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The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power

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I have to admit it: I'm a presidential cultist. In 8th grade I memorized all the presidents with their years of service. In high school I read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, a book that inspired me during a particularly rough time in my life. To this day I follow politics like most men follow sports.

So it's not easy or natural for me to recommend a book that celebrates the likes of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge and deconstructs Woodrow Wilson, FDR, or my beloved TR.

Yet if you're like me, you have this nagging sense that something has gone terribly wrong. In a country founded on the anti-monarchical principle that government is "of the people," we have come to lust after a king - a man who will heal our hurts, save us from our enemies, educate our children, protect us from the weather, and guarantee our material comforts.

In this book, you'll learn how we got here. After starting out with the Founders and the debate over whether the nation's chief executive should have a title, you'll be introduced to the concept of Unitary Executive theory and its chief proponent, Professor John Yoo, who as a young lawyer in the post-9/11 Office of Legal Counsel, provided the intellectual firepower for George W's expansive view of presidential prerogative. You'll also meet Clinton Rossiter, whose book, The American Presidency, published in the 1950s, documented how such an expansive view was palatable to the American people who had come to expect their president to be World Leader, Protector of the Peace, Chief Legislator, Manager of Prosperity, and Voice of the People, among other things.

Along the way, you will gain an appreciation for the Quiet Ones - John Adams to Calvin Coolidge - and why, out of commitment to republican principles, they kept their mouths shut (for the most part). You'll see how the Progressive movement's program to take power away from political bosses and give it to "the people" has ironically resulted in creating the greatest political Boss of all. That same movement also gave us our first models of modern Heroic Presidents - TR and Wilson. Interestingly, while TR may have been the Luther, it was Wilson who was the Calvin - the great intellectual systematizer and practical political implementer of the theology of presidential power. "The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can," Wilson declared.

Journalists and scholars, who are, by trade, usually in the Progressive camp, are indicted for aiding and abetting the creation of this un-republican Big Man.

The book falls short of a true classic (and a 5-star rating) due to the following.

The author spills a lot of ink over the imperialistic sins of George W. Bush (3 of 9 chapters), which will unfortunately limit the book's shelf life once the current occupant leaves office. He failed to engage at least one of the standard presidential biographies. Anyone evaluating LBJ is obliged to engage Robert Caro's penetrating 3-volume study, and yet I didn't see one reference to it. There is also a fair amount of dieseling of the author's main point in the book's nearly 300 pages.

His discussion of Lincoln is surprisingly short. He justifies this on the premise that the chief executives from 1865 to 1901 reverted to the antebellum model, and thus Lincoln didn't permanently change the game. And yet all the executive over-reaches of power which the author decries were dramatically displayed in Lincoln. While one may explain this away as a singular historical moment, I have also suspected that Lincoln, and specifically, his Emancipation Proclamation poses something of a dilemma for Libertarians. While emancipation from slavery is certainly libertarian, it took a very un-libertarian Executive Order and a bloody civil war to achieve it. Whether it's by design or oversight, the lack of a thorough discussion of Lincoln and the impact his deification in the post-war North must have had on the young Roosevelt cousins and Wilson was a missed opportunity.

Despite his amassing the evidence of presidential abuses of power, the author's proposed remedies are surprisingly brief (5 pages) and timid - airing some thoughts about the proposed Separation of Powers Act and tinkering with the War Powers Resolution. The author prefaces his lack of solutions by noting that we are already too far gone: until we adjust our expectations of the presidency, no legislative solution will be sufficient to tame the creature we have created. Nevertheless, since we are dealing in the realm of ideas, the author could have taken the opportunity to be bolder.

These shortcomings are relatively minor given the depth with which the author has built his case and the importance and timeliness of his message. To those of you who are growing tired of your addiction to The Politico and RealClearPolitics.com, this book will be your first step toward sobriety.

Do yourself--and the country--a favor, and pick up a copy of Cato Institute scholar Gene Healy's new book, The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. This important book has the potential to start a much-needed national conversation about the monstrous amount of power we invest in the individual who occupies the White House at any given moment.

Every four years, we find ourselves in a national tizzy. Some of us have hopes that ________________ (insert your favorite power-hungry presidential candidate here) will somehow save the country. But most of us fret about the possibility that _________________ (insert your least favorite power-hungry presidential candidate here) may wreak economic or foreign-policy havoc.

And we have good reason to fret. Once he or she becomes a resident at 1600 Pennsylvania, the elected president has a finger on the nuclear button, the ability to start wars unilaterally, and the power to meddle forcefully in the US economy via executive orders and regulatory fiat.

On paper, there are checks and balances on the presidency, but those checks and balances are easily overridden by a national psychology in which the masses look to the president to solve their daily economic problems and combat every evil, whether domestic or foreign. We are repeatedly disappointed by the performance of our presidents, but we continue to give them greater and greater powers.

Healy's book examines the historical origins of our cultish devotion to the presidency, and explains the danger to America of placing too much power in the hands of one person--no matter who that person is, or what party he/she belongs to.

This is a book Americans need to read--especially this year.

(Lower-case p intended.)

