Reassessing the “Imperial Presidency”

Author(s): Louis W. Koenig

Source: Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, Vol. 34, No. 2, The Power to Govern: Assessing Reform in the United States, (1981), pp. 31-44; http://www.jstor.org

Published by: The Academy of Political Science

Among the innumerable books published about the American

presidency in the nearly two centuries of the office’s existence, Arthur M. Schlesinger,

Jr.’s Imperial Presidency holds a unique place.’ Published in 1973, the

book’s title remains part of the American political lexicon. Mention presidency

in a word association test administered to any number of politicians, civil servants,

academics, and others tolerably informed about the office, and the likelihood

is that the word imperial will figure prominently in the results. Adding to

the book’s impact are Schlesinger’s previous writings and service in a presidential

administration, a record in sharp contrast to the theme of his book. His

earlier works were laudatory chronicles of the presidencies of Jackson, Franklin

Roosevelt, and Kennedy, which, with his service in the latter’s presidency, were

encouraging to other writers, especially in the 1960s, in building their cases for

an activist presidency. The Imperial Presidency is a 180-degree turnaround from

this previous record.

Writing in 1973, when the unpopularity of the Vietnam war was reaching a

crescendo and Richard Nixon’s abuses of power were surfacing and straining the

credence of shocked citizens, Schlesinger’s contention that presidential power

had attained a state of extreme aggrandizement seemed justified and aptly

timed. In an extended analysis, he argued that Watergate and the Vietnam war

were not isolated aberrations but the long-building climaxes of rampant presidential

power that had been set in the direction of abuse soon after the office

commenced its operations in 1789.

The rock on which the imperial presidency rests is the phenomenon of

presidential wars, launched simply by the chief executive’s fiat. Innumerable

small-scale hostilities were initiated in the nineteenth century; more elaborate

conflicts were waged by Tyler, Polk, and above all Lincoln in the Civil War. In

the twentieth century such wars were conducted on the scale of the Korean and

Vietnam conflicts. The spreading use of executive agreements and ever broaden-

1 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).

32 | LOUIS W. KOENIG

ing executive privilege were other ingredients that made foreign policy the principal

arena of the imperial presidency. Particularly since World War II, according

to Schlesinger, “the image of the President acting by himself in foreign affairs,

imposing his own sense of reality and necessity on a waiting government

and people became the new orthodoxy.”2 In domestic affairs, the rise of social

programs, such as the New Deal and the Great Society, and the expansion of a

national economy dominated by interstate business and amenable to control

through national regulation, enlarged the imperial presidency’s domain.

Certainly after the compounded troubles of Watergate and the Vietnam war,

one should not be surprised that the presidency underwent sweeping indictment

and searching reexamination. Criticism, a common experience of the presidency,

is fed by the nation’s historic suspicion of executive power and the fear of its

susceptibility to abuse, rooted in popular perceptions of George III. The

American Revolution was fought against executive power. After the presidency

was established, criticism often took on an antimonarchical cast. President

Washington, with his taste for fine living and receptivity to deference, was

sometimes accused of acting like a king. When Martin Van Buren enhanced the

White House grounds by planting trees and improving the landscaping, he was

assailed for aping the monarchs of Europe by creating an orangery in the rear of

his palace where he might enjoy majestic seclusion.

But throughout its lengthy history the presidency’s incumbents have been virtually

unanimous in their heartfelt testimony of its inadequacies, which

perceives the office as anything but imperial. John Adams exclaimed, after

pitching endlessly on the presidency’s rough waters: “No! The real fault is, that

the president has not influence enough, and is not independent enough.”

Thomas Jefferson spoke of the office as a “splendid misery,” and James A. Garfield,

in a brief tenure, for which he sacrificed his life, exclaimed, “My God,

what is there in this place that a man should ever want to get in it?” Herbert

Hoover, after battling the economic depression with prodigious labor and experiencing

unremitting failure, could understandably declare, with nonimperial

fervor, “This office is a compound hell.”3

Scholars and Observers

Scholars and observers who analysed the presidency in the nineteenth and for

most of the twentieth centuries were impressed not that it was exercising too

much power, as the imperial thesis contends, but suffered from serious deficiencies

of power. In 1885, political scientist Woodrow Wilson argued that Congress

was “the dominant, nay, the irresistible, power of the federal system.”4 In the in-

2 Ibid., p. 206.

3 Quotations are from Arthur Benson Tourtelot, The Presidents on the Presidency (New York:

Russell and Russell, 1970).

