Presidents, Then and Now

...I shall not know how to deal with other matters of even greater Fitzpatrick in The St...

...But being acutely aware that he held the "vital center of action" in our system of government, Truman turned the whole of the event into a campaign argument which played no small part in the defeat of the Republicans and in his own surprise election to the Presidency...

...In realistic terms, since a President of all the people is so vague a notion, what a President must decide is which part of the people does he want to be President of...

...And if no one else except the President is on hand for this purpose, how can he do what is required of him unless he knows how to make his own political consciousness the cause of political consciousness in others...

...I say "the first of the modern Presidents" because we now live intensively with the problems which began to claw at the nation in his time...

...And even among the handful he can identify, the many cases involving a conflict of interest on the part of the President's chief aides—some examples in the current Administration are the Dixon-Yates case, the Goldfine-Adams case, the Talbot case, the Ross case—stand for his difficulty in knowing what they are doing with the trust he has reposed in them...

...He collaborated with Robert Sherwood in the writing of "Roosevelt and Hopkins...

...The other was Truman's own Presi-tial nomination by the Democratic convention...

...One was the fact that the Republican nominating convention had pledged the party to enact some of the very programs the Republicans in Congress had but recently rejected...

...Such is the man who leads a great free democratic nation...

...It is as difficult to name as the shadow of a mirage is difficult to measure...

...January, 1959 35...

...At the same time, many of the domestic measures Truman had recommended had been rejected by that same 80th Congress...

...That is to say, it is a Presidency where power and responsibility are fatally separated...

...The Presidency, for T.R., was much more than all this combined...

...And of course he shares the desires of his immediate predecessors...

...No matter who his advisers were, or what they advised, he could not evade the use of his own power of decision, nor evade his personal accountability to the nation for that decision...

...As government itself has grown bigger and more complex, "executive power" can mean any number of things...

...before him, he added approvingly: "The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can be...

...A nation is led by a man who hears more than those things...

...In my view, at least, there is not...

...and Wilson—but broken off by the intervening Presidencies of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—and made it his own life-line...

...said they, as they clinked their whisky glasses in malicious hopefulness that Africa's lions might be the end of T.R...

...Worse still, this vague and flabby sentimentalism comes to justify a torpor of mind whose main activity is merely to invent excuses why there should be no grueling cross-examination of this and that version of reality to see whether it is what it pretends to be...

...One thing, however, seems plain...

...Its immediately tangible result was a Presidency which won a grudging tribute from his enemies in 1909 when they heard that Roosevelt was leaving for an African safari...

...It has been, I think, a kind of anti-political Presidency...

...Someone, somewhere, must throw his reserve weight of authority and judgment into the deadlocked situation so that the social and political work of the hour can go forward again...

...Yet it might as well be said once and for all, that "a President of all the people" is an airy-fairy abstraction...

...Instead, beginning with the cold war, we have found ourselves compelled to form and join an infinitely varied number of nation-state coalitions, each for a special purpose, in special regions, and none having any foreseeable terminal date...

...the meaning they have for America...

...The groanings of these two changes rising within all organs of government—between them and the people —and between America as a whole and the off-shore world, could be heard even in William McKinley's Presidency...

...I ask this of you in support of the foreign policy of this Administration," Wilson said...

...What this meant in actual practice can be illustrated by what Truman did in the summer of 1948...

...I shall go to the country," he warned, "after my resignation is tendered, and ask whether America is to stand before the world as a nation that violates its contracts as mere matters of convenience, upon a basis of expediency...

...In such circumstances, when the natural instincts of a democracy are to stay close and snug near one's fireplace, and all the requirements of national survival call for a resumption of our task of exploration, we look for a President of the sort Wood-row Wilson had in mind when he said: "A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street corners or the opinions of the newspapers...

...because if he decides something, he ceases to be the President of those people who are adversely affected by the decision...

...32 The PROGRESSIVE In day-to-day matters, admittedly, Theodore Roosevelt often filled the air with noise and smoke as he banged away confusingly, now against the politics of the Right, and now against the politics of the Left...

