Via Rose..
From republic to empire
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were labelled 'imperial
presidents,' recalls former White House adviser ROGER MORRIS .
But neither could hold a candle to today's George Bush
By ROGER MORRIS
Monday, April 14, 2003 - Page A11
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Whatever his triumph in Iraq,
George W. Bush already enjoyed a
victory of historic proportions in the
United States. By unique
dominance of Congress and the
rest of government, and to the
approval of the American media
and an impressive majority in the
polls, Mr. Bush had acquired
power beyond the grasp of any
predecessor. Before U.S. forces
ever roared through Baghdad, their
Commander-in-Chief was
America's most imperial
president.
The spectre of an emperor in the
White House is familiar to an
American system that lurches
between the wider powers of the
modern president and the
long-sacred constitutional
restraints placed on executive
supremacy. In his noted 1973
book, The Imperial Presidency,
historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
warned of "presidential power so
spacious and peremptory as to
imply a radical transformation of
the traditional polity." Cases in
point were Lyndon Johnson and
Richard Nixon, whose conduct
from the Vietnam War to the
Watergate scandal seemed to
many to be a dangerous
culmination of might and
pretension assembled in the Oval
Office.
By the mid 1970s, Mr. Johnson
and Mr. Nixon had left Washington
in disrepute. Congress reasserted
itself in the War Powers Act, which
limited the unilateral power of the
president to go to war, and take
certain other steps. Presidential
authority shrank under Gerald Ford
and Jimmy Carter.
As Capitol Hill and the White
House divided between
Republicans and Democrats, the
traditional shifting balance
between legislative and executive
branches continued throughout
the 1980s and 1990s under the
administrations of Ronald
Reagan, George H. W. Bush and
Bill Clinton. An imperial presidency
seemed the relic of a bygone era.
Now George W. Bush has sharply
reversed that history. His empire
began with the surrender of
Congress, a collapse almost as
sweeping as the fall of the
Baghdad regime.
In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson had his Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the 1964 act that
endorsed U.S. entry into the Vietnam War. President Johnson liked to refer to it as
"grandma's nightshirt" because the legislation covered everything. To strike Iraq, Mr. Bush
demanded and got from legislators an even broader cloak for invasion, occupation, and
further military action in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Like the Tonkin measure, hastily voted amid what proved to be false reports of a North
Vietnamese attack on U.S. vessels, this Congress's Iraqi resolution passed with scant
debate and a brandishing of bogus intelligence, such as the forgery of Iraqi nuclear
procurement from Niger. In a stroke, the blank cheque for Mr. Bush swept away the legal
requirement of a congressional declaration of war or even compliance with the 1973 War
Powers Act.
As a result, the White House was ceded sovereign authority to justify and launch full-scale
hostilities -- a right vested by the Constitution in the Congress precisely to prevent such
fateful power falling to any one president and handful of advisers.
The groundwork for this usurpation was laid last September with the National Security
Strategy Mr. Bush sent to Congress. In this document, the President claimed the right --
indeed, responsibility -- to take pre-emptive action against perceived future threats to the
security of the United States. From this, it was but a short jump to his Iraqi venture.
Claiming a prerogative to invade Iraq as a "clear and present danger" to peace -- it was by
no means "clear" to much of the world or even Iraq's closest neighbours, and it was by no
means "present" even in his prediction of a threat "in one year or five years" -- Mr. Bush
erased long-recognized limits on the right of any nation to attack another.
If the unilateral abrogation alarmed allies, friends and the United Nations, however, it went
unchallenged on Capitol Hill, another sign that any internal democratic restraint on the
President's war-making was a dead letter.
Added to all this was an equally historic concentration of power in domestic affairs. By the
Patriot Act and other enabling laws in the pervasive new realm of "Homeland Security," Mr.
Bush has brought an imperial presidency home to a depth and breadth that Lyndon
Johnson, with his furtive FBI spying on antiwar groups, or even Richard Nixon, with his
Watergate "plumbers" and other extraconstitutional means, never contemplated. Under
Attorney-General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department now has the kind of licence to
conduct the political surveillance without probable cause or court sanction that many of
the Nixon men went to prison for. As no other federal government before it, the Bush
administration wields the authority to arrest and hold suspects without charge, detain
prisoners indefinitely, and deny access to legal counsel, all with unparalleled secrecy.
It would be easy to attribute this singular massing of power to predictable chauvinist
politics in America's reaction to the shock of Sept. 11. There is comfort in thinking of Mr.
Bush as one more president riding the crest of a breaking wave -- and that the tide will
turn back, as always, to constitutional balance. Yet, even apart from the uncertain course
of the "war on terrorism," or Washington's open-ended evocation of it, that optimistic view
ignores decisive new realities in U.S. politics -- and the emerging reality of George W.
Bush himself.
Today's imperial presidency looms over political parties and a Congress very different
from those of the recent past. President Johnson faced formidable critics from his own
party, such as senators William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. Mr.
