The Inflation of Executive Power

...And Schlesinger retains his knack for recreating historical figures with a familiarity that makes them seem his contemporaries...

...With Nixon executive power has reached vast proportions, and Schle-singer's summary of the official justification for the invasion of Cambodia makes a fine antidote to complacency: "[The President] could freely, on his own initiative, without a national emergency, without reference to Congress, as a routine employment of unilateral executive authority, go to war against any country containing any troops that might in any conceivable circumstance be used in an attack on American forces...

...A new statute on Presidential war should require the executive "to report at once to Congress, with full information and justification, whenever he sends troops into battle and to keep on reporting so long as hostilities continue," and Congress should declare "its right at any point to terminate such military action by concurrent resolution...

...For this reason, Schlesinger's study constitutes not merely an expression of partisanship but a small act of patriotism as well...

...FDR exchanged destroyers for naval bases as war raged in Europe, without formal Senatorial assent...

...The Nixon imperial Presidency has become above all an isolated Presidency, prompting Schlesinger to assume the role of liberal as conservative: He notes the importance of consultation—of wider participation in the shaping of policy—and praises the old politics, with its interplay of forces, its kaleidoscope of constituencies, its reconciliation of opposites through compromise...

...Armed Forces frequently engaged in hostilities despite the absence of Congressional authorization...

...Kennedy risked Armageddon in 1962, without seeking even advice from the men on Capitol Hill...

...He also concedes the legality, though hardly the wisdom, of the Vietnam war, less on the basis of the dubious Tonkin Gulf resolution than other Congressional acts like defense appropriations...

...Mary McCarthy once observed, "Arthur just doesn't like Republicans," and in The Imperial Presidency, after bestowing the highest praise upon Roosevelt and Kennedy among recent leaders, generally approving of Truman's statecraft, and discerning sagacity in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Fulbright, this loyal Democrat proceeds to round up the usual suspects...

...He urges Congressional courage to restore the balance of power, while at the same time rejecting the simplistic substitution of legislative primacy...

...But when the isolation and prestige of the legislature sank with the fleet at Pearl Harbor, the "imperial Presidency" as such began to take shape...

...Whereas in The Bitter Heritage Schlesinger argued that the Vietnam intervention was the invalid extension of the valid principle of anti-Communism, in this book he identifies the Nixon Administration as the invalid extension of the valid principle of a strong Presidency...

...Schlesinger's most timely chapter, on "The Revolutionary Presidency," demonstrates how the Nixon Administration has subverted the doctrines of separation and balance of powers...

...No one can say at present if the trend toward a plebiscitary executive is irreversible, yet as the Bicentennial approaches, it would be comforting to believe that the principle of separation of powers is regaining its force...

...These clashes were usually brief and confused, with Congress and the Supreme Court looking the other way while the Marines landed...

...It fell to other Presidents to aggrandize the office at the expense of the separation of powers, especially in their conduct of foreign policy...

...Under normal circumstances, Schlesinger writes, selfrestraint, sobriety, the desire to share the decision-making process, flexibility, and tact characterized each of these leaders, and their performance in moments of national crisis conformed to the spirit of the Founding Fathers...

...Although Schlesinger accepts the "police action" in Korea, since it was sanctioned by the United Nations if not by a Congressional declaration of war, he nonetheless maintains that Truman "dangerously enlarged the power of future Presidents to take the nation into major war...

...Watergate is symptomatic of rule by overreachers, and this sort of staff infection, reflecting the personal tone Richard Nixon has brought to his office, is perhaps the strongest argument for impeachment—which the enemies-listed historian stops just short of prescribing...

...The Imperial Presidency attempts to draw the line between a strong executive, constrained by the prerogatives and resilience of the legislature and the judiciary, and an almost "plebiscitary Presidency" that illegally wages war, threatens civil liberties and encroaches on the other branches of government established by the Constitution...

...Schlesinger offers a few specific proposals to reestablish harmony in the Federal system...

...Still, no narrative undertow pulls the reader along...

...Congress should also examine the deployment of troops overseas when it scrutinizes the defense budget...

...As the chronicler of the achievements of the enhanced Presidency, he understands that the Nixon White House may have many faults, but Congress has few virtues...

...Besides his call for courage...

...But The Imperial Presidency is an extremely valuable work, whatever its shortcomings...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., self-appointed occupant of the republic's chair of very modern history, has written the most pertinent study to date of our beleaguered system...

...The CIA should stick to gathering intelligence and abolish Eisenhower's replacement for overt American intervention abroad, the department of dirty tricks...

...True, the old skills that, after a dozen volumes, we have learned to take for granted are still much in evidence: the famous crystalline prose, the eye for juicy quotations and anecdotes which are the historian's shorthand for character and circumstance...

...Yet it should be quickly noted that Schlesinger accepts the use of extraconstitutional means when the nation is faced with authentic peril...

...Moreover, the devious bombing of Cambodia took the process one step further: It lacked even the rationale of protecting American troops and directly contravened Congress' prohibition of a U.S...

...To him, for example, the Civil War, World War II and the Cuban missile crisis represented the gravest threats to American survival in our history, and therefore justified the exercise of executive privilege...

...Furthermore, nearly all government documents should be declassified after 10 years, in the faith, to quote another historian, that "the American nation could stand the shock of being adequately informed about its past in time for possible improvement and correction...

...Yet he never explains why modern liberalism is so vulnerable to abuse, so susceptible to outlandish extrapolations...

...military commitment to the Cambodian government...

...The chapters are briskly efficient rather than evocative...

...Schlesinger, to the detriment of his book, is more interested in causes for indictment than for introspection...

...Nixon . . . expressed no doubt about the perfect legality of his personal extension of the war . . . and showed no interest even in retrospective Congressional ratification...

...Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, U.S...

...Modern liberalism is itself clearly implicated in the present inflation of Presidential power, and though Schlesinger acknowledges his own errors, he lacks the temperament to systematically revise the philosophy he has championed with remarkable consistency for three decades...

...Lincoln, of course, proclaimed the right to declare martial law in the North, to free slaves in the South, to make arrests without warrant, and to restrict the press and the mails without Congressional approval...

...Whether in the impounding of funds for the sake of its own social priorities, or in the unnecessary secrecy that distorts the capacity of Congress and the electorate to render informed judgments, or in the shabby incantations of "national security" and "executive privilege" beyond (or beneath) legitimate purpose, or in the illegal use of the pocket veto, or in the preference for executive agreements over treaties requiring Senatorial ratification, the White House has blown its cover as "conservative...