...For that matter, it can also mean a powerfully entrenched chairman of a Congressional committee or subcommittee...

...the inventor as well as the executor of public policy...

...He revived an antiquated practice by delivering his messages in person to the two chambers...

...It was not just a place held by a very senior civil servant who signed papers containing Congressional decision...

...Of course he means well...

...Thus, in his acceptance speech, he reviewed the various measures he had recommended to the 80th Congress, only to have them die there...

...He most certainly could not just sit inertly in the White House like an unattended gilded harp, sounding tunelessly only when drafty winds swept across its strings...

...when it comes to the management of a whole society, a diffuse desire to do good, divorced from a toughness of spirit and from exact knowledge about how to do good, is, at best, no better than a good dream...

...Moreover, when the call was actually made, it recommended for immediate enactment many of the same measures the Republican platform had advocated...

...Yet all this in turn calls for a President who views himself in practice, and not only in theory, as the chief organ of foreign affairs—a President who can and must act, when the chips are down, literally as his own Secretary of State...

...Also in his time, we changed from a nation living to one side of world currents into a nation fated to brush against and be brushed by things in flux everywhere...

...And as his words become progressively more unreal, there sets in a steady erosion in his moral authority and in his power to lead others...

...His giant achievements need no retelling...

...With that, he announced that he was summoning the Congress back into special session on July 26...

...He did not hesitate to appeal to the public over the heads of the Congress...

...It began with his dramatic use of the constitutional duty a President has "to give the Congress information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient...

...There is nothing unlawful in the fact that Big Labor, Big Agriculture, and Big Business—to cite but a few examples—have their special spokesmen in the House, the Senate, and in those arms of the Executive which deal with problems of special interest to them...

...Only he can best know how and why distant events are trending where they are...

...one which has limited itself either to an administrative routine, or has exerted only enough energy to stop things which others put in motion, while originating nothing itself...

...The Presidency, to Theodore Roosevelt, was not just an office narrowly circumscribed by the letter of the law...

...England protested the law, and when Wilson found that English cooperation with his Mexican policy was contingent on repeal of the toll law, he went before the Congress to request that repeal...

...Congress is not structurally built to look after America's day-to-day requirements as a member of many criss-crossing coalitions...

...And if Congress refused...

...It can and should lay down general policy lines...

...At critical junctures, he spent hours in the President's room at the Capitol, pressing for action on his bills...

...In Wilson's hands, this duty was transformed into a claim and a successful defense of a Presidential right to be the nation's first legislator...

...Yet as Speaker Joe Cannon said, perhaps unkindly, McKin-ley kept his ears so close to the ground that he got them "full of grasshoppers...

...The President was bound to be an activist, fighting under his own flag with all the legal and extra-legal resources at his command—fighting for national goals he, on his own, defined for the country...

...Where once this term and the Presidency were synonymous, they are no longer so...

...He had to be the creator as well as the acoustical bounce-back of public opinion...

...or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning...

...delicacy and nearer consequence if you do not grant it to me...

...The legacy of active policy inherited from a former time has now been outstripped by events both at home and abroad...

...The corollary, for Theodore Roosevelt, was plain enough...

...where power is exercised without accountability, and where responsibility wanders around on the horizon like a displaced person, looking for someone to attach itself to...

...Then, with the contrasting image of T.R...

...Yet the near equality of strength among these rival forces (each with its own maze of internal rivalries) can lead to a governmental deadlock, arresting all progress...

...Then he said: "My duty as President requires that I use every means within my power to get the laws the people need on such important matters...

...When it comes to politics...

...speaks, not the rumor of the streets, but a new principle for a new age...

...and what we must all do if our aim is to nip a growing danger in the bud, or to seize a fugitive opportunity...

...Who other than the President can do this...

...The classic test here came very early in his tenure...

...In the final stages of political decomposition, he loses the power to carry out even good policies and, in lieu of moral authority, is driven to bluster or to sulky and sullen submission...

