Customer Reviews

Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

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In "Bomb Power" Wills argues that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked a critical turning point in American polity. Presidents would no longer have the time necessary, nor the luxury of consulting Congress and asking for a formal declaration of war. The increasing ability to forward position nuclear weapons and the rapidly improving technology for delivering them meant that time and space were contracting too rapidly to allow for such formality. More importantly, the potential for mass destruction had to be closely guarded to prevent the potential for catastrophic mistakes. Thus the near dictatorial powers General Leslie Groves had crafted around the Manhattan Project had to be transferred to the direct control of the President. This served to greatly enhance the power and prestige of the President, leading to the construct of the Imperial Presidency that evolved over time, allowing Presidents to avoid and evade the need to consult Congress on military matters, whether it was Korea, Vietnam, or other conflicts. As a result there was a pressing need for a robust national security apparatus that could effectively serve the needs of the President in such a dangerous age of nuclear proliferation.

Wills argues that the creation of this National Security State (as he terms it in the title and elsewhere) has served to weaken democracy by transforming the presidency and the executive branch into something with near dictatorial powers, thwarting any effective checks and balances from Congress. At times Wills digresses into tangents that weaken his narrative and really have little to do with his central arguments. In the later chapters it almost had the ring of a polemic against the abuses of George W. Bush's Administration that will certainly cause readers to accuse Wills of particular biases. That tempts me to caution that "Bomb Power" may certainly be loved or hated by readers based on political idealogy, but his arguments elsewhere are quite persuasive and thought provoking. "Bomb Power" is perhaps one of the best written books on the consolidation of power within the Executive Branch driven by the events of the Cold War and is up on par with other recent books such as The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War and One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (Vintage). If Wills could reign in his diversions I'd be tempted to give it an enthusiastic five star rating. Even with those flaws and it's diatribe against the Bush Administration I'm tempted to give it five stars.

This is a very important book, one that should have been written many years ago. But it's not one to be read by anyone with suicidal tendencies, unless in the presence of someone with a good restraining hand.

That the development of the atomic bomb did far more damage to us than it did to Japan is a fact that few people have noticed. In Japan it killed a relative few people, who would, for the most part, be dead by now, in any case. But, either because of the hubris the bomb allowed us (power corrupts, etc. etc.), because of the genuine necessity for the USA to take over management of the world to protect others from the bomb, or some plausibility in between we have been almost perpetually at war since 1945 - have, in fact converted ourselves into a war country. President Eisenhower, early on, saw it coming and warned us; we ignored him at our peril. And this book shows us the consequences of our inaction.

The supposed requirement for speed has given all subsequent presidents after Truman the excuse to usurp the Constitution, ignore Congress, and declare their wars themselves....or, beginning with Korea, just to refrain from declaring them altogether and go on with the wars. Sometimes, early on, as with Korea, they called it something else, like a "police action." But by Vietnam they'd learned that no one would try to stop them. So the word "war" returned to match the deed. And foreign political assassinations and declarations that governments must be changed because we were displeased with those countries' citizens' choices barely caused little blips on our radar screens.

The atomic bomb-generated fear has been the catalyst for an unbelievable number of overlapping secret organizations for gathering "intelligence" and those organizations' constantly morphing missions from their original stated purposes toward more and more intrusion on the privacy of Americans. Remember when the CIA was just for foreign intelligence gathering? Remember when the electromic spying by the NSA was restricted to foreign targets? And what do those dozens of other spy agencies do? The result has been that any concept of privacy and anonymity are now but dim, distant memories.

What this book does not do is give us any idea how - or whether -we can ever hope to return to the America that was the hope for and the beacon to the world.