4 Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government (Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1956), p.

31.

THE “IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY” | 33

terval between Lincoln and Cleveland, he found the presidency weak and helpless,

its power steadily disintegrating.

That acute observer of American society and politics, Alexis de Tocqueville,

compared the president’s power with the power of the constitutional kings of

France. Tocqueville’s findings do not support Schlesinger’s contention that at

this juncture the presidency was already well embarked on the imperial road.

Tocqueville thought that the president was highly limited by functioning in a

federal system of government, by his modest tenure of four years compared

with the monarch’s life tenure, and by his responsibility for his actions in contrast

to the inviolability of the person of the king declared by French law.5

Another distinguished foreign commentator, James Bryce, assessing the

presidency near the close of the nineteenth century, while conceding the immense

dignity of the president’s position and his unrivalled platform “from

which to impress his ideas (if he has any) upon the people,” felt that a tyrannical

president was “hard to imagine.” The president, Bryce noted, has no standing army

and cannot create one, and Congress can checkmate him by stopping supplies.

A more serious problem, Bryce argued, was the lack of great men in the

presidency: “The only thing remarkable about them is that being so commonplace

they should have climbed so high.”6

Most twentieth-century commentators have been tolerant of the presidency’s

power. After leaving the office William Howard Taft, mindful that his former

mentor, Theodore Roosevelt, had made extravagant claims of power in his

memorable stewardship theory in contrast to his own conservative theory,

nonetheless viewed the office’s state and future confidently. Taft saw little

danger of a tyrannous president who lacked popular support. At least one house

of Congress, Taft concluded serenely, would block him. And if the people

should support him, Taft also felt, their “good sense” would prevail, if a

wayward president exploited their approval.7

In 1942 Thomas K. Finletter of the law faculty of the University of Pennsylvania,

a special assistant to the secretary of state and a future secretary of the

air force, expressed a widely felt sense that the presidency was lacking in power

and effectiveness as it approached public problems after World War II.8 To

Finletter, the office’s long history displayed not an imperial presidency but a

“government of fits and starts,” which had become “no longer good enough for

our purposes”- the grand-scale adjustment of the nation and the international

community, moving from an era of war to an era of peace and reconstruction.

Finletter was troubled by the ease with which Congress can thwart a president,

5 Phillips Bradley, ed., Alexis De Tocqueville: Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf,

1948), pp. 123-25.

6 James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1893), pp. 76-78.

7 William Howard Taft, Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1916), pp. 156-57.

8 Thomas K. Finletter, Can Representative Government Do the Job? (New York: Reynal and

Hitchcock, 1945), p. 64.

34 | LOUIS W. KOENIG

even a strong president, who offers creative initiatives for public problems. Only

if the two branches worked together harmoniously and constructively, Finletter

argued, could government become sufficiently effective, and he offered

thoughtful proposals for restructuring relations between Congress and the

presidency toward that end. Similarly, Sidney Hyman, writing in 1956, concluded

that the presidency alone of the governmental system is structurally

organized to be at the center of affairs. The role of Congress is to investigate and

criticize, and if the sword of power that the president holds “seems more

dangerous, it is simply because our position in the world has become dangerously

great. It will not become less so if the Congress allows its individual members

to shatter that sword.”9 Other commentators in this era were equally serene and

accepting of presidential power. In his widely read work, The American

Presidency, Harold J. Laski, a British political scientist, contended that the

warnings of abuse following the tenure of a strong president were “baseless,”

and their chief consequence was that they often led to the selection of a successor

“who has half-abdicated from the control of policy.”10

In another classic study bearing the same title, Clinton Rossiter waved off efforts

to reduce the president’s powers as “ill-considered and ill-starred.” In a

world of unrest and aggression, in a country over which industrialism has swept

in great waves, in a world where active diplomacy is the minimum price of survival,

“it is not alone power but a vacuum of power that men must fear.” Urging

that the presidency remain unamended and untouched, he concluded that “the

strong Presidency is the product of events that cannot be undone and of forces

that continue to roll.””