...But what he can do— indeed, must do—is to create a political climate within the government and within the nation where his purposes are so clearly understood and so strongly supported that the fragmented bits of the government will move in concert toward common ends —because the atmospheric pressure he sets compels them to do so...

...The still larger result of T.R.'s years in the White House was a Presidential style that was adapted and refined and extended by three of his strongest successors—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman—as they dealt with the onrushing domestic and international challenges of their times...

...Thus he made himself the master of the party machinery by becoming the master of the party caucus...

...Yet the kinetic energy T.R...

...a man [to whom] the voices of the nation . . . unite in a single meaning and reveal to him in a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice...

...Herblock in The Washington Post "Well, Men, Whafll We Refrain from Doing Now...

...Yet only the President is structurally situated to present the Congress and the nation with the key to the inner connection between events occurring at separate parts of the globe...

...Two—The second reason for the need here being considered takes into account the character of American life as it is organized along functional and regional interests, and as both are reflected in the Congress and in the Executive...

...The only way it can come to pass in the formidable real world is for a President to decide nothing at all...

...Is there any Presidential tradition other than the one just sketched which has any relevancy to current needs...

...It was in his time, first of all, that America turned from a farm economy into a complex industrial machine—geared along corporate lines for national and international production and distribution...

...Regrettably, however, to say of a person that he means well has a creative validity only in the realm of ethics...

...In the foreign field, certainly, we stand—-whether we know it or not—in the margins of the maps where ancient geographers, having exhausted their knowledge of the known world, used to write: "Beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice or a frozen sea...

...had negotiated on the domestic front in the new Presidential role of commander-in-chief of the economy...

...The portrait starts in 1909 when Theodore Roosevelt, the first of the modern Presidents, completed his White House tenure...

...And to say this is to imply that he conceives of himself as dwelling far above the human travail...

...In a brief survey, all one can do is to pose the Presidency rather arbitrarily amid lights and lines which seem most likely to show its ruling spirit...

...It was the common reference point for social effort...

...At worst, it envelops everything in a vague and flabby sentimentalism where emotion and impulse take the place of wisdom and where government itself becomes a tedious exercise in grandiloquent words standing for policies never put into effect and never intended to be...

...How else, except through politics, can one formulate alternative versions about what is just and unjust, what is liberty and oppression...

...To say of a President that he is above politics is the equivalent of saying that he is indifferent alike to both the just and the unjust, both to the free and the oppressed...

...Yet if he is to decide nothing, why have a President in the first place...

...But that, too, is worse than a valueless value...

...squarely at the center of changing relationships at home and abroad...

...It was not just a position of dignity and decorum...

...In a retrospect of six years, one searches in vain for the emergence of a single powerful new root from which a successor in the Presidency can draw nourishment...

...When Wilson himself became President, William Allen White remarked of his handshake that "it felt like a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper—irresponsive and lifeless...

...It has also been a Presidency which strikes me as being more suited to the Articles of Confederation than to the Constitution...

...To be sure, little was eventually passed quite as the President wanted...

...Three—The third reason takes into account the change that has occurred in the way our foreign affairs must be conducted...

...But what of today...

...It can and should keep the actions of the Executive under constant review, to approve or censure measures taken...

...A President of the United States knows by name and face only a handful of the thousands upon thousands of individuals who wield executive power under a delegation of Presidential authority, or by a direct grant from the Congress...

...And of the many supporting reasons that can be cited, here are but a few: One—The first takes into account what has happened to "executive power" in the last 50 years...

...What kind of Presidency have we had with the inauguration of General 34 The PROGRESSIVE Eisenhower six years ago...

...Certainly General Eisenhower wanted to be a President of all the people...

...Health to the lions...

...The repeal was passed within ten weeks after Wilson's threat...

...Two decades later, when Franklin D. Roosevelt moved into the White House, he picked up the thread of the Presidential tradition spun by T.R...

...Louis Post-Dispateh But Where's the Captain...

...The placard read: The Buck Stops Here...

