THE FAILURE OF THE EISENHOWER PRESIDENCY
Hyman, Sidney
the failure of the eisenhower presidency by SIDNEY HYMAN rriHE Eisenhower Presidency is drawing to a close and the War of the Presidential Succession is on in earnest. The moment, therefore,...
...For example, three months elapsed between the firing of the first Sputnik and the convening of Congress...
...if there was a dividend withholding tax, as in the case of many other sources of income, the government would collect at least a billion dollars of the dividend-based revenues that were due it...
...A failure or a success in one area need not have had any visible effect on the course events took in another...
...The law which makes him Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces has now made him our Chief Scientist...
...The earnest men who are worried about our country's security are told by him that they are "political morticians exhibiting a breast-beating pessimism...
...One is the voting constituency formed by his fellow Americans from whom he draws his title of office...
...How could Congress attend, for example, to the needs of education, housing, and urban redevelopment when measures of this kind were beaten down by Executive veto—all in the name of a balanced budget...
...Its dominating tendencies have been to act as if domestic and foreign affairs were separate matters...
...In the last session, the Foreign Relations Committee, which was of the same mind, labored long and hard and issued a nearly unanimous report which would have enabled the Development Loan Fund to plan its operations on a long-term basis...
...When asked about the lagging space program, Wilson said he had enough troubles on earth...
...Should we extend the order of values and the style of the Eisenhower Presidency into the 1960's, or does the impending future demand a different kind of Presidency...
...And it was cut down...
...It ordinarily works through a complex maze of more than three hundred committees whose chairmen, under the seniority rules, have inordinate personal power to bend the work that is done—and hence the work of Congress—to their own local needs...
...In the case of the Senate, it is a joint partner with the President in the treaty-making power...
...After twenty years of innovation under the Presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in meeting the social, political, and military revolutions of the day, perhaps the time was ripe for a Presidency that would devote itself to consolidating the gains made...
...It has no way of knowing from our allies, directly, what they consider to be correct or incorrect policies...
...There was no word of correction from the White House...
...There has been at least one more vital change...
...In what we do, our allies must see that their interest as well as our own is better served by common policies than without them...
...They are, he says, unpatriotic because they have "the tendency to disparage our country" with their "spurious" assertions...
...Demands long postponed or ignored will burst upon the President in the 1960's...
...It therefore falls to the President to explain the two constituencies to each other...
...The present age is different...
...These are great legal powers and they have a commensurate practical meaning as well...
...It alone has the power to tax, to raise and support armies, to declare war, to regulate interstate and foreign commerce...
...In some areas, the Congress was to act as the amateur and the President as the expert...
...That support was forthcoming not because the leaders of Congress were convinced of the wisdom of the Administration's course...
...Moreover, at any time, there is a place for a veto, for a disengagement from dangerous points of exposure, and for a political dialectic in which the negative arm is stronger than the affirmative arm...
...To be sure, at one point, it developed a deficit of $12.5 billion...
...Item...
...as if the sensibilities of our non-voting constituents could be ignored whenever their wishes collided with the voting constituency of America...
...And even when Congress is in session, it cannot exercise a round-the-clock, day-to-day direction over the great questions of national policy which must now be pursued in the context of a multi-nation coalition diplomacy...
...to reunite power and responsibility in it...
...In the last session of the Congress, the President exercised his veto power 150 times, yet lent his approval to the Republican policy of calling the Democratic-controlled 86th Congress a "do-nothing Congress...
...he concentrates in himself the power of quick action...
...Item...
...It has bent the weight of its energies to the end of stopping things which have been put into motion elsewhere...
...Now, in the name of its own success, reinforced by a perverse mystical faith in the inevitability of success, the Soviets are strongly placed to impose their will on all who would deny them whatever object they set for themselves...
...Yet his has been the period of a falling apart, of a loss of elan and dash, of a veto for the sake of saying no, of a widening breach between power and responsibility...
...as if we could win the newly emergent nations to the practices of democracy by ringing democratic manifestoes—while withholding from them a full measure of the material assistance they need as a flooring for democratic growth...
...as if information which belonged in the public domain as an indispensible prerequisite for democratic debate, should be withheld from the nation on the theory that President "knows best...
...But this is no longer true...
...The full proof of these charges would require a day-to-day listing of the actions of the Eisenhower Administration since it came to power in 1953...