Although popular presidents like Jackson and the Roosevelts were objects of

venomous attack, the office they occupied remained relatively unscathed until

its encounter with the Vietnam war and Watergate in the presidencies of

Johnson and Nixon. A precursor of Schlesinger’s study was George Reedy’s influential

Twilight of the Presidency, published in 1970. A long-time aide of

President Johnson, Reedy depicted the president as isolated from reality, living

in a euphoric dream of the matchless goodness of his works, shielded by his

enormous power and a human wall of sycophants who served as his staff. Other

influential voices of the 1970s, stirred by the Vietnam war and Watergate,

recommended drastic surgery for the ills of the office. A former senator and

presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy, called for the depersonalization and

decentralization of the presidency. Barbara Tuchman, contending that the office

had become too complex and extended, a place where an impetuous man might

run amok and cause horrendous damage, proposed a six-member executive with

9 Sidney Hyman, “The Art of the Presidency,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political

and Social Science 307 (September 1956): 9.

10 Harold J. Laski, The American Presidency (New York: Harper and Row, 1940), p. 15.

1 Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), pp.

159-60.

THE “IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY” | 35

a rotating chairman, in the fashion of the Swiss presidency. Political scientist

and journalist Max Lerner urged that the president be fettered with a council of

state, with half of its members from Congress and the other half drawn from

outside of Congress. Schlesinger, it should be noted, opposed any shearing

away of presidential power. Rather, to set things aright, institutions with which

the presidency deals, such as Congress and the bureaucracy of the executive

branch, must be shaken out of their torpor and invigorated to do the job of

checking the president, the job they had always been expected to do.

Assessing Congress

Schlesinger depicts Congress as largely compliant, supine, and only occasionally

assertive against the president. This perception runs counter to the widely

prevailing view of political scientists and historians in their writing on the

presidency. If anything, Congress, often spoken of as the most powerful

legislative body in history, has been a highly consequential presence. After the

dazzling first hundred days of the New Deal, that most imperial of presidents,

Franklin Roosevelt, as early as 1934 – after only a year in office and seemingly

favored with staunch public and congressional support-suffered defeat on

three important issues. The Senate rejected the St. Lawrence Seaway Treaty and

refused to empower the president to embargo the shipment of arms to countries

at war. The American Legion and the Government Employees’ Union pushed his

solidly Democratic Congress into overriding his veto of increases in veterans’

pensions and a restored cut in the federal payrolls. Congress thenceforth seldom

allowed Roosevelt to forget its presence as a powerful vetoing body.

Even that spectacular Exhibit A of Schlesinger’s imperial presidents, Richard

Nixon, who stretched to the farthermost limits claims of executive privilege, impoundments

of appropriations, and indulgence in sheer indictable acts, suffered

many congressional rebuffs. As the Nixon years illustrate, the claim of imperial

power does not necessarily constitute actual power. Time and again Congress

prevailed over Nixon. It ended his once secret war in Cambodia by cutting off

funds. His claims of almost limitless powers to impound funds, keep secrets,

and abolish programs were rejected by Congress and the courts. His modest

program proposals were rebuffed by Congress more frequently than those of

any other modem president. Eventually, Nixon’s clear impending doom in the

impeachment process drove him from the presidency. The imperial thesis underrates

Congress and distorts history by portraying it as largely an institution of

ineffectuality and slender impact.

In the American system, as Edward S. Corwin put it, the president proposes

and Congress disposes. No presidential policy of importance can long endure

without funds, and only Congress under the Constitution can provide appropriations.

While in many ways the Vietnam war was conducted by the president,

it was also a congressional war, supported annually and deliberately by

36 [ LOUIS W. KOENIG

that body’s appropriations. At any moment that it chose, Congress could have

ended the war by withholding appropriations, but it did not so choose.

