Abuse of Power

...In contrast to the recent debate over the anti-ballistic missile system, the fateful decision to construct a hydrogen bomb was made exclusively within the Executive offices...

...The Awesome Power, by Richard F. Haynes, is a useful, though conventional, survey of Presidential military authority under Harry S. Truman and of the origins of what Arthur Schlesinger has called " t h e imperial Presidency...

...reviewed by Robert Griffith Given the euphoria with which the press initially greeted the ascension of Gerald Ford, it is entirely possible that many of the grave issues raised by the Nixon Presidency will be swept aside in a headlong stampede into normalcy...

...Designed to centralize and expedite Presidential command, these new Federal institutions enshrouded executive decision making in secrecy and effectively foreclosed participation by either Congress or the public...

...Abuse of Power THE AWESOME POWER: HARRY S. TRUMAN AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF, by Richard F. Haynes...

...Truman successfully pressed for the unification of the armed services and for the creation of the National Security Council, the CIA, and the Atomic Energy Commission...

...The vast powers of the Cold War Presidency were enhanced by each successive President, until finally Richard Nixon used those powers to violate the very constitutional process which he had sworn to defend...

...The President," he later declared, "must use whatever power the Constitution does not expressly deny him...

...by 1949 the AEC was even refusing to furnish information to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, whose chairman, Senator Brien McMahon, had sponsored the legislation creating the Commission...

...But if the actions of Nixon and his associates are understood only as the acts of misguided or unprincipled individuals and not as manifestations of a dangerous institutional crisis, then the specter of Watergate will continue to haunt the land...

...The next time, as Representative James Mann of South Carolina so eloquently warned, "there may be no watchman in the night...

...Finally, and perhaps most important, Truman became the first President to lead this country into a major war without the advice or approval of Congress, a tragic precedent which his successors would follow as they led the United States deeper and deeper into the Vietnam quagmire...

...The CIA, operating under secret Presidential directives, quickly became a law unto itself...

...Truman also invoked the claim of "national security" to justify an ever widening spectrum of Presidential actions, from sending troops to Europe to seizing the steel mills at hqme...

...Robert Griffith teaches American history at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst His most recent book is "The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism...

...Truman, Haynes argues, was the first incumbent of the modern Presidency, an institution which, though prefigured by the wartime leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, was primarily a product of America's Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union...

...This would be most unfortunate, for it seems to me that the issues involved are not only the transgressions of Nixon and his retainers but a deeper crisis in the American system of government...

...Since World War II the powers of the Presidency have steadily swollen, especially in the area of foreign and military policy, to the point that they now threaten to undermine not only the coordinate power of the Congress, but the very precepts of popular and democratic government...

...Against a background of almost constant international crises,the Truman Administration forged new institutions for the conduct of war...