 2007
Imperial Presidencies Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST In today’s lead feature, Allen Barra interviews James Reston, Jr., about his new book, The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews. Reston argues that “Watergate was the most important political scandal in America in the twentieth century and possibly the biggest scandal of the entire American Presidency. It was so largely because a criminal conspiracy was run right out of the Oval Office in the White House. The scandal was not about the burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington but about the cover-up of the involvement of President Nixon’s reelection campaign in the burglary.” This is surely correct, though it’s worth remembering that Richard Nixon’s administration was less an aberration and more an extreme culmination of trends that had been on the build for several decades. In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a prominent historian and onetime advisor to John F. Kennedy, wrote about the vast expansion of the federal state since the 1930s and the consequent emergence of an increasingly powerful and autonomous executive branch. Identifying the unchecked “imperial presidency” as a threat to democratic values, Schlesinger noted that Nixon was not the first President to wield these expanded powers injudiciously, even if he ultimately proved to be the worst offender in modern presidential history. Indeed, we now know that Robert Kennedy, who served as attorney general in his brother’s administration, not only approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Jr., but also directed the IRS to audit Richard Nixon in 1962. Under Lyndon Johnson’s watch, the FBI tried unsuccessfully to use illegal recordings of a hotel-room tryst to blackmail King into committing suicide and worked overtime at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 to infiltrate the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a political organization comprised of black and white civil rights activists. It was also under Johnson’s authority that the CIA conducted the extensive–and patently illegal–surveillance and disruption of domestic political organizations, and that the FBI deliberately tried to disrupt peace rallies by planting violent saboteurs in the ranks of peaceful demonstrators. Congress did its best to curb many of these abuses in the aftermath of Watergate. Sen. Frank Church chaired hearings that brought to light the CIA’s violation of its charter, leading to more stringent regulations barring the agency from conducting domestic intelligence against U.S. citizens, while a stronger War Powers Act and new campaign-finance regulations made it tougher for presidents to wage war without congressional oversight or to engage in the kind of money laundering and dirty-tricks tactics for which Nixon’s re-election committee became famous. The question today is whether in the past seven years we’ve seen a return to the imperial presidency. Certainly the concentration of administrative power in the West Wing–with political advisers meddling with the Justice Department and U.S. attorneys’ offices–would suggest this is the case. If history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.
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