In foreign affairs, the Elysian Fields of the imperial presidency, the role of

Congress has been far greater than Schlesinger allows. From the beginning of independence

to the close of the Civil War, Congress was largely the dominant

force, with expansionist legislators often winning out as the United States absorbed

great stretches of the North American mainland. In 1812, the expansionist

“war hawks” of the House of Representatives, eyeing Canada to the

north and the Floridas to the south, compelled a reluctant President Madison to

make war on England. Again, expansionists in the House pressed President

James Monroe, at the risk of war with Spain, to recognize the new Latin

American republics emerging from the disintegrating Spanish empire. And

again, the expansionists, unable to muster the two-thirds vote in the Senate required

to approve a treaty, annexed Texas in 1845 via a joint resolution, making

war with Mexico a certainty.

From the post-Civil War years until the close of the nineteenth century, Congress’s

influence was stronger in foreign affairs than the president’s, and its tenor

was decidedly “imperial.” Expansionists in Congress, their eyes trained acquisitively

on Cuba, agitated for war with Spain. But a nonimperial president,

Grover Cleveland, said that if Congress declared war, it must not be assumed

that he would wage it. Congress was more successful in annexing Hawaii in

1895, and it subsequently induced a peace-minded president, William McKinley,

to follow its guideposts down the road to war with Spain over Cuba. In a

joint resolution, in whose drafting McKinley took no part, the president was

called on to affirm the right of Cubans to freedom and independence. The

resolution was in effect a declaration of war since it directed the president to

employ the armed forces to eject Spain from Cuba.

Not until Theodore Roosevelt’s adventurism in foreign affairs did the presidency

fit the imperial model neatly. Roosevelt “took Panama,” intervened freely

in the affairs of Latin American countries, and sided with and encouraged

France and Japan in their foreign policy ventures. Except when his policies required

legislation for their implementation Roosevelt thrived in high-handed independence

from Congress.

Not so two other allegedly stellar contributors to the imperial model in the

first half of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

Acting according to his own well-developed ideas of popular leadership and intent

on converting the national government from a negative system of checks

and balances into a positive, effective mechanism, Wilson worked elaborately

and often in the manner of a British prime minister, which he admired, to elicit

Congress’s approval and support. A masterful political leader, he scored impressive

successes with his New Freedom program of domestic reforms and with

foreign policy measures. But after an initial “honeymoon” year of success, congressional

opposition grew, as Wilson had anticipated it would. Henry Cabot

THE “IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY” | 37

Lodge, Albert Fall, and other senators demanded armed intervention in Mexico.

A Senate filibuster blocked a bill granting the president authority to arm merchant

vessels, driving a thoroughly frustrated Wilson into his memorable outburst

against “a little group of willful men.” American entry into war dispelled

the interbranch conflict temporarily, but it resumed when Congress sought to

force a war cabinet on the president and raked the War Department with

acrimonious attack, while voters spurned Wilson’s appeal for a Democratic

Congress in 1918. The pendulum of power swung more decisively to Congress

when it defeated the Versailles treaty and the president’s ardently advocated

membership of the United States in the League of Nations.

Franklin Roosevelt, a wizard of politics and the exercise of power, who

guided the country through the Great Depression and World War II, was equally

a prime candidate for top honors as an imperial president. To be sure, he provided

dramatic moments when he seemed to fit the model – uprooting JapaneseAmericans

from the West Coast in World War II, for example, and when Congress

was overdue in renewing price control legislation, threatening to pass the

law himself. Fortunately, Congress acquiesced. Roosevelt’s more customary

stance was a careful nurturing of congressional and public opinion to support

the measures necessary for the crisis.

From one perspective, Roosevelt played the role of an imperial president to

the hilt, particularly in the crucial interval between the German conquest of

France and the attack on Pearl Harbor (June 1940-December 1941). Britain then

stood alone, with much of its military resources lost in the frantic escape at

Dunkirk, and was threatened with invasion. With congressional and public

opinion closely divided between intervention and isolation, Roosevelt acted

with audacious initiative, to the point of committing warlike acts. Among other

things, fifty “obsolete” but still serviceable destroyers were given Britain in exchange

for leases of bases for American forces on British territories in the

Western Hemisphere. When Germany occupied Denmark, Roosevelt moved

American forces into the Danish territories of Greenland and Iceland. To

safeguard arms deliveries to Britain, he provided naval convoys and ordered the

shooting of Axis naval craft at sight. Several violent encounters ensued.