Award winning historian, author and teacher, Garry Wills talks to the readers about the influences of 'bomb power' on American politics and the separation of powers in our government. Professor Wills, in this well written book leads us from the secret Manhattan Project,developing the bomb down to current times forwarding the idea that the bomb has given the President vast power, not only to use the bomb but to do do all the covert operations needed to deal with the nuclear use and protection of the country from countries that might use nuclear threats to their advantage. This upsets our balance of powers set forth in the Constitution. Wills always writes well and this book is an example of his good works but the idea of the 'bomb power' is going to take more study. A vastly interesting theory

I am a big fan of Garry Wills and have read most of his non-religious writing. I have very much enjoyed his writings about Nixon, Reagan, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Henry Adams. I also read Head and Heart: American Christianities (2007), which I thought was extraordinary. I am very much in agreement with the central thesis of "Bomb Power" -- that the secret creation of nuclear weapons has led to a consolidation of power in presidential and military hands that threatens our Constitutional government -- which is why I found this book frustrating and disappointing.

The lack of a Bibliography makes it difficult to ascertain whether Professor Wills read either THE DECISION TO USE THE ATOMIC BOMB AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF AN AMERICAN MYTH (Gar Alperovitz, 1995) or House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (James Carroll, 2006), two books that make a case very similar to that made by Professor Wills. Alperovitz basically makes the case that President Truman and Secretary of State Byrnes made a unilateral decision to drop atomic weapons on Japan in order to gain negotiating leverage against Stalin at the Yalta Conference, which would make it the first example of the kind of executive abuse that Professor Wills wants to warn us against. I would certainly have expected Professor Wills to have mentioned these books.

Professor Wills discusses life at Los Alamos, but seems to rely on Richard Feynman's lighthearted memoirs or Jennet Conant's deeply flawed 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (2005). (Conant's book is mostly an apology for her father's decisions and perpetuates myths about the need to drop the atomic bombs.) I would have welcomed a mention of Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhatten Project (1997), Peter Bacon Hales's magnificant discussion of the logistics of the Manhattan Project, which is a chilling account of the secrecy that surrounded the creation of the Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge sites.

(Professor Wills has been poorly served by his publisher. In addition to the omission of a bibliography, the decision to group notes at the end of the book makes it difficult for a reader to evaluate citations and sources. It is unfortunate that in this day and age, when computer typesetting makes footnoes an inexpensive and convenient option, that so many publishers choose instead to collect references in a section at the end of the book.)

Much of this book is very worth reading. I found the discussion of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers very enlightening, as well as Professor Wills's discussion of the Korean War. And Professor Wills's thesis about the danger to the Constitution is of great importance. But the book seems "choppy" and slapdash and less clear that much of Professor Wills's other work. I'm glad I bought it, glad I read it, but wish Professor Wills had taken a bit more time with it.

With the rise of Alexander the Great, the experiment in limited participatory democracy in ancient Athens came to an end after about two centuries, and Athens was absorbed into Alexander's empire.

With the rise of Octavian (later known as Caesar Augustus), the ancient Roman Republic came to an end after about five centuries, as Octavian transformed the appearances of the old Roman Republic into the new Roman Empire, with himself as the first emperor.

With the rise of secret research in World War II on the atomic bomb, the appearances of the old American Republic came to an end after about a century and a half, as various presidents transformed the old American Republic into the new National Security State, with each successive president in turn as the commander-in-chief of the new National Security State.

In effect, the new National Security State overturned and reversed the cause for which the American Revolution had been fought and for which the U.S. Constitution had been written.

But, hey, aren't most Americans today happy to live in the new National Security State, with each successive president as the commander-in-chief of the National Security State?

After all, Dick Cheney is.

But Garry Wills isn't. So he rails against the new National Security State as though the spirit of 1776 and the U.S. Constitution were still alive in the hearts of Americans today.

But how many Americans will pay attention to his railing? Didn't the spirit of 1776 and the U.S. Constitution die with the rise of the new National Security State?

General Groves was given charge of the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons and end World War II. He had an enormous budget and operated at a level of secrecy even the Vice President didn't know what was going on. So few people could discuss the project, wacky ideas crept in: e.g. making more and more bombs so as to absorb all the available uranium and plutonium and make any challenge unthinkable.

