Where the News Ends

...Its rulings forced Roosevelt to discontinue the National Recovery Administration and Truman to abandon his seizure of the steel industry...

...He gives a good-tempered appraisal of the virtues and defects of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman ("distressingly petty in petty things...

...Although the President may propose, Congress must dispose...

...But Mr...

...As Professor Rossiter correctly says: "Far stronger than the states as a check on the Presidency is the American system of free enterprise —that fabulous galaxy of corporations, small businesses, partnerships, individual enterprises, trade associations, cooperatives, unions, consumer groups and foundations through which the power of economic decision is splintered and diffused in the interest of freedom and progress...

...Rossiter does not believe that this is the case and points out the limitations which prevent an American President from turning into a dictator...

...This is what Professor Clinton Rossiter...

...In what seems an obvious reference to FDR and the present occupant of the White House, he observes: "A President who is adored by a little more than half the people and despised by the rest is a more probable candidate for immortality than a President who is liked by all of us in the center and disliked only by those on the fringes...

...who has already won his scholarly spurs with two excellent books, Seedtime of the Republic and Conservatism in America, provides with his concise, thoughtful and stimulating book, The American Presidency (Harcourt, Brace, $2.95...

...Professor Rossiter, a liberal in the American rather than the classical European sense of the term, rates the strong and assertive Presidents more highly than those who construed the functions of the office more narrowly...

...The Supreme Court is another barrier to Presidential absolutism...

...The President is at once head of the nation and head of his party...

...This is because he combines two attributes which are separated in European constitutional monarchies and republics...

...The President of the United States has always been the most powerful political figure in any of the world's free countries...

...As Professor Rossiter puts it: "The framers of the Constitution took a momentous step when they fused the dignity of a king and the power of a prime minister in one elective office...

...It is possible that the author forecasts too favorable an historical appraisal of FDR...

...gallantly big in big things") and Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he obviously does not admire enthusiastically but of whom he concedes: "He is charming, manly, brave, honest, capable, democratic, fair-minded and incredibly lucky—and who, asks Leonard Hall complacently, who could ask for anything more...

...And...

...Misplaced confidence in his own ability to 'handle Stalin' " is a pretty mild rebuke for a foreign policy framed largely under the influence of ignorant amateurs and leading to a disillusioning climax when the defeat of tyranny in Germany...

...as the United States has grown in population, wealth and international influence, the significance of the Presidential office has automatically expanded...

...Although strong Presidents, stretching the Constitutional powers of their office in times of crisis, have been called dictators by their opponents, there has never in the 180 years of America's national existence been the slightest suspicion of a Presidential coup d'etat...

...The individual states represent another check, though not so much as in the past because of the steady drift toward greater centralization of authority in Washington...

...He is chief of state, chief executive, initiator of legislation through his annual messages to Congress, chief diplomat, commander-in-chief of the military forces, and, more recently, chief manager of economic welfare...

...He places Washington and Lincoln at the top, followed by Jackson and Wilson, with Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt completing a list of seven outstanding chief executives...

...The President cannot get a law enacted which Congress is unwilling to pass...

...Rossiter ticks off the President's main powers, and they add up to an aweinspiring concentration of authority in the hands of a single individual...

...Probably the most important safeguards against the danger that the Presidency might degenerate into a dictatorship are the unbroken American tradition of freedom of speech and press and the character of the American people...

...This listing might suggest that the Presidency has gotten out of hand in the American Government, which was framed in a spirit of limited and divided functions...

...And a President cannot prevent the enactment of a law when two-thirds of each house of Congress vote to pass it over his veto...

...Japan and Italy was offset by the enormous extension of Soviet and Chinese Communist tyranny...

...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Clinton Rossiter On the Presidency In this year of America's great political sweepstakes, it is appropriate to have an up-to-date study of the nature, powers and limitations of the office of President of the United States...