But while playing out his imperial role, Roosevelt in speeches and statements

was diligently explaining to the public the nature of the peril lurking in the

events of Europe, the necessity of alert citizen interest, and the certainty of

severe sacrifices. By these attentions Roosevelt fashioned an essential, though

imperfect, basis of support for his warlike initiatives.

Likewise, Roosevelt struggled in Congress to secure laws and appropriations

to further his policies. The vehicle of continuous large-scale aid to Britain was

the Lend Lease Act of 1941, in effect a thoroughly deliberated abandonment by

Congress of its foreign policy of neutrality established in previous statutes.

Roosevelt also had to secure extension of the Selective Service Act of 1940,

which by dint of prodigious administration lobbying, squeezed through the

38 I LOUIS W. KOENIG

House of Representatives by a single vote. Life was not always imperial for the

president.

Cycles of the Presidency

The thesis of the imperial presidency boldly undertakes to interpret all of

presidential history and both perceives and explains the office as a force of

steadily aggrandizing power. From other extensive writing on the presidency,

however, one can extract or build on other theories that undertake to explain

the presidency’s lengthy historic experience. One theory, for example,

represented in various writings about the office, is the cycle theory.12 It suggests

that the impact and effectiveness of the presidency fluctuate. Unlike the imperial

theory, which sees the presidency as sustaining a steady linear progression of

power, a cyclical overview of the presidency suggests rises and falls in the

office’s fortunes.

Fluctuation and the cycle effect are produced by many forces. Much of the

president’s power over foreign and domestic affairs is shared with Congress, but

the precise patterns of sharing are often tentative and unclear. Even after nearly

two centuries of constitutional practice, they remain largely unpredictable.

Power fluctuates because of shifts in public mood and opinion. In foreign affairs,

the mood swings between high ideals and costly sacrifice, as during the

two World Wars, to an opposite extreme of absorption in domestic affairs,

characteristic of the nineteenth century, and even to moods of disillusionment

and withdrawal prevailing in the era between the two World Wars and to some

extent subsequent to the Vietnam war. Likewise, in domestic affairs, after

breasting a flood of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, the public

seemed to crave less initiative and proved receptive to the Nixon-Ford-Carter

retrenchment.

Other regulators built into the political system ensure that the president’s

power circumstances will fluctuate. The principle of separation of powers,

employed by the Founding Fathers in constructing the Constitution, both produced

the three branches of government and gave rise to a psychology of identity

and self-assertion. Congress struggles to maintain its identity. For a time,

especially during war, it may acquiesce to the president’s initiatives, but sooner

or later it will assert itself by contesting, amending, or rejecting what the president

puts before it. Congress’s identity is thereupon bolstered; unremitting assent

erodes it. Likewise, the public mood, whose support the president must

elicit if he is to accomplish objectives of any magnitude, is regulated by a limited

span of attention. The presidential call for support to further a grand purpose

cannot be made too often in a society devoted to private values and whose

rewards fall most generously on private achievement.

12 See, e.g., Norman Small, Some Presidential Interpretations of the Presidency (Baltimore: The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1930).

THE “IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY” | 39

Another potent variable is the personality of the incumbent, his conception of

the presidency’s powers, how and to what extent they should be used, and his

political skill in using them. In writings on the presidency, classifications of the

incumbents are offered on the basis of such factors.

Thomas Finletter, for example, concerned not that the presidency was imperial

but that all too often the office hobbled an incumbent’s capacity for accomplishment

and produced results that failed to meet the needs of the times,

noted what he called “the orthodox presidents.” This type is characterized by a

failure to use “the potential power which the direct election by the people gives

him.”‘3 Taft, for example, a strict constructionist of the Constitution, felt that

the president could exercise no authority that was not traceable to some specific

grant of power in the Constitution or to an act of Congress. His stance toward

Congress was decidedly nonimperial; he made no attempt to lead Congress

assertively, as did his predecessor Roosevelt and his successor Wilson. Although

important legislation was enacted during his term, much of it was carried over

from Roosevelt’s tenure, and no amount of straining could detect in Taft’s

policymaking an imperial flair. Roosevelt, who had his own scheme of classifying

presidents and spoke of a Buchanan-Taft school, contended that it was

denoted by the attitude that “the President is the servant of Congress rather than