Since the Manhattan Project, secrecy has progressively become a general pattern of U.S. governance creating a cult of the President as Commander in Chief. Democracy is being challenged. Our government "by the people, of the people and for the people" has acquired distinctly regal qualities. What should the regular U.S. Citizen do about it? A previous reviewer complains that Wills "... does not offer much in the way of a solution to the problem ...". My response is what more can he do? He stuck his neck out writing this book, now it is up to us to promote it and generate peaceful action. First things first and let's make sure of the facts. I am waiting to see if any knowledgeable one and two star reviews appear on amazon.com. Meanwhile I happily award five stars for an interesting, challenging and very accessible book.

Insightful and thorough, this book is required reading for people concerned about the health and maintenance of our national experiment, a democracy in a republic, transformed over time into something that the Founders never intended. Political partisans may take issue with parts of what Garry Wills writes, but the facts are irrefutable. In recent history, we have seen a deliberate, calculated assault on the U.S. Constitution by people dreaming of establishing a new Roman-style empire based on perpetual warfare, just like the old one. The insidious introduction of a "parallel government" in the Bush Administration subverted everything that this country has stood for, and died for. Well before the controversial "bailouts" of financial institutions, the bloated national security infrastructure built at the expense of genuine well-being threatened to bankrupt the country.

Hearkening to the cautionary words written by Alistair Cooke, in the early 1970s, it remains to be seen whether this nation will give up basic freedoms in exchange for "bread and circuses."

Jim O'Dell
Buellton, CA

Garry Wills short, thoughtful analysis of expanding American presidential power since the creation of the atomic bomb is insightful and thought provoking, but not completely unified.

The strongest sections of the book are the first hundred pages or so, where he describes the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan project during WWII and the aftermath of the war are the best. Here he establishes how the the military was able to secure the funds, material and people to produce the Bomb, outside the normal constraints of the Constitution, but within the expectations of a wartime presidency.

In the years following WWII and up to Korea, Wills is still able to show how possession of the Bomb became a legal justification for pursuing numerous secret practices. But by the second half of the book, the connection is not always so clear. Wills describes numerous examples of how recent presidents have avoided Congressional oversight and subverted the Constitution, but it is not clear how having the nuclear football is the root cause of Presidential excess.

Wills seems to imply that once the power is in the President's hands he will inevitably be loath to let it go, but that is not spelled out, it is just assumed. By the time George Bush is re writting legislative bills with his incredibly frequent use of signing statements, it seems Presidential privelege is taken for granted. While the book does a great job on examining how the threat of the Bomb in the Soviet Union's hands was used to ratchet up the security state he is silent on the impact of the collapse of the USSR.

Wills also does not offer much in the way of a solution to the problem, perhaps because he does not see one. It seems to require a Washington like decision - a President will need to refuse to accept imperial powers that a nation is willing to bestow on him for the long range interest of the nation. Towards the end of the book he makes clear he does not think this will happen in the Obama administration.

The age of atomic bombs and forward-located ICBMS (especially on submarines) means that presidents can no longer wait to consult Congress and receive a declaration of war.But that's the worst-kept secret of today - everyone knows that the president is never far from the 'nuclear football,' ready to respond to attacks or even initiate one without approval from Congress. Author Wills, however, sees this as only one of numerous Constitutional violations that have grown out of the nuclear genie. Others include the secrecy with which General Leslie Groves operated during the Manhattan Project (Congress wasn't even informed), the arbitrary revocation of Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance (he wasn't supportive enough of the H-bomb), keeping secret the quid pro quo given by Kennedy to end the Cuban Missile Crisis, our 'police action' in Korea, and thousands of legally-dubious presidential signing statements are others. Wills also sees the nuclear age as having led to U.S. stationing troops around the globe. Then there's been our Cngressionally unapproved and unprovoked invasions of Cuba, Panama, and Grenada, and toppling regimes in Iran, the Dominican Republic, the Republic of the Congo, the the lies and half-truths that brought the U.S. into the Vietnam War and extended it briefly to Cambodia.

"Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order." A national security state has become increasingly pervasive - increased secrecy and spying have become the norm, and 'extraordinary renditions,' along with unilateral abrogation of treaties additional means of skirting the Constitution.

Wills concludes with "Perhaps in the nuclear era, the Constitution has become quaint and obsolete." John Yoo, author of legal justifications for some of Bush II's actions in the WOT, might suggest it was obsolete long ago - his "The History of Executive Power From George Washington to George W. Bush" points out that after one ill-fated attempt, Washington quit seeking advice and consent from the Senate on treaties and ambassadors. And Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, had the State Department list 83 prior cases in which a president dispatched troops without asking Congress to declare war.

Bottom-Line: Given our current inability to govern from Washington, we need to rethink and rewrite the Constitution.

This book collects a lot of facts and information that's usually scattered in one place; and it's well written and easy to read. Its thesis is that the "Imperial Presidency" and the shift of power from Congress to the Executive branch was triggered and facilitated by the creation and evolution of nuclear weapons, and that it's gotten out of control. Garry Wills is clearly a liberal, not a conservative, and his prose and his choice of examples is unusual for a liberal; I would expect it from Sarah Palin, but not from Garry Wills.

Except for some obvious errata, he has his facts straight so far as I know the facts (and I do know quite a few of the facts). He slants the language of his presentation fairly violently, and omits quite a few salient facts about the Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton administrations, focusing on the "sins" of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, G.W.H. Bush and George W. Bush. He also ignores what I consider the astonishing amiability of the Supreme Court toward dubious uses of Executive power. And he completely ignores the key question of whether something major needs to be changed in the structure of American government, and if so, what, and how that might be done (whatever it is).

What tends to get forgotten in discussions of Presidential power as laid down by the Constitution and constitutional law is that except for the Bill of Rights and Amendment XVI, the powers of the Presidency, as set forth in Article II of the Constitution, and as constrained by the language of Article I and Article III, are stated with almost no detail;. When one reads about the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention, it becomes evident that this lack of detail was intentional, leaving for later resolution severe differences between the views of the delegates to the Convention and between the legislatures of the states. A great deal of modern argument about what is constitutional or what is legal harks back to differences of opinion that already existed in 1787. So statements about what is unconstitutional, or what is illegal, depend more on the vast body of statutes enacted by Congress, and the vast body of judicial decisions and interpretations, than they do on the text of the Constitution or the text of various Federal statutes.

I find Wills' frequent flat statements that some action is or was unconstitutional or illegal a bit silly; these things are illegal or illegal depending on what Congress, the Justice Department, and the courts have determined over the years. So I consider most of what Wills describes to be a result of the intentional or unintentional relinquishment of power by Congress to the President, and the acquiescence of the Supreme Court in these actions. There is no doubt that many of the powers now exercised by the Presidency are and have been used unwisely, and in some cases in clear violation of the norms of civilized behavior. But what does this have to do with "bomb power"? Not a lot, so far as I can tell; it has a lot more to do with the timidity of Congress in exercising the powers granted to it under Article I of the Constitution.

So, are changes needed? In my view, yes. But do we need a new Constitution, or new constitutional restrictions on Presidential power? I believe not. So far as I can see, what's needed is Congressional and judicial reclamation of the powers granted to Congress under Article I. This is a completely different take on the situation than that of Garry Wills, who seems to feel that presidential power grabs have been malicious and almost demonic. That's why Will does not advocate any particular path to fixing what's wrong with the government. He ignores the simple fact that almost anything about the US Federal government can be fixed by Congressional action, combined with judicial acquiescence.

This flaw turns what could have been a very strong political manifesto into an exercise in whining.