June 16, 2007
Imperial Presidencies III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:00 PM EST Josh Zeitz, pondering Richard Nixon, recalled Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1973 meditation on “the vast expansion of the federal state since the 1930s and the consequent emergence of an increasingly powerful and autonomous executive branch”. Schlesinger identified “the unchecked ‘imperial presidency’ as a threat to democratic values” and “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.” Polemics about “the imperial presidency” were a significant part of the rhetorical world in which I came of age, but they did not go unchallenged. One of the more interesting challenges I remember hearing occurred when I was asked to be a member of a panel arguing about War Powers Act on local cable TV—this was in the early 1980s. Preparing for this, I wandered over to the Columbia Law School and read through the debate in Congress, then repaired to the main library and reread the relevant parts of the Federalist Papers, some diplomatic history, etc., and showed up loaded for bear, prepared to annihilate any miserably benighted advocate of the imperial Presidency. The debate was held in the auditorium of the suburban high school from which I’d graduated in the late 1960s, and I was feeling pretty cocky; I was then teaching the history of political theory at Columbia, I knew what I thought was a lot of military and diplomatic history, and the only other panelist likely to know anything about the subject was a high school teacher of American history. I remember winning the debate, although I knew at the time that I did not deserve victory. That high school teacher saw both sides of the question, which can suppress the instinct to go for the polemical kill, and did, whereas the audience was at that moment in our history pretty tired of imperial Presidents. It wanted to hear a nasty, unfair, one-sided case, and I gave them one. The instructive part of the day came because I knew from anecdotes that the high school teacher had spent his adolescence eating wormy cabbage in a Japanese internment camp in China, where his family wound up after fleeing Hitler’s Germany; the ones who didn’t get to China were killed by the Nazis. The high school teacher was too much of a gentleman to relate this family history in a debate, but he did note that FDR had not had nearly enough imperial authority to stop Hitler in his tracks, which significantly more U.S. aid to France in 1939 and 1940 would almost certainly have done. By later standards the isolationists in the 1930s Congress had significantly crimped the powers of the executive, so FDR had instead schemed to get us into war. He’d done it too slowly and much too cautiously, because he lacked the imperial authority to swiftly intervene in a war that killed at least 50 million people. That was how the high school teacher saw it, anyway, and he made a good case, one weakened when appealing to a crowd by his sadness and uncertainty when making it; he was passionately opposed to Reagan administration foreign policy, as he had apparently been opposed to the Vietnam War, two other achievements of imperial Presidents, but he did not know what sort of legal arrangements could possibly restrain LBJ and Reagan while leaving FDR and Truman free hands. Making sure that there could never again be an FDR tricking a too-hesitant America into a necessary war—in effect, one of the goals of some of the day’s reformers—seemed to that teacher to be a possibly suicidal outcome. It seems to me that if Bush gets us into a war with Iran, imperial Presidents will get an even worse name, but if Bush fails to use force and Iran one day launches nuclear weapons at Israeli, European, or American cities, opponents of imperial Presidencies will be widely execrated. Josh writes that “if history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.” That high school teacher would probably reply that this is indeed one of the things history has shown us, but that history has shown us more than one thing.
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