“…In August 1949, MacLeish published an astonishingly bitter essay in the Atlantic Monthly. ‘The Conquest of
--Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin1
The first evidence for the imperial presidency comes with the administration of President Harry Truman. Between the end of World War II and the start of the Korean War, the Truman Administration occupied itself with the incipient start of the Cold War. The Cold War revolved around the issues of nuclear weapons and their proliferation, fearing the Soviets might gain the advantage of, having the most weapons and thereby able to target and strike at the United States. The Truman Administration, with the assistance and support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initiated the concept of, “mutually assured destruction,” of, “first use,” “preventive war,” and, “the obsession with secrecy”. It is of note that Congress goes along with the entire program, creating the climate that will produce Senator McCarthy and his hearings, concerning American citizens, as communists, and create the all-powerful J. Edgar Hoover and his Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. During this administration, the Super bomb, the H-bomb, comes to its fruition, and the weapons race takes off unabated, and the concept of surveillance.
The parallels between the situation between 1946-1952 mirrors our own, oddly enough. If one substitutes the, “Soviet threat,” for the Islamic threat, and preemptive war for preventive war, the same beast with new claws, one would have the current impasse, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, particularly Iran who insists on nuclear power, and, whom the Bush Administration insists, intends to build nuclear weapons, and, of course, Russian. This impasse governs our foreign policy and domestic policy as well. In fact, a fair assessment, concerning current foreign policy, one built upon the bulwark of hypocrisy, can be seen in the relationship we have with Iran, a major oil producer, and Russia, another major oil producer, but, whereas nuclear weapons makes possible a very, “strange stability,” the Bush Administration insists on, declaring preemptive strikes, preventive strikes against its perceived enemies; nevertheless, this adds to a, “dystopia,” a juggernaut that now creates conditions for wars, revolving around natural resources, oil and gas. Iraq is such a war; the Sudan is such a war, and Burma is such a place, rich in those natural resources that the economic engines of China, who watches with, increasing anxiety as Indian supplies the military junta with the arms it needs to suppress the citizen revolt against its totalitarian rule.
The imperial presidency of the Bush Administration sends its Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice promotes, to Russia, according to an article, appearing in an October 13th, Yahoo news, www.yahoonews.com, written by Associated Press writer, Matthew Lee, and, in her usual arrogance, the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration, admonishing the Russian President Putin, for the same lapses in democracy that the Bush Administration practices. For instance, Rice says: “In any country, if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.” Indeed, the, “countervailing institutions,” of this country have been subsumed by the Bush Administration so that civil rights have become a much beleaguered commodity since the DOJ has seen fit to allow the defenestration of civil rights and civil liberties, replacing career and neutral attorneys, with political appointees. She continues to put her foot in her mouth, if you will, saying: “I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin…There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media, and, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma.” Substitute the words, “Kremlin,” with presidency, and, “Duma,” with congress, and you have picture of the hypocrisy that appears to be part-and-parcel of the Bush Administration. To be sure, this cannot be said to be the first administration which has made it a priority to wag its collective finger, as it were, at other countries, calling the kettle black, while in its own kettle things have come to a sad and sorry mess. New Orleans, after hurricane Katrina, the imposition of surveillance on the citizens of the United States, on every aspect of the life of citizens of this country, dismantling civil rights, ignoring human rights and the continued practice of torture and rendition, and you have authoritarian creep, crawling all over this democracy. Matthew Lee, who wrote this article, states:
The State Department frequently has criticized what
Its most recent human rights report on Russia notes continuing centralization of power in the Kremlin, a compliant political pressure on the judiciary, intolerance of ethnic minorities, corruption and selectivity in enforcement of the media restrictions and self-censorship.
