Eisenhower Disarmed
KLAIN, MAURICE
If Ike wins, his power will be cut by the 22nd Amendment, limiting a President to two terms, which the GOP sponsored EISENHOWER DISARMED By Maurice Klain WHEN THE Republicans aimed a blow at the...
...The General's word in February saved the GOP from civil war...
...The President's lightest word is sifted, hefted, measured, appraised-and every drop of meaning twisted from it...
...Fat chance...
...Neither Wilson nor Roosevelt had the 22nd Amendment to contend with...
...The "inevitable consequence," as John Quincy Adams forecast, will be to make the second term "a scene of continuous and furious electioneering," a four-year war of succession, embroiling, distracting and exhausting the party's titular chieftain in the White House...
...Desperate and frustrated, Ike at that time thought of seceding from the Old Guard and forming another party...
...Indeed the very word "politics" offends his sensibilities...
...Of his first two years in office, when such a majority prevailed, Walter Lippmann noted that "General Eisenhower was on the way to being as unsuccessful a President as was General Grant...
...Politicians in both parties take his "yes" or "no" as their cue...
...Once we're in, the hell with him...
...As his grip weakens, there will be no one else to anticipate, grapple with and dominate the issues of foreign policy...
...He waits for the notables on Capitol Hill to take the lead...
...Because, reportedly, he'd like another crack at "reforming" his party...
...Unhappily for Congressional supremacists, Presidents often are unwilling to play their role this way...
...By January 1951, twenty-six states had ratified but others were lagging...
...The coattail riders, who clung to him earlier for their political lives, must fend for themselves and find passage elsewhere...
...Members had not warmed their seats on the opening day of the 80th's first session, January 3, 1947, when Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, supported by the first GOP majority since Herbert Hoover, introduced the two-term limit...
...Senator Know-land will become more sullen and obstreperous, Senator Bricker more insistent in pressing his amendment...
...Speaker Joe Martin acclaimed it as the "first important measure" of his party's renaissance...
...He is armed with his constitutional prerogatives in all their potency...
...He's our meal ticket now...
...Daily, headlines and airwaves proffer clues...
...He campaigns with reluctance-only after others twist his arm, never with the exuberance of an FDR...
...To save Senator Wiley, his faithful spear-carrier, the General who hankers for a party "reformation" has lifted not a finger...
...In some history book of the future, this chapter of American experience may be titled "Better Late Than Never...
...He not only captivates the people's eye...
...More radical, the Mundt plan to amend the electoral college aims at squelching urban power in Presidential contests, thus re-directing, perhaps reducing, Executive energies...
...By running a second time, he may have rescued the party from defeat...
...Nor will the President's command of his party avail him...
...Before the 22nd Amendment, a President might publicly renounce another term, as Theodore Roosevelt did in 1904, and still enjoy the power of his availability because he alone could enforce the renunciation...
...With Ike's antipathy to them out in the open now, a public spectacle thanks to Robert Donovan, the right-wingers will have blood in their eye...
...His tormenters in Congress will be back in full cry after November...
...In the party's view, he has shot his bolt...
...In such a situation, the President's influence abroad will steadily decline...
...FDR's magie, a decade after his death, still is potent-stronger than that of any man alive...
...Defeated by "that man" again and again and again, they finally had their hour...
...Nonetheless the GOP has every right to the lion's-or elephant's-share of credit...
...Congress was established as the eyes, ears, and the voice of the people...
...From Jackson on, the strong Presidents assumed the national leadership as a right established and a duty imposed by the national character of their election...
...I will not," he said of McCarthy, "get into the gutter with that guy...
...The potentialities of his office rust in their sheath...
...More than likely, they will be the first casualties of the 22nd Amendment which they launched in 1947 to demolish once and for all the possibility of another third-term President...
...I now was certain that I would not run again...
...The Whig image of a good President...
...From these commanding heights on Capitol Hill, the Democrats in 1954 routed the Old Guard, incidentally rescuing the President from his own party...