of the people …. Most able lawyers who are past middle age take this view.”14

A contrasting type, Finletter and Roosevelt agree, is the president who excels

as a popular leader, exemplified by Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, and

the Roosevelts. This type flourishes in times of crisis and change – during war or

economic depression or when political movements such as populism or progressivism

attain their crest. He interprets his powers liberally, is a precedentmaker,

and causes the legality of his actions to be challenged. Clearly he is the

most eligible type for Schlesinger’s imperial category, particularly when he

resorts to war-making. But “imperial” is hardly apt to denote this type’s other

noteworthy contributions in promoting the general welfare through social and

economic programs for the body of citizens and responding constructively to

the tasks and opportunities of international leadership.

There is also a middle category of presidents suggested by the tenure of

Grover Cleveland. Its characteristics mix those of the categories that flank it. At

times the president personally is at the forefront; at other times his office. Now

he acquiesces to Congress; later he leads or contests it. At one time he summons

the nation to advance to some new horizon; at another he is stopped in his

tracks or moving backward. As president, he is often defensive or negative,

resorting to the veto, shunning issues, halting what predecessors and others

have set in motion, and using executive power only to maintain an equilibrium.

Eisenhower is a recent illustration of this type.

13 Finletter, p. 26.

14 Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Scribners, 1920), p. 406.

40 | LOUIS W. KOENIG

Whether a given president becomes “imperial” depends mainly on his situation,

his times, and the events of his tenure. His chances for reaching that heady

clime are slim if he comes into office after a long war and the nation is fed up

with conflict. Woe betide Andrew Johnson, succeeding in office that highflier of

presidential power, Abraham Lincoln. Eisenhower’s electoral success in 1952

was significantly predicated on his promise to end the war in Korea, a

nonimperial act and a promise he kept. It was hardly likely that he would then

involve the nation in another war, and he did not. He resisted the pressure of his

military advisers to dispatch American forces to Vietnam. Similarly, after the

termination of the long war in Indochina, Ford and Carter faced a situation in

which initiating a further war of any scale was politically out of the question.

Situations, so far as the viability of a genuinely imperial presidency is concerned,

vary by kind according to their potential. War, economic depression,

and an encompassing political consensus supportive of a large-scale program of

economic and social reform, such as Johnson’s Great Society, are situations inviting

presidential ascendance, a fertile ground for Schlesinger’s imperial

presidency. Less propitious are situations inviting a presidential administration

whose effect is consolidation. Eisenhower’s presidency was of this genre, coming

on the heels of the tempestuous years of Truman, with war in Korea, hobbling

labor-management disputes, an ambitious but abortive Fair Deal program of

domestic reforms, and scandals sparked by mink coats and deep freezes. The

situation invited a presidency capable of providing equilibrium, defined as

avoidance of the conflict and upheaval characterizing the Truman years.

Least promising for the thriving of the imperial presidency is a situation that

puts the office in a state of clearly diminished fortunes. Warren Harding’s era of

“normalcy” after World War I, like the Andrew Johnson administration after

Lincoln, who had used the presidency to the hilt, provided fallow ground for the

imperial seed.

The Presidency as Democracy-Serving

To single out a presidency and to label certain of its acts as imperial runs the

danger that other acts, contributing to the common good, will be overlooked.

Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Wilson’s New Freedom, and Franklin

Roosevelt’s New Deal are hardly to be dismissed as merely contributing to the

imperial momentum. More memorably, they ameliorated human suffering, improved

the lot of the general body of citizens, and responded to the essential

needs of groups such as the elderly with social security pensions and blacks with

enhanced political rights and economic opportunities. In one perspective,

democracy requires benevolence, or a fraternal concern for the well-being of

others, manifested in the social and economic programs of modem presidents.