Imperial presidency exists, also, in
On October 12th, a day before Rice’s visit, Charlie Savage gives an interview, promoting his new book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, in an interview, with Amy Goodman, and Juan Gonzalez, on Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org. Juan Gonzalez begins the conversation, discussing the Protect America Act pushed through Congress, in August, and with an expiration date, February, 2008. On the one hand, the bill restores some of the checks and balances, removed by the Protect America, but, on the other hand, it increases the surveillance of US citizens and residents, without requiring warrants, continues, eavesdropping of all overseas communications, and the, “blanket warrants, issued by the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, will need only annual review, allowing for greater latitude in emergency surveillance. Charlie Savage begins his explanation of these events by, telling the story of Dick Cheney’s shoot down order, involving the already crashed, United flight 93. Savage states:
But this shoot-down order became the subject of an intense dispute with the 0/11 Commission because Cheney later told the Commission, and Bush agreed with him, that Bush had given Cheney prior authority, as the Commander-in-Chief, who actually commands the military to take such an extraordinary step. But the 9/11 Commission looked at all the notes of the people aboard air Force One and in the bunker, and they looked at all the switchboard logs from the bunker and the military, of communications, going in and out, and they found no evidence, no documentary evidence that the call existed.
…it’s a very vivid illustration of, first of all, the climate, you know, the atmosphere of 9/11 which really helped this push to concentrate more power in the White House, but also Cheney, taking command inside the administration, especially in the national security context; Bush, acquiescing to Cheney’s point of view, and then their effort—their administration’s effort to control the flow of information about kind of what’s, happening behind the closed doors at the executive branch.
..And one of the most important things and one of the most successfully implemented policies of this administration, [and] the one they never talk about, and that I think has received scant attention, just depending on how, sweeping it is, and how successfully they pulled it off, was that he had wanted, when they arrived in office, long before 9/11, to use that time in office to reshape American democracy by, concentrating more power in the by, expanding presidential power by, throwing off checks and balances White House.
…Congress was re-imposing some checks and balances on the imperial presidency that had grown up during the early Cold War. And Cheney would spend the next thirty years, trying to throw that off. Finally, as Vice President, the most experienced Vice President, in history, dealing with one of the least experienced presidents in history, he was in a position to shape this administration’s practices and tactics as it went forward…in order to take actions and set precedents across a huge range of issues and ways that were going to leave the presidency much stronger than it was when they arrived.
…[O]ne of the things that’s been very interesting about the last year is now we have split control of government again, and so the question was how is that going to change things? And what we’ve seen from the Protect America Act, in August, and the dynamic, going forward, is that even with split control of government, the dynamic is still there. Congress is just as it was for the first twenty or thirty years of the Cold War when the original imperial presidency was growing under presidents of both parties, by the way. Congress is, again, unwilling to push back against the White House’s assertion that it needs ever more authority, and checks and balances will result in bloodshed…
…And accountability for how people use their power is one of the great ways in which the administration has successfully expanded their own powers, as well. For example, by dramatically, expanding secrecy, surrounding the executive branch , in all kinds of ways, going after o pen government laws, expanding executive privilege, expanding the use of the state secret privilege to get rid of lawsuits in courts, and on and on and on and on; what they’ve done is they’ve made the executive branch much more of a black box so that outsiders, whether Congress, the courts or just voters, don’t know what officials are doing with these powers at the very moment that the powers are being dramatically increased, and that means that the officials who have that power, who[m]ever they are at any given moment, are much freer to do whatever they want with them.
Alexander Hamilton, et al, must be spinning in their individual graves to see what all their risks, their hard work, their engineering to craft an experiment in true
representative government has become, a shell, a farce, a travesty of republican democracy, subsumed, now, to the pressures of non-representative government, much like that under King George III. The truth sits, more closer than the Truman Administration, an administration the Bush Administration touted as admirable, and President Truman, a President that President George Bush admires as one that history and time will assess favorably. The concept of the imperial presidency begun with Truman and the Cold War, has taken the US down paths and into alleys Truman himself would have not considered; moreover, that the Bush Administration has eviscerated the democracy in this country, while insisting that other countries tow the line that itself has abandoned, makes US foreign policy hypocritical. Our arrogance abroad is merely the Bush Administration and
1. All citations are from the authors’ work, unless otherwise noted, American Promethus—the life and tragedy of J.Robert Oppenheimer.