...Factional strife impends, too...
...That party-Democratic or Republican-is decentralized, heterogeneous, unruly...
...Under the 22nd Amendment, however, the President in his second term is disarmed of this check...
...Congressional supremacy...
...Not to be outdone, the Senate revealed an unsuspected power to move with dispatch and, in record time, joined the House in blessing the proposed alteration...
...He stands at the pinnacle of his power...
...But they have valued their freedom of choice-the power to run again or not-as a prime source of influence...
...In other ways...
...Only his availability kept the Old Guard at bay, forestalling eruptions in Congress, in primaries, in the convention, perhaps in the campaign...
...This control over his party's choice affords the President a powerful check upon the crown princes...
...He'll be used up...
...More than ever, he over-shadows everyone else in politics...
...Today, its chief protagonists are the Republican Old Guard-Bridges, Knowland, Bricker and others...
...If he wins again, he will provide the first laboratory test of the 22nd Amendment...
...Why does Ike want a second term...
...The principle takes its name from the party of Clay and Webster which fought Jacksonian "usurpation...
...This was a strategy of calculated risk, requiring that issues be muted rather than exploited...
...The choppers rely heavily upon the amending process, over which, because of gerrymandered state legislatures, they enjoy a preponderant influence...
...By the very nature of his office, this is one secret a President must keep to himself to the last possible moment...
...Hitherto, they may have tried to restrain themselves-with only partial success-in hopes the President would steer the party to victory...
...A President who cannot run again is, by virtue of that fact, a political has-been...
...For heaven's sake," he counseled GOP politicians, "don't forget the utility of a smile...
...The President's control over it is at best limited and provisional...
...He has strong partisan biases but somehow escapes identification with his party, a fact which led the Wall Street Journal to chide him: "A President of the United States is not above politics but rather holds the greatest political office in the world...
...He loathed the Bricker amendment, but his own party backed it overwhelmingly...
...Persuaded, the House, after a few hours of consideration by a subcommittee and two more of debate on the floor, endorsed a basic change in the Presidency...
...There is," Senator William Jenner said recently, "one fundamental idea which underlies the structure of our governmental machinery-the unwavering distrust of a strong Executive...
...He seethed over McCarthy, but more than half the Senate Republicans opposed censure...
...Congress is an aggregation of men representing multifarious, conflicting, local interests...
...The two-term restriction, Republicans avowed, was "anti-Roosevelt...
...If he wins again, the answer will resound...
...Republicans may reflect upon the jokes history often pays on mortal expectations...
...My decision not to be a candidate for re-election in 1952," Harry Truman reveals, "goes back to my inauguration in 1949...
...Not that he thought any man ought to have a third term, but it weakened the President for Congress to know he could not run again...
...Alerted, as by a fireball in the night, party stalwarts again went to work on lackadaisical legislators...
...So long as the President could seek re-election, he could also name his successor...
...Others, rather, will elbow the President aside, take the limelight from him, focus interest and curiosity upon themselves...
...The President's unifying influence, once a shield against this peril, is gone with his availability...
...Liberals, conservatives and reactionaries will renew their bitter feuding...
...But I would not share this decision with anyone...
...Take Taft or you'll get me," Theodore Roosevelt told the Republicans in 1908...
...He makes scant use of the fireside chat...
...No wonder Presidents have been tight-lipped, jocular, mysterious, teasing-everything but forthright about plans for the next election...
...No second-term President hereafter can enjoy such mastery...
...By other means, too, Congressional supremacists hope to curtail the Presidency...
...They plead and promise, coax and cajole, warn and wheedle, tingling his pride, his patriotism, his prejudice-all to hear him say what is music to their ears...
...One arrow in his quiver the General most appreciates -his availability...
...The President's heir presumptives, especially in the Senate, will become ungovernable...
...Jackson's view became the dominant tradition of the office...
