The American Presidency

...If we didn't assume that Presidents were charged with the building of new Jerusalems, we might not tempt them to ever greater bungles and ever more dan gerous extensions of authority...

...The United States Congress, because of its bicameral structure, its lack of party discipline, and its diffuse distribution of authority, is simply incapable of giving clear direction to the American people...

...His argument would have been clearer had he kept his usage more precise...

...Congress, the courts, and the political system may resist extensions of presidential authority, and it is this continuous process of challenge and response that, in Pious' view, best explains the changes in presidential influence and authority over time...

...Politics aside, public policy issues seem hopelessly complex and responsive neither to good intentions nor to systematic analysis...

...New occasions teach new duties, and the liberal presidentialists suddenly discovered the threat of the "Imperial Presidency...

...A little humility and a lot of eternal vigilance might be our best weapons for keeping our Presidents under control...

...Presidents typically find that they cannot easily mobilize public opinion, lead their party, point the Congress in any one direction, or control a refractory bureaucracy...

...Political factors and public opinion influence presidential power "at the margins," but they do not, Pious contends, "determine its use or set its limits...

...Richard Neustadt and others, emphasizing the political milieu within which Presidents function, have argued that Presidents typically govern less through command or fiat than through the arts of persuasion and influence...

...Actually there is a time-honored alternative: obfuscatory rhetoric...

...Often he seems to mean by it the exercise of extraordinary or emergency authority at the very limits of the specific grants of power made in the Constitution...

...In our conysis...

...But events of the 1960s brought the received wisdom concerning the Presidency into question...

...The need for strong presidential leadership is self-evident in foreign policy and probably inescapable in domestic affairs as well...

...Schlesinger's early works had constituted a sustained hymn of praise for presidential power, but, in one of the more arresting displays of casuistry in our time, his Imperial Presidency warned the nation of the dangers of a runaway executive...

...Strong Presidents (Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, the two Roosevelts) were good because they did progressive things at home and, at least in this century, heroic things abroad...

...There is also a problem in Pious' somewhat elastic use of the term "prerogative...

...Here Pious sneaks in the back door the emphasis on political factors he has just ushered out the front...

...As so often was the case in the postwar era, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., broke the trail of liberal revisionism...

...What then is left to the President but the exercise, however feckless or arbitrary, of prerogative power...

...As Richard Pious' useful new book makes clear, mixed feelings about the Presidency are nothing new...

...Professor Pious himself displays signs of that ambivalence...

...A weak Presidency, by contrast, meant domestic reaction matched with isolationism and timidity in foreign relations...

...seen by the White House as the antidote to paralPrerogative government does not always work, of course...

...As he himself argues, for example in a discussion of presidential war-making, "unless the president wins the support of Congress and the nation for his exercise of prerogative powers, he will face a split in his own party, a drop in public support, and pressure to end hostilities on disadvantageous terms...

...Unfortunately, like so many others, Pious has allowed Vietnam and Watergate to lead him into some dubious suggestions concerning limitations on presidential power...

...His approach is scholarly and balanced, but he does not seem entirely to have made up his mind as to where the presidential office should go from here...

...Pious interprets presidential power in a manner contrary to that of many recent analysts...

...The true lesson of Watergate is that the American political system needs honorable and sensible men, not a rearrangement of the division of powers...

...Characteristically, Schlesinger wanted things both ways: The inescapable, if never explicit, message of his book was that strong liberal Presidencies remained right and necessary, but strong conservatives should, at all costs, be kept out of the White House...

...From the Constitutional Convention forward, Americans have alternated between fears of a chief executive either too strong or too weak...

...Recent history suggests that the normal political condition of the President is a weak one, and it is that weakness which inclines him to prerogative government...

...It wouldn't hurt, either, if we could understand better than we now do the limits of social policy...

...Like most of us, he wants to rein in the President without hobbling him, but also like most of us, he is not quite sure how this might be accomplished...

...As Pious concludes, "prerogatives are...

...At other times, he is referring to nothing more controversial than the use of the veto...

...One strong President (Johnson) continued to do liberal things at home but did unpleasant things abroad, while another (Nixon) did mostly James A. Nuechterlein is associate professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario...

...Remember when the Keynesians used to tell us-and we believed them-that they had learned how to fine-tune the economy...

...conservative and often beastly things everywhere...

...He speaks hopefully of new "collaborative mechanisms" between the President and Congress for managing fiscal and foreign policy, but it is doubtful whether mechanisms can be found which will work...

...If the thesis occasionally turns fuzzy at the edges, however, it remains mostly persuasive at the core...

...And yet the public demands that the politicians-the President in particular-solve all their problems, preferably by next Thursday...

...sternation, we come to suspect that in most cases benign neglect may well be the best available policy option...

...Pious suggests, however, that Presidents normally find themselves in a weak political position and thus turn for effective action to their constitutional, or "prerogative," powers: "The fundamental and irreducible core of presidential power rests not on influence, persuasion, public opinion, elections, or party, but rather on the successful assertion of constitutional authority to resolve crises and significant domestic issues...