Nixon fought to the end a Democratic-ruled Senate and House, and the resistance of
many influential Republican moderates. President Bush, on the other hand, will deliver
his Iraqi war victory speech to houses of Congress dominated by conservative
Republicans, with GOP moderates a rarity and rebels extinct. Their religious
fundamentalist leaders, as well as the rank and file, not only back the President's new
reach with domestic repression and foreign retribution, but also share the larger
geo-strategic urge to American hegemony behind the war on Iraq.
In their all but silent minority, today's congressional Democrats are similarly to the political
right of their predecessors, and bow no less to enlarged presidential power at home and
abroad -- if not to Mr. Bush benefiting from it. The "bipartisan" approach by this Congress
that goes beyond terrorism and Iraq is an abdication of legislative responsibility.
Congress has ceded the White House exceptional authority over trade agreements,
allowed it to rewrite the usually sacrosanct farm bill, capitulated on the $400-billion
military budget. The sort of party revolt that forced Mr. Johnson to retire, or the bipartisan
ballast to Mr. Nixon's command, are nowhere in the offing for Mr. Bush.
Not least in a new calculus of an imperial presidency is the man in the Oval Office. George
W. Bush, of course, was an unlikely emperor -- America's least informed modern
president in world affairs. For the first nine months of his term -- it now seems hard to
remember -- he was a lacklustre, evidently purposeless and unprepossessing politician
of ridiculed syntax and shrouded electoral legitimacy. Questions about his suspect
business dealings, or the sway over his administration of corporate interests, even more
egregious than Washington's accepted captivity to moneyed power, began to swirl about
the White House. Then, in perhaps the most dramatic effect of its kind in American history,
Sept. 11 transformed the man as well as the political setting.
"Every president reconstructs the presidency," Mr. Schlesinger wrote of the imperial
impulse, "to meet his own psychological needs." Elevated by terrorist attacks from a butt
of satire to a commanding leader disposing an awesome, vengeful power, Mr. Bush took
on his own reconstruction with earnest determination, even gusto, finding his yet
undefined political destiny in an expansively defined war on terrorism.
As the first inside testimony of his presidency tells, he remains much the man he was
before his new power and purpose, still lacking knowledge and experience, while still
caustic about opponents, still convinced of his own sound judgment and moral rectitude.
By all accounts, he has adopted naturally the concept of a "spacious" and "peremptory"
authority that Mr. Schlesinger saw in the elected emperor. In contrast to Lyndon Johnson's
Washington-backroom politicking or Richard Nixon's aloof cynicism, it is Mr. Bush's
mixture of his old defiant self-assurance and his new sense of mission that makes his
exercise of the imperial presidency all the more formidable.
That grip only tightens with the President's domination of the government beneath him, as
well as the acquiescence, if not outright support, he enjoys from the American media, and
the personal popularity he wins. The role of a small clique of officials in the decision to
invade Iraq -- Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon
consultant Richard Perle and others who have long advocated an attack -- is well known
from coverage of the war. Less noted, however, is how much their bureaucratic
dominance of the military, State Department and intelligence agencies in the process
added to the power of a president who embraced their strategy so completely. Mr. Bush
and his hawkish advisers face another battle altogether in their ambitious vision of Iraqi
democracy and its inspiration for freer regimes across the Middle East. But their swift
military victory disarmed, along with Saddam Hussein, any U.S. bureaucratic opposition to
the President's writ, fixing a White House mastery over foreign affairs not seen in
Washington since the policy autocracy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
So, too, Mr. Bush stands likely to have a prolonged honeymoon with the American media.
It is not only that television coverage in particular -- epitomized by the ironically named
"embedded reporters" -- has cheerled the advance into Baghdad. Crippled by
self-censorship, often by its lack of knowledge or sensibility, and without a vocal
opposition in Congress to report by default, American journalism will give the new
imperial president publicity his forerunners could only envy.
Finally, there is Mr. Bush's paradoxical popularity. If 70 per cent to 75 per cent of
Americans approve of his war and performance, the same number question a sagging
economy and other issues that are his least-imperial domains. Yet the White House has
a manifest capacity to keep the terrorist threat a political preoccupation. Its public shows
an equally clear acceptance of a strong leader to deal with the post-Sept. 11 world. The
combination will certainly rescue Mr. Bush from the return to domestic concerns and
resulting fall in popularity that his father suffered after the first war in the Persian Gulf -- yet
another reason why this imperial presidency will not soon wane.
All this makes for a certain irony when Mr. Bush comes before the Congress to announce
the triumph in Iraq, basking in his new power won at the constitutional expense of the very
chambers that will hail him.
Not that this should surprise us. Shortly before he died in 1989, the eminent American
writer Robert Penn Warren, author of All The King's Men, a novel about a democratic
demagogue and dictator, was asked if he foresaw another president with too much
power.
"Well, it'll probably be someone you least expect under circumstances nobody foresaw,"
he said. "And, of course, it'll come with a standing ovation from Congress."
Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council under presidents Lyndon
Johnson and Richard Nixon, is the author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an
American Politician and Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America. |