Presidents have been a principal means of access to government and to

responsive policymaking for left-out groups. Labor leaders enjoyed an access to

Franklin Roosevelt unmatched in earlier presidencies, opening doors to his

THE “IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY” I 41

championship of legislation that enhanced labor’s legal rights to organize and

engage in collective bargaining, and that enormously enlarged the ranks of

organized labor. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation dealt slavery its most

mortal blows, and in more recent times black rights received high priorities in

the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson. Both placed themselves at the head of

the black civil rights movement and employed a variety of presidential

resources to promote their purposes. In addition to proposing legislation and

resorting to the courts, Kennedy, for example, made public appeals in radio and

television addresses. He employed private persuasion with individuals and

delegations of southern businessmen, theater owners, and newspaper editors, as

well as intensive dialogue with civil rights leaders, to keep the explosive issues

within tolerable bounds. Kennedy also employed government contracts, hiring

and promotion policies in the civil service, and the expenditure of federal funds,

among other things, to clear the way for civil rights advances. In one perspective

these accumulated efforts might be seen as contributing cubits of growth to

an imperial presidency, but their far weightier importance is their function of

democratic benevolence, of providing access to society’s benefits and opportunities

for a vast group that had for so long been left out.

If democracy is considered from another basic perspective, civil liberties,

their observance and support by presidents are underrated by tagging their

tenure as imperial. Jefferson was the first popular president, but his leadership

was committed to human liberty, to developing public understanding of that

concept, and of strengthening its protection. Even in what appear to be the

presidency’s most imperial moments, such as Lincoln’s assertion of power in the

Civil War, a moment when the nation’s survival was in greatest peril,

democracy in its essentials was observed, an achievement that ought not to be

lightly regarded. James G. Randall, after close study of Lincoln’s presidency,

concluded that “no undue advantage was taken of the emergency to force arbitrary

rule upon the country or to promote personal ends.” Political opposition,

Randall noted, continued to air its opinions, and the voters could

repudiate their president at the polls if they wanted to. Lincoln’s power,

however “imperial,” remained contingent on popular support.15

The contention that there is an imperial presidency largely ignores the office’s

everyday political functioning in a democratic context. The case for the imperial

presidency centers on its incumbents’ claims of legal power to make war, keep

secrets, impound funds, and the like but treads lightly on the president’s standard

political tasks of political brokerage and consensus-building. As broker,

the president projects an image of the good society and the means of attaining it.

He struggles to weave together legislative majorities to enact his vision and to

obtain support from interest groups. As Richard Neustadt recounts the process

15 E. Pendleton Herring, Presidential Leadership (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1940),

p. 17.

42 | LOUIS W. KOENIG

in his study, Presidential Power,16 the president, contrary to the imperial thesis

and its implications, has little power of command but has primarily the power

to persuade, to influence groups and others in political life to perceive that it is

in their interest to do what he asks. To help these respondents see the light, the

president holds forth inducements from the store of benefits and advantages his

office provides, and he bargains to evoke the desired behavior and metes out

punishments and rewards. If he can awaken public opinion and evoke its support,

he eases his tasks of persuading and bargaining. This picture of everyday

presidential functioning, of one player with limited power among many players,

is decidedly more democratic than imperial.

The Age of Television

According to one view, television has been a leading contributor to the rise of

the imperial presidency. It has been a mighty force in reducing the strength and

function of political parties that have historically mediated between the president

and the voters, interpreting each to the other, and providing ties that hold

the political structure together. Television presents presidents and other politicians

directly to the voters. Certainly, John Kennedy enormously expanded his

popularity and image by deftly using television to concentrate attention on his

presidency. A president who dominates television can determine the way issues

are shaped and focus national attention on what he wants to accomplish. Fred

Friendly, a former television producer and now a professor of journalism, after

considering television’s potential for presidential leadership, exclaimed, “No

mightly king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, no prophet ever dreamt of such

an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand.”17

But television is by no means the sheer advantage for the presidency it is often

hailed to be. If television has enhanced the president’s position as the nation’s

supreme political symbol, it has also done much to establish him as the nation’s

favorite scapegoat. If things go wrong, a program is maladministered, the Vietnam

war drags on, the Soviet Union launches a new thrust, or inflation soars,

the president is the readiest object on which to hang blame. Even though his

powers for dealing with these occurrences are limited and shared with Congress,

the executive branch bureaucracy, interest groups, and private corporate

leaders, he is a readily summoned scapegoat.

