Revising the Checks and Balances
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Revising the Checks and Balances Presidential Power and Accountability: Toward a New Constitution By Charles M. Hardin Chicago. 257 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of History,...
...The Vice Presidency would be abolished...
...Herbert Hoover, who stuck to his own policy for curing the Depression...
...Willy-nilly, we have had to face in new and frightening ways the meaning of Executive power, the relationship between the President and public policy, the nature of Presidential decision-making, the limits of Presidential reach, and a host of corollary issues...
...Hardin is certainly correct in arguing—unlike most students of the Presidency—that the U.S...
...It emerged from a deeply felt need in a limited monarchy under circumstances far different from those in America today...
...The revelations of the last year have altered everything that has been written about the 20th-century Presidency...
...I respect what Hardin has attempted here...
...It ought not to be overlooked, either, that some of the most forthcoming and lively opposition that a U.S...
...Yet the Executive must be bridled by an adequate countervailing power —such as a well-organized opposition party, constantly and systematically at work...
...One consequence has been to make everybody an expert on the subject...
...The candidates for Congress plus a slate of candidates at large would make up the nominating conventions selecting the Presidential standard bearers...
...Watergate has reminded us, too, that Americans are the best monarchists in the world...
...Congress, therefore, as it is now constituted, does not represent a sufficient control...
...Only a few years ago liberals were defending as vital to the Republic the expanded role of the White House that Franklin D. Roosevelt helped to create...
...It has also become, as political scandal always does, a form of public entertainment: The Nixon debacle contains a drama that reaches a fresh climax every week, and because it centers on the Chief himself, the personified repository of ideals, authority and purpose, it touches each one of us...
...To begin with, its acceptance requires more than a careful blueprint...
...Charles Hardin's book ought to be welcomed heartily in the current national hubbub...
...defeated candidates for the Presidency sink from view in a trice...
...Moreover, our tradition—which surely dies hard?is "winner take all...
...But books like this one can sensitize those citizens who are politically aware...
...Hardin's scheme does not end here...
...As the President speaks with a single voice, so should he be answered by a single voice instead of a clamor of discordant and little-known voices in a legislative body whose present genius is the dispersion of power...
...There can be no doubt that the study of the Presidency is the only growth industry in the country at the moment...
...If they will not accept its remedies, they can nevertheless be pricked by its passionate indignation and inspirited by its high-minded optimism...
...What Hardin proposes is that "the President and Congress should be elected for simultaneous four-year terms...
...Executives and their times mingle unpredictably, and the thoughtful judgment of today is the inanity of tomorrow...
...author, "The Tuesday Cabinet: Deliberation and Decision on Peace and War Under Lyndon B. Johnson" Watergate has unleashed a stream of moral outrage that is sincere and proper...
...Now they sound like their old adversary, the late Senator Robert Taft, who regarded the Roosevelt-Truman type of Presidency as an open door to dictatorship...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of History, Columbia...
...It is full of argument, rich in detail and anecdote, and, most important, it proposes solutions out of the present difficulties...
...In addition, the defeated candidate for the Presidency should have a seat in the House of Representatives, priority in committees and on the floor, and a staff, offices and other prerequisites suitable to his position as the leader of the opposition...
...Constitution needs reexamining and reshaping...
...In a word, Hardin is hoping to substitute party government for Presidential government...
...He is learned and his convictions are honest...
...We repeatedly turn the First Family into a royal family, obliterating party labels and making princes and princesses out of Presidential children...
...Yet I doubt that the modified parliamentary system Hardin would have us adopt provides the answer...
...Our assumption that 18th-century principles of government can automatically serve a 20th-century society has clearly come a cropper...
...The transforming of Presidents into Kings, accompanied by a shrinking from regicide, has been a tendency among U.S...
...In this category, he brackets Woodrow Wilson, who is described as having clung rigidly to his particular view of the League of Nations...
...And he spares nobody's favorite...
...The first reform then must strike at the relationship not only between President and Congress but also between both and the public...
...The truth, of course, is that nothing is absolute about the American Presidency...
...Organized parties, he maintains, would both strengthen the role of the public and weaken the grip of special interests...
...Its leadership is too diluted by the committee system...
...He does not deal, for example, with the sham in our world that now inundates everybody's daily life and infects the highest places...
...Still, his prescriptions do not really attack the genuine ills of our society out of which the present disaster has come...
...and Lyndon Johnson, who glued himself to the goal of victory in Vietnam on his terms...
...Nor does he consider the implications of the belief most Americans have that their country is special and that their leader speaks with a divine voice other peoples strain—or ought to strain—to hear...
...Relief from the current agony will not come quickly or on order...
...President faces comes from within his own party...
...citizens since George Washington's era...
...Even in England the idea of a loyal opposition developed through gradual growth, not sudden design...
...Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy are declared to have been equally careless about the limits on the powers of the office they occupied...
...It showed in the White House, by the way, at least as long ago as 1902 when, during a debilitating coal strike, a senior Senator wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt asking, "Is there nothing we can appear to be doing...
...At its best, this "disloyal opposition" can energize and elevate policy...
...Hardin sees a need for the nation to be able to rid itself of failed "active-negative" Chief Executives, those with a will to act boldly but an incapacity to let go of a policy that proves bankrupt...
...To be sure, says Hardin, a great nation requires a strong leader...
...A political scientist at the University of California at Davis, Hardin is impressed and depressed by the abuses of power he observes in the recent stewardship of the White House...
Vol. 57 • May 1974 • No. 11