...At that same point, the Democratic members of Congress observed that something like $4 billion in dividend income in this country goes unreported...
...The President repeatedly talked of how important it was to provide long term economic assistance to the underdeveloped countries...
...In practice, this theory worked well enough in the Nineteenth Century, the Golden Age of the Amateur...
...Under modern conditions, with every major political question somehow involving the entire nation, it is to be expected that the institution in which our national experience comes to a head should be the institution to which we all look for ways and means to bring our leading questions under control...
...For Congress has no ambassadors of its own...
...to allow no voice but its own to be heard, yet to make Congress assume a large measure of the responsibility for all miscarriages of Administration policy...
...The details of our policies must appeal to them as the best chance of success in solving problems of common interest...
...It is, and it must be, the Presidency, because the President is at one and the same time these many officials: He is the head of state, the head of government, the head of party, the military commander-in-chief, the chief of diplomacy, the head of administration, the source of appointments and removals, the chief proponent of legislation, the manager-in-chief of the economy, the ultimate source of discipline and clemency, the party leader, the guide and interpretor of public opinion, the keeper of the national conscience, the chief prophet of warning and encouragement, the chief banker, social service worker, insurance agent, scientist, and, above all, the commander-in-chief of the Grand Alliance...
...Item...
...if he had in fact used his negative arm to stop dangerous tendencies or to withdraw from them, his Presidency would have had a material relevance to the hour at which we stand in our history...
...with a terminal point in mind...
...Yet when there was a crucial vote on the floor of the Senate, the White House, swayed by the Treasury Department and the Bureau of the Budget (over the opposition of the State Department), sent word to party lieutenants to cut down the Development Loan proposal...
...Eisenhower but like a President...
...These factors work against unity of direction, against a concentration of energy, against staying power, against a global view, against speed, against flexibility...
...He must constantly shift his gravitational center from one to the other so that in a continuous process of accommodation the purposes of the alliance as a whole can better be advanced...
...Yet one must hope that the next President will have the courage and the magnanimity to make his office respond to the needs of the time...
...Item...
...The two have been merged into a single indivisible whole in which domestic and foreign events take their shape from each other...
...That institution, for the reasons indicated, is not and cannot now be Congress...
...The other is the non-voting constituency of our allies who do not have a say in choosing him in a polling booth, but who are immediately and vitally affected by anything he does...
...It has not firmly grasped the responsibility of Presidential leadership from above, yet it has refused to allow Congress to improvise a substitute leadership from below to fill the vacuum...
...But the paramount reasons he can act where Congress cannot arises from these considerations: First, as our only national officer, he is expected to represent and to speak for the nation as a united whole, without regard to local and sectional accents...
...The policies we advance in the cause of peace must not, in themselves, be more terrifying than the fear of hostile threats...
...The two are merged particularly in the office of the Presidency because it is the only office the American people have that is both national and international in its reach...
...All that Congress cannot do, for structural reasons, the President can do...
...Now they are in a ferment to be the authors of their own history...
...This Democratic proposal was killed by the Administration, as was the case with another proposal that there be a tightening up of the tax-free expense allowances...
...Because any leading question of modern American government requires the simultaneous performance of most of these functions, the effect has been to render obsolete the old notion that the President's job is merely to administer the objects and situations defined for him by Congress...
...Now, as never before, the conduct of our affairs demands unity of direction, a concentration of energy, staying power, a faculty for group diplomacy, a global vision, precise information, and an increased measure of discretionary authority so that sudden advantages can be speedily seized, and sudden dangers can be swiftly met...
...It is the age where a rapidly accumulating fund of specialized knowledge has shaken, if it has not altogether shattered, the structure of an over-arching general knowledge...
...The effort we require of them must be within their capabilities...
...Those who disagree with his judgments are, to him, "noisy extremists...
...Item...
...But where issues like war and peace demand decision—and this one issue draws a host of others into its vortex—the built-in split personality of the Congress stands in the way of its own motions: each of its two chambers is organized on a different principle of representation...
...Yet it falls to the President to create the conditions for a tolerable life when the old notions of war and the old notions of diplomacy have lost their boundary lines...
...In practice, in their new role, they may give satirical meanings to the great political watchwords they learned from the West—words like liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, social justice, nationalism, and self-determination...
