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The Imperial Presidency
By Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973. 505 pp. $10.00.

Among all the books on our present constitutional crisis published during the last year and a half, this one is surely the most important.

Hopefully, readers will not be put off by the matter-of-fact early chapters. In them, the author, Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at The City University of New York and a distinguished historian of the United States, lays solid foundations for the last two thirds of the book by dispelling the myths that have grown up about presidential sovereignty since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and most particularly since the accession of Richard M. Nixon.

The opening chapter describes the constitutional system that the Framers constructed-one dispersing authority among three independent branches of government, each possessing, as the Federalist put it, "the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others." Schlesinger then moves to that aspect of federal authority which for obvious reasons has been most crucial since the Second World War-the war-making power, including the power to involve the nation in situations that might easily lead to war. Before Nixon, no President had ever thought that he had the power to wage war without the support or explicit consent of Congress, as well as the substantial support of the American people.

Of course, this generalization is too sweeping, and the author notes all the exceptions. Lincoln waged war initially on his own and was in many respects a military dictator, but he faced the supreme peril of civil war and frankly told Congress and the people what he did and why he did it. He could save the Constitution only by violating it when necessity demanded. Franklin Roosevelt's destroyer-bases deal with Great Britain in 1940 was unprecedented; but in this matter the President was careful to consult, not only with leaders on the Hill, but also with the leaders of the opposition party, and he also knew that he was backed substantially by public opinion. Truman, in his Korean decision in 1950, was the first President to take the country into a foreign conflict that became a full-fledged war without explicit congressional approval. However, he acted with the almost unanimous informal approval of Congress and the people. Kennedy, acting largely on his own and in great secrecy, took the nation to the brink of nuclear war with Russia in the Cuban missiles crisis in 1962. But Kennedy, like Lincoln, acted beyond constitutional bounds only in order to save the nation from unacceptable perils. Whatever one may think

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of their wisdom, the actions of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson before 1965 in involving the United States in the Vietnamese quagmire were within the bounds of customary practice. And, it should be added, Johnson moved from limited to full-scale participation in the Vietnamese war in 1965 under the explicit congressional authority of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

Against this background and a discussion of other important developments which cannot be related here because of spatial limitations, Schlesinger measures the Nixon presidency. This is the heart of the book. It is the author's view that Nixon stands alone in the long line of Presidents in his pretensions to imperial power. More than that, the President deliberately set out, most brazenly in 1972, to destroy our constitutional system by creating what Schlesinger calls a plebiscitary presidency on the De Gaulle model, "with the President accountable only once every four years, shielded in the years between elections from congressional and public harassment, empowered by his mandate to make war or to make peace, to spend or to impound, to give out information or to hold it back, superseding congressional legislation by executive order, all in the name of a majority whose choice must prevail till it made another choice four years later" (p.255). In other words, Nixon conceived of himself and acted as an elected king in a new revolutionary presidency.

Schlesinger not only asserts but also develops this new thesis in the most meticulous and systematic account of the Nixon presidency that has yet been published. Whether his account is polemical is best left to the judgment of the reader. But no one can quarrel with facts so carefully, methodically, and, one might add, relentlessly marshaled-of unprecedented and unbelievable claims of the right to withhold information from Congress and the people (executive privilege, it is called; actually it is a recent term and practice); of thwarting the clear will of Congress by the impoundment of funds; of waging war secretly and without any constitutional right whatsoever ("wickedly and unconstitutionally," the author says); of establishing and carrying out covert internal security operations in flagrant violation of fundamental constitutional rights; of the use of the Internal Revenue Service and the F.B.I. to harass opponents; of practicing deception and prevarication shamelessly and unendingly; and of setting the President above the law and insofar as possible beyond the reach of the courts.

The Watergate affair is of course important from a legal and moral standpoint, but Schlesinger contends that it is perhaps more important as another manifestation of Nixon's imperial conception of the presidency. There were no bounds to which the many of the President's men could not and would not go to win the election of 1972. Bugging the Democratic national headquarters, collecting huge sums of money from businessmen and corporations by duress and in violation of the law, using secret slush funds, practicing "dirty tricks"

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to confound and divide the opposition-all these were not only crimes but a clear subversion of the historical rules of the electoral process, observance of which has permitted the two-party system to operate successfully in this country. Incidentally, Schlesinger nowhere says that Nixon should be impeached and removed from office; however, it is not hard to guess where he stands on this matter.

What is the remedy? Schlesinger is too deeply immersed in American political history and traditions to believe that the answer lies in any reduction of the broad powers that the Constitution clearly vests in the President. As he rightly points out, the American government has never functioned successfully, and cannot function successfully, without strong and active presidential leadership. On some of the controversial issues like impoundment and the growing secrecy of executive operations, Congress might apply specific remedies, like the anti-impoundment bill that the President signed on July 12, 1974. But we cannot rely upon Congress for a solution of the most vexing problem of all, that of presidential war making. For one thing, Congress has usually acted cravenly in this difficult matter; for another thing, it seems impossible to devise particular legislation that will not do more harm than good by giving the President more power than he now constitutionally possesses, which is, actually, quite limited. Hope lies only in the restoration of the presidency to its rightful role in our constitutional system, and this can be done only by the election of Presidents who know American traditions, respect the Constitution and the principle of separation of powers, can be trusted to use self-restraint, understand the necessity for close cooperation with Congress, and who are able to give the moral and political leadership that the nation always desperately needs.

The foregoing should not be meant to imply that this reviewer agrees with every detail and generalization of The Imperial Presidency. As Professor Schlesinger is quick to point out, presidential power has grown considerably since the Second World War largely because of the necessity for presidential leadership in world affairs. I agree with him that generally it had not grown beyond subversive bounds before Nixon. However, I would place more emphasis on the precedents for an imperial presidency than he has done.

Franklin Roosevelt's destroyer-bases deal may have had the approval of congressional and Republican leaders and the public, but it certainly violated the treaty-making power of the Senate and was the most important of the kind of executive agreements that Professor Schlesinger deplores. Truman set a monumental precedent when, in order to preserve the President's right independently to repel aggression, he refused to ask Congress for explicit approval of his "police action" in Korea. It was as bald an assertion of the right to wage presidential war as one can conceive of. In my opinion, it is an error to equate the emergencies that Lincoln and Kennedy faced, as I think that there is no convincing evidence to support the argument

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that national survival was at stake because the Russians were placing missiles in Cuba. Finally, this reviewer noted only one factual error in the book-the statement (p. 305) that the Constitution confides the war-making power to two-thirds of Congress. Only simple majorities are required for passage of war resolutions.

Arthur S. Link
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.