...Hence the effort in recent years to chop the office down to Whig specifications...
...When Eisenhower can no longer cow the Old Guard and overawe the Democrats with his formidable appeal as a candidate, he may become a Samson shorn...
...Stripped of that power, the President will suffer a steady dissolution of his party leadership...
...If he lead the nation," Woodrow Wilson said, "his party can hardly resist him...
...But the General is a shrinking warrior with no stomach for the methods of strong Presidents...
...It is an act of frustration and resentment against the fact that the Presidency, rather than Congress, has become the mainspring of the constitutional system...
...It is retaliation against a whole line of men-the strong Presidents-Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson and the Roosevelts...
...Awed by Ike's popularity, the Democrats sought by moderation and restraint to encourage his retirement...
...The suspense coils gradually, winding springs of tension tighter and tighter after the midterm elections...
...The man in the White House, they contended, voices far more faithfully than Congress the will of a countrywide majority...
...If this vital ratification is not finished in 1951," a Committee member warned, "it will probably fail...
...Nothing more...
...This fact-more than advanced age, an uncertain heart or what Ike has called a "bellyache"-overclouds the political future of the President and his party...
...The function of the Executive is to put those laws into effect exactly as Congress wrote them...
...It performs the noblest function of government, that of making the laws...
...The President alone, MAURICE KLAIN, Associate Professor of Political Science at Western Reserve University, is director for northern Ohio of the Citizenship Clearing House...
...Usually, though, Presidents deem silence and obscurity better ways to exploit the power...
...the Amendment is apt to prove even more consequential...
...Meanwhile...
...In the future -beginning, perhaps, with Eisenhower-this limit will weaken, frustrate and embarrass second-term Presidents...
...The 22nd Amendment is an incident in one of the oldest, continuing wars of American politics-Presidential leadership vs...
...Now restraint is unnecessary...
...A President who can run again is, by virtue of that fact, a man the Congress, the parties, the country, indeed the world must reckon with...
...There should be "complete dependence of the Executive on the approval of Congress...
...His legislative "musts" will no longer resound with authority...
...He dodges hand-to-hand encounters, even direct challenges...
...He is a pea from the same pod as Buchanan, Grant and Harding...
...Without it, he knows, fretful talk of a third party won't amount to "boo...
...Ironically, Ike himself may equip his foes to harass him more effectively...
...With the voting millions, as Gallup found last year...
...Unanimously, it approved the two-term restriction...
...As the GOP's Pied Piper, he may lure enough votes to qualify the Old Guard for the committee chairmanships...
...In Eisenhower's case, the isolationists in his party, and the Asia-firsters, will defy him increasingly...
...The tumult will shake the President's authority and prestige in foreign affairs...
...His partisans may never be so anxious as now to please him...
...The 22nd Amendment will not diminish Franklin D. Roosevelt as a popular idol...
...I have never," he says, "really understood throughly this expression 'pressure on Congress.'" The rough and tumble of politics he finds repellent...
...A President, Woodrow Wilson advised, needs to don his warpaint...
...This strategy failing, Democrats will spare Ike no longer-least of all the liberals, who feel they have sacrificed most for the tactics of forbearance...
...In musing of a second term, Eisenhower, according to Sam Lubell, worried about "how much less influence he would command in view of the prohibition against any President having more than two terms...
...The loss of his availability may cripple Eisenhower more than it would another President-regardless of his health...
...Without help from Dixiecrats and McCarranites, the Republican majority could not have mustered the twothirds vote required to submit the proposal for ratification by the states...
...The press with its instinct for what titillates the public keeps the game exciting and full of mystification...
...Yet the 22nd Amendment is much more than vengeance against a single man...
...The mere possibility that he may be a candidate again is enough to reinforce and sharpen these prerogatives, compelling respect for his legislative demands, increasing the effect of his vetoes, strengthening his diplomatic enterprises...
...His power to run or not to run makes it more responsive to his purpose than it would be otherwise...