...Yet each would know enough to pass a sound judgment on what the other was doing, while the amateur electorate as a whole would know enough to pass a sound judgment on what the Congress and the Presidency were jointly doing...
...In this age, an exploding science has had the effect of fusing vital political questions with infinitely complex scientific and technological questions...
...But there is an even more compelling consideration...
...The Administration repeatedly emphasized the imperative necessity of maintaining "fiscal solvency...
...Yet in Lebanon, just as in Quemoy and Matsu, Congress suddenly discovered that the Eisenhower Doctrine was its doctrine, and the Formosa Resolution was its resolution...
...Now there is the accelerating change of the Soviet Union into a disciplined industrial complex whose power tends to cast a golden glow over the means used to bring that power into being...
...Yet when there is a sharp difference of opinion among his experts—as there often is—how is he to know which expert is the one worth listening to...
...The line between foreign and domestic affairs is now as indistinct as a line drawn through water...
...Item...
...On the matter, for example, of whether or not to stop all further tests of the hydrogen bomb, only a handful of people know even the vocabulary that is relevant to the discussion, let alone how to frame a precise judgment...
...In others, the Congress was to act as the expert and the President as the amateur...
...Yet, for all its own negligence in enforcing existing tax laws, the Administration at every turn blasted the Democrats for being "reckless spenders...
...A people could mobilize and wage war SIDNEY HYMAN, author of "The American President," contributes to the New York Times Magazine, The Reporter, and The Saturday Review...
...In both cases, Congress was informed that it had to support the position of the Administration because otherwise the Russians and the rest of the world would think we were sorely divided...
...To be sure, by a direct grant of the Constitution, the Congress alone enacts legislation...
...Still, the structural character of Congress, by its very nature, weakens its role in formulating and initiating solutions to the great political issues of the day...
...In such an interval of pause, existing programs could have been refined, the fast setting mold of habit could have been breached to allow for an entry of fresh air, the whole administrative machinery of government could have been renovated...
...Congress has been, it now is, and it can be, an effective mediator between clashing local and sectional interests...
...The Senate Preparedness Subcommittee on Armed Services sat day after day, week after week, heard hundreds of witnesses, took testimony from dozens of men, and unanimously made seventeen recommendations urging this nation to accelerate its defense program...
...It is not in touch with scores of foreign nations simultaneously...
...When asked why he had not spent the money, Wilson was quoted as saying that in his mind basic research was what you were doing when you did not know what to do...
...After the Suez war, to whose onset the Administration contributed through its own blunders, the Eisenhower Doctrine was proclaimed as the nostrum which would set everything right in the Middle East...
...He collaborated with Robert Sherwood in the writing of "Roosevelt and Hopkins...
...Long held to the role of raw material producers, they would now attain for themselves the good they see in the industrial revolution previously denied them...
...Consider some of them: f There was a time when foreign and domestic affairs seemed to be distinctly separate matters...
...For almost four Presidential terms we have been living in a no-man's land, without war and yet without peace...
...The legacy he leaves to his successor in the White House, whoever he may be, is unenviable...
...Few of the recommendations have been carried out by the President...
...They were convinced that the course was either dangerous or meaningless...
...He is aided, of course, by special grants of power which come directly from the Constitution...
...Eisenhower's moral nature...
...What is being posed for judgment here is not Mr...
...Yet the heart of the trouble with the Eisenhower Presidency is something else again...
...When Charles E. Wilson was Secretary of Defense, Congress appropriated about $175 million for basic research...
...If President Eisenhower had in fact been a consolidator in some such manner...
...Eisenhower, albeit a small one...
...Item...
...It has been its failure to accept the reality of the shift in executive-legislative relations that has occurred within the Constitution...
...What it has done throughout is to seek the best of both worlds: to claim all the credit for the sunshine and to blame everyone else for the rain...
...It is the age of the Expert...
...There has been a profound and unavoidable shift within the Constitution—a shift that brings us abreast of the British parliamentary principle whereby the Executive must lead from above while Congress revises and vetoes from below...
...We are mobilized for instant nuclear warfare yet dare not resort to it as a means for attaining the political settlement— or the peace— which lies beyond war...
...Third, unlike Congress, he is always in session—or at least should be—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week...