Following the Vietnam war and Watergate and the burrowing of the notion of

an imperial presidency into the national consciousness, television has abounded

with reporters who not only follow the journalistic preference for bad news over

good news but also frequently moralize over the policies and performances of

16 Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: Wiley, 1960).

17 Newton N. Minow, John Bartlow Martin, and Lee M. Mitchell, Presidential Television (New

York: Basic Books, 1973), p. vii.

THE “IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY” | 43

presidents and their administrations. Since presidential policies, like other

public policies, seldom offer clear moral choices and since the implementation

of presidential policies is easily snarled by the misadventures of the many

human beings on whom their effectuation depends, the president is a ready

target.

Television also restricts the president’s capacity to lay complicated issues

before the public, to explain his proposals of action, and to perform the

educative tasks of leadership. Like others in the political system, the president

must reckon with television’s preference for questions that are not too complicated

to treat in approximately one minute and fifteen seconds and its

predilection for visual drama as a context for those questions. Presidents, too,

must accommodate the imperatives of television and largely abstain from the

full-length expositions of issues they were accustomed to rendering on radio but

which are rarely viable on television. Like other citizens, the president must capsulize

serious questions to be represented in that most prized domain,

television’s evening news.

Leadership for the 1980s

The notion of an imperial presidency both contributes to a weakening of today’s

presidency and misstates its true condition. The thesis reinforces the contemporary

mood to disparage the presidency, to suspect the motives and

statements of the incumbent, and to thrust serious restrictions on the office. In

foreign affairs, for example, Congress increasingly limits the president’s policy

choices. According to a recent count, Congress has used its appropriations

power to impose more than seventy “constraints” on the president, such as barring

military assistance to Thailand unless authorized by Congress, barring

foreign aid from being spent on abortions, and prohibiting direct financing of

any assistance to Angola. President Carter subsequently complained that

because of congressional restraints, the United States was unable to provide

assistance to rebels in Angola fighting Cubans. In the War Powers Act of 1973,

Congress made many presidential deployments of the armed forces subject to its

veto, although precisely which of the president’s actions fall within the resolution

remains unclear.

The Senate is increasingly engaged in the negotiation of treaties to the point

that at its insistence a treaty may be renegotiated. Often this assertiveness comes

not at the advice stage but at the consent stage, adding to the president’s difficulties.

A vivid illustration of this phenomenon was provided in the final

stages of the Panama Canal treaties, when Senate majority Leader Robert C.

Byrd and Minority Leader Howard H. Baker journeyed to Panama and negotiated

changes in the treaty with Panama’s president.

Congress in its countermoves against a presumed imperial presidency has

been anything but the supine body that Schlesinger describes. The mood

engendered by the idea of the imperial presidency also affects citizen attitudes,

44 | LOUIS W. KOENIG

making the public continuously suspicious and disparaging. Any new president

becomes eligible for deprecation if he does not quickly produce visible results

through leadership initiatives. The apparatus of public opinion polls and interest

groups that are better funded, more sophisticated, and more committed to

particular issues are increasingly resulting in presidential policymaking by fits

and starts. Progress on energy, inflation, unemployment, tax reform, and urban

affairs, all have experienced advances and retreats in the Carter years but the

cause cannot be explained merely in terms of the president himself and the talents

of his aides but as reflecting the ever more deft thrusts of private interests,

the disinclination of legislators to follow the president’s lead, and the decline of

the party as a unifying force.

Ironically, while presidential leadership is being denigrated by cries of “imperial,”

the demands on it, as the 1980s begin, are fast enlarging. Inflation, the

energy shortage, the spread of nuclear weapons capability, and the constant

presence of war are survival problems threatening not only American wellbeing

but the well-being of all mankind. The complexity of these issues, the

broad canvass of interests that they traverse, and their constant unwinding in

new manifestations heighten the demands on leadership.

To make its way, future presidential leadership must summon a high order of

creativity, political dexterity both at home and abroad, and resolute humanism

in its orientation. It must experiment and educate; it must be fair-minded in the

distribution of burdens and sensitive to avoiding unnecessary hardship. In the

certain shifting of fortunes between good days and bad days in policymaking

and implementation, the president, above all, must be capable of maintaining

public confidence and trust. It will be easier if the clouds of suspicion generated

by the notion of an imperial presidency can be dispelled.