...His veto will lose its stab...
...This secret-the Big Question, newsmen call it-intrigues and fascinates like no other phenomenon in American politics...
...He can't run again...
...He comprehends the significance of the Presidential secret...
...He understands the value of crowd appeal...
...If Ike wins, his power will be cut by the 22nd Amendment, limiting a President to two terms, which the GOP sponsored EISENHOWER DISARMED By Maurice Klain WHEN THE Republicans aimed a blow at the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, they probably threw a boomerang...
...Nor can a second-term President serve his party as Ike did by saying "yes" on Leap Year Day...
...Never has it gone unchallenged...
...Jackson pointed out, is "the Elect of the People at Large...
...The perils of the 22nd Amendment are far more predictable than those of the actuarial tables...
...The 22nd Amendment is a monument to his extraordinary success at the polls which now no other President can hope to rival...
...Within a short time-not long, indeed, after Roosevelt's death- they rallied sufficiently to deal him his comeuppance and to brand his shame into the Constitution...
...He is their spokesman and watch against special claims and pressures...
...Truman imposed himself in 1948, hand-picked his heir in 1952...
...Anyone can join the guessing and everybody does...
...and a majority of the GOP may follow them rather than Ike...
...Congress is "the higher tribunal...
...Within a month, the Amendment was law...
...The President himself plays the game with gusto, trading banter with reporters, tweaking the hopes and fears of politicians, teetering the world on edge as he plucks the petals of the daisy...
...As his second term advances, his right as an outgoing President to make and receive commitments will ever more be doubted and assailed...
...Franklin Roosevelt, it seemed, had only to look at a microphone to make Congress jump...
...Anxiously, the Republican National Committee took counsel in Washington...
...As an example of how a legislature can act with speed and boldness, scorning the dull rigmarole of prolonged debate and hearings, it is nothing less than breath-taking...
...The party seniors, always jealous of their rank and privilege, have less reason than ever to accept his leadership...
...Can he succeed...
...What if Ike had lacked this yea-saying power...
...Ike has at least one consolation...
...If General Eisenhower wins the election, he will go down in history as the first man to brave the White House disarmed completely of the power of his availability...
...At no other time, unless it be during the first blush of his honeymoon with Congress, is his influence so commanding...
...Premiers and potentates will care less and less about traveling to the "summit" with a President on his way out...
...The two-term limit is their first success...
...This Amendment is one of the triumphs of the 80th Congress...
...More, it is a stroke of jealous outrage against the office these men endowed so massively with color and tradition, leadership and prerogative...
...He has written for the American Political Science Review, National Municipal Review, Antioch Review and other journals...
...He is above "politics"-a decorative figure...
...He may contribute uniquely to political science...
...There was, the leadership insisted, scarcely need for hearings...
...But he can never do it again...
...His greatest danger is a Republican majority in Congress...
...From their eminence on Capitol Hill, the seniors of Congress-committee chairmen and the grandees of the Senate-have denounced it, proclaiming instead the Whig principle of legislative supremacy...
...He is innocent of demagogic wiles and deferential to Congress...
...White House witticisms-like the one about vaporizing Senator Bricker with an atomic bomb, or the one about prompting the Kremlin to pay McCarthy-will inflame the Old Guard like the call of the wild...
...Most have willingly left the office after a second term...
...This alone, so rare is unanimity in either party, marks the adoption of the Amendment as a memorable event...
...Their mood, as an old Taft man expresses it, will he nasty: "I won't give a damn about Ike the day after election...
...It is, in more ways than one, a remarkable achievement...
...Best known is the Bricker proposal to lop White House authority in diplomatic relations...
...Now a President, no matter how popular, will find it increasingly difficult during a second term to transform his mass appeal into an instrument of party command...
...A nation addicted to mystery stories, crossword puzzles and quiz contests makes the Presidential secret the biggest guessing game of all...
Vol. 39 • September 1956 • No. 38
