July 2, 2007
More on Imperial Presidencies Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST Last month this site hosted a brief exchange on the idea of the “imperial Presidency,” a term coined by the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who viewed with considerable skepticism the expansion of the executive branch’s authority from the 1930s onward. I argued that Richard Nixon’s administration “was less an aberration and more an extreme culmination of trends that had been on the build for several decades.” My larger point was that “if history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.” In response, Fred Smoler offered a conditional defense of the imperial Presidency, proffering that “if [George] Bush gets us into a war with Iran, imperial Presidents will get an even worse name, but if Bush fails to use force and Iran one day launches nuclear weapons at Israeli, European, or American cities, opponents of imperial Presidencies will be widely execrated. . . . History has shown us more than one thing.” On June 30 The New York Times published an op-ed by Egil Krogh, a former deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon who served as one of the chief “plumbers” of Watergate fame. Krogh’s op-ed related the story of the administration’s decision to conduct an illegal search of the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist who had been treating Daniel Ellsberg, the source behind the Pentagon Papers leak. As Krogh explained, “At no time did I or anyone else there question whether the operation was necessary, legal or moral. Convinced that we were responding legitimately to a national security crisis, we focused instead on the operational details: who would do what, when and where.” In effect, Krogh and his colleagues anticipated by several years the line that Richard Nixon would famously deliver in his televised interview with David Frost: “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” Last week the Washington Post ran a remarkable investigative series on the role that Vice President Dick Cheney has played in the Bush administration. With his combination of ideological rigor and administrative background—Cheney has served as White House chief-of-staff, GOP House whip, and Secretary of Defense—the Vice Vresident has managed to short-circuit established operating procedures and thereby exert enormous influence on defense, environmental, and fiscal policies. Though he is now advancing the bizarre claim that he is not part of the executive branch, arguably Cheney stands as an example of the potential dangers of the “imperial Presidency.” By proxy, he has enjoyed unchecked executive authority that Congress and the Courts will spend the next decade reviewing. In a separate item, documents released last week reveal that President John Kennedy authorized the creation of an extralegal unit affiliated with the CIA to investigate Pentagon leaks to The New York Times’ defense correspondent. In effect, JFK created his own plumbers unit, almost a decade before Nixon did the same. While I appreciate Fred Smoler’s point, I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between an enhanced executive branch—one with the flexibility to respond to national security threats—and an imperial Presidency that knowingly flouts the law, administrative codes, and the Constitution. In the case of JFK and Nixon, neither President could (or should) have used the CIA to spy on domestic political adversaries. In the case of George Bush and Dick Cheney, there is something remarkably troubling in the insistence that the White House operates beyond the boundaries of congressional or administrative oversight. If history has shown us more than one thing, certainly, it has shown us that such abuses seldom contribute to anything but the political security of those currently occupying the West Wing.
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