...Yet his general tendency has been to shut off all debate by asserting that he knows more than "almost anyone" about military matters...
...It has no way of keeping abreast of fast-breaking events at distant points around the globe, and to relate them for their significance...
...There was a time when we were a nation whose security policies were based on hemispheric isolation...
...There was a time when household knowledge and conventional wisdom were sufficient sources of valid judgments on public questions...
...If President Eisenhower's successor rises to meet them, as he must if we are to continue to be a major power, it seems fairly certain that he will be damned for somehow violating the Constitution because he might insist on acting not like Mr...
...How could it do anything when the veto power is equal to two-thirds the combined strength of the entire Congress, and a majority of that size is rarely on the same side of legislation...
...This new necessity of serving national interest by supra-national means creates two constituencies for a President...
...But this is no longer true...
...as if religion was a substitute for politics in a condition of no war and no peace...
...Once that point was reached, and the political objectives which lie beyond the shooting war were attained, a condition of peace would ensue...
...Indeed, the framework of the American Constitution was based largely on a theory of knowledge...
...It has no intelligence service of its own...
...It seems fairly certain that he will be damned for being a divisive influence, a source of acrimonious dispute, and worse...
...For the same cause, the President of the United States must somehow guarantee for our economy the measure of sustained growth it needs if we are to have the material means with which to meet the mounting threat of the Soviet economic offensive...
...An even greater impediment is that either of the two chambers only rarely sits as a committee of the whole to consider any matter...
...The problem is all the more complicated for the President...
...If these are indeed the demands of the times, then a second conclusion follows...
...The terms were first leaked to the press, and once they were in public print, the Administration invoked the holy name of bi-partisanship to insure its adoption by Congress, just as it had previously done in the case of the Formosa Resolution...
...There is a case to be made for Mr...
...and to revive our sagging constitutional morality by restoring discussion itself to the governmental process...
...He would most certainly agree that free and open discussion is a leading factor in the actual workings of democracy...
...Congress was not consulted in the period while that Doctrine was being formulated within the Executive...
...Fourth, though the constitutional lawyers dispute the point, the national instinct for survival tends to make the President's inaugural oath to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution a residual source of power he can draw on to preserve the nation when all the other organs of government are stalled in a crisis...
...Perhaps we all needed a breather in which to look around and to reappraise where we stood as individuals in relationship to our own government, and where our government stood in relation to other nations...
...Yet their aim is clear enough...
...Second, he is one man, not a committee...
...It has not marched at the head of affairs to force events into being of a kind favorable to America and the Grand Alliance...
...Agreed: as a human being, he is a good man...
...Now we are a nation that must pursue those policies on distant shores, in distant skies, from distant bases on foreign soil, on all fronts of human endeavor...
...Nor should it be forgotten that Congress has its periods of adjournment when it does nothing at all...
...However honorable its motives, any modern Presidency which fails to accept the reality of this shift, and to act on the basis of it, contributes to a general disarray and to a sense of frustration throughout the whole order of government...
...At this point, we can come directly to the Eisenhower Presidency...
...There was a time when large masses of humanity lived in a state of static listlessness under colonial rule...
...Moreover, at least one billion dollars of defense money the Congress has appropriated has been impounded, sunk, or hidden by the President while Congress is virtually powerless to make him do what it wants done...
...But a few representative instances, chosen without reference to any time sequence, will make an adequate case...
...f There was a time when the Russians were a peasant people, living in rural isolation with a barnyard economy...
...The President has spoken eloquently about the virtues of democracy...
...It falls to the President to make major decisions on where and how much of our own surplus capital can best be spent abroad in ways congruous with our national interest and the interest of the peoples who want to industrialize...
...51 There was a time when a clear line could be drawn between a state of war and a condition of peace...
...The Eisenhower Administration has acted as if decisions of our choosing correspond to the best interest of our allies...
...They were not at all convinced of the wisdom of the Administration's policy...
...as if a balanced budget was the paramount means of meeting the Soviet economic offensive...
...What is being posed is his conduct of the Presidential office in response to political challenges that act on any modern Presidency...
...It is that Congress, as an alternative to the President, cannot under modern conditions be the vital center of action in our government in dealing with the highest matters of state...
...The moment, therefore, raises a leading question...
...There was no word of correction from the White House...
Vol. 24 • May 1960 • No. 5