...In outward manner, Harry S. Truman seemed to have nothing in common with T.R., Wilson, and F.D.R...

...By treaty with England, the Panama Canal, then under construction, was "to be open to British and American vessels on equal terms...

...the source of the national will to decide things in dispute, and the focal point of responsibility for the consequences of decisions...

...PreJanuary,, 1959 33 viously, though the 80th Congress was controlled by a Republican majority, he had won its support for foreign policies as sweeping in their implications as any F.D.R...

...Under the spur of domestic and international emergencies, the end-result in practice was a Presidency which led the nation from above, while the Congress revised and vetoed from below, after the manner of the relationship existing in England between the Cabinet and the Commons...

...It stood for his acute awareness that the President, and the President alone, was responsible for the acts of his Administration...

...But that arrangement was meant to end with victory...

...None of this argues that President Eisenhower has not meant well, or that he has not shared the ardent desires of his immediate predecessors to create a prosperous and peaceful American and world community...

...And there was much more than substantial truth in Robert M. LaFollette's judgment that "when the battle cloud lifted and quiet was restored, it was always a matter of surprise that so little had been accomplished...

...Wilson, who spoke as it were on behalf of this school of three, wrote reprovingly in 1908: "Some of our Presidents have deliberately held themselves off from using the full power they might legitimately have used, because of conscientious scruples, because they were more theorists than statesmen...

...One must go on to admit that President Eisenhower most certainly wanted to be above politics...

...They have become hallowed in our political liturgy...

...Yet there was nothing irresponsive and lifeless about the way Wilson made his Presidency "the vital place of action...

...Two events now gave him the means to mount a vigorous counterattack...

...Yet the sign and symbol that he was their direct descendant could be seen in the celebrated placard he put on his desk as a constant reminder of what the Presidency was all about...

...It was Theodore Roosevelt, by contrast, who placed the Presidency SIDNEY HYMAN, author of "The American President," is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, The Reporter, and the Saturday Review...

...Regardless of what the law says, in practice it can mean the person of the President, or his White House staff, or the heads of the great departments, or the independent administrative agencies, or the regulatory agencies...

...And when all else threatened to fail, he fought for his objectives by threatening to resign if he lost them...

...The first was a shift of that power from the states to the federal government...

...But in 1912, Congress exempted coastwise vessels of the United States from toll payments...

...let loose was not aimless...

...Nor was it a place held simply by an efficiency expert hired to get one hundred cents in value from ever)' dollar spent...

...It was the ultimate source of national style...

...And doing so, it was he who redefined the Presidency's role in managing and solving the problems those changes cast up...

...Indeed, the whole of this is so far-flung, and takes in and grinds out so much detailed work, as to make it an abuse of language to speak of the President as the "Chief Executive"— in the sense that the phrase conjures up the analogy of a president of a large industrial corporation...

...The second was a shift within the federal government from the Congress to the President...

...Bit by bit, the person who invents the excuses himself drifts farther and farther away from reality...

...On the contrary, the likelihood is that a Presidential successor who tries—as he must—to get back in line with the tradition President Eisenhower broke off, can count on being denounced as someone who was bent on an "executive usurpation of power...

...There was no other place except in the Presidency where the hopes of Americans in the multitude could find their voice so that all could hear and know and do what all vaguely felt...

...It has not been a Presidency which moved in the tradition of T.R., Wilson, F.D.R., and Truman...

...It is enough to say that during his Presidency, the balance of the American government—insofar as it concerned the power of initiative—underwent a double shift within our constitutional framework...

...In Franklin D. Roosevelt's time, to be sure, America waged a major war as part of a coalition of nation-states...

...He learned rapidly from his Postmaster General how to use the vast federal patronage system to lubricate the legislative mill...

...But we have long overstayed the hour when there was any political merit to be had in restful abstention...

...His is the vital place of action in the system whether he accept it as such or not, and the office is the measure of the man—of his wisdom as well as of his force...

...There are times when not doing things is as conducive to public health as rest is to the health of the human body...