Healy offers a thorough, acerbic, witty, and timely critique of the rise of the American monarchy. It's somewhat ironic that as we Americans celebrate our revolution to overthrow the British Crown each July, and as we denounce dictators and totalitarian regimes across the globe, we also celebrate and venerate those presidents who most behaved like dictators, and who most sought to aggrandize their own power at the expense of the constitutional checks and balances that set our system of government apart from all tried before us.

We exalt the Roosevelts (both), Eisenhowers, and Wilsons--men who stifled free speech, imprisoned dissenters, and overstepped their constitutional bounds. Meanwhile, the men who, as Healy puts it, "merely" oversaw years of peace and prosperity--men like Calvin Coolidge, Grover Cleveland, and the heavily whiskered presidents of the 19th century--are ridiculed as do-nothings.

As we approach a November 2008 likely featuring a TR acolyte against a JFK acolyte, Healy's book is a needed, welcome addition to the debate, a reminder that the office of the presidency was intended to be a modest office, merely an administrator of the executive branch. That it has morphed into a kind of messianic position of all-encompassing power and reverence is a troubling development, and doesn't bode well for the American experiment.

A year might as well be a century in the world of books about current politics. It is a refreshingly well-researched book on the ascension of executive-branch power from the founding to 2008. Unlike most I've sampled, it isn't left vs. right - pretty much every modern president is skewered by history. If you are concerned with a Presidency that can wage war or shut down the internet on a whim, maybe you could download it and give it a read, too?

This book provides an important, comprehensive examination of the power of the presidency. The book examines the history of the presidency from conception to the present day, and features an in-depth look at all dimensions of the presidency: the statutory scope of the office, the relationship of the office to the other divisions of government, and most unsettling, the contemporary expectations of the American public.

Gene Healy has displayed a passion for research of the presidency, and consequently offers the reader a rich presentation of specific examples and historical context surrounding the morphing of the presidency into what it is today. The telling of this story is both unsettling and poignant, as we are provided relentless examples of the results of individual ambition, complicity of the other branches of the government, and the growing, collective desire for an American hero. The results are tragic: unrealistic expectations, dashed hopes, and the trail of carnage and devastation that has been wreaked upon other nations in the pursuit of our own identity. This book is essential reading for every American voter . One of the most perspective-changing books I've read in a long time.

Our relationship with the presidency is a lot like that Offspring song, in which the sucker with no self-esteem keeps begging for his girlfriend back, all the while knowing that she's no good for him. Americans keep telling pollsters, in a survey that began in 1958, that they no longer trust the federal government to do what's right. However, as time goes on, we increasingly rely on the president to take declare war on obesity, start fights in foreign countries without actually declaring war, revive our "national soul," and manage miscellaneous other physical and metaphysical tasks.

Healy is too much of a skeptic to overstate any sweeping hypothesis as to why things turned out the way they did. For example, the risks of technology, from the invention of television as a medium by which the president's face can be a national focal point, to the invasion of privacy threatened by REAL ID, are easily tempered by many benefits of expanding technology. Today, the threat of clicking on Google Earth would prevent a repeat of Operation Menu, in which Nixon managed to order an indiscriminate bombing raid that killed thousands of Cambodian civilians, all while concealing this campaign from his own Secretary of State, Secretary of the Air Force, the Air Force Chief of Staff, let alone Congress.

Nor does Healy insist, despite his general thesis that presidential power has expanded, that we are overall less free today overall. The government sponsored a program to test radiation treatment on prisoner's testicles up until the mid-1970s. Woodrow Wilson was able to employ the Espionage and Sedition Acts in reckless abandon, even managing to imprison the producer of The Spirit of '76, a patriotic movie if there ever was one. In the past, the army was ordered by numerous presidents to spy on NOW, the ACLU, etc., and the FBI's COINTELPRO bugged endless numbers of "hate groups" such as MLK's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, even taping MLK's extramarital affairs, and sending a letter to the civil rights leader, encouraging him to commit suicide. Today, however, you can't create a new file for every cantankerous, influential, and anonymous, citizen on twitter.

Healy believes that the "story of the president's growth" is "one of ideology meeting opportunity in the form of successive national emergencies" an argument evocative of Naomi Klein's, yet applied toward people who forced others to die in the name of false patriotism or explicit political expedience ("We'll draft them [into the army] and think about the law later," Truman threatened, concerning striking railroad workers), rather than to geeky economists who worked to rid the U.S. of mandatory conscription.

Perhaps another reason for the change is that increased presidential power is the inevitable outcome of people's desire for a strong central leader, and that every revolution has its calcified end point. This notion is as old as the Ancient Israelites begging the aging Prophet Samuel to "Give us a king to lead us," or mayoral candidate Sideshow Bob's insistence that "secretly you all yearn for a president...to brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king. You need me Springfield!"

Perhaps people want such a leader to fulfill some romantic feeling of togetherness and community among fellow compatriots. Healy provides an echo of this emotion in a quote by former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, "The biggest event in my lifetime was the Second World War and we have never been able to recreate it. Some people may say `Thank God,' but there's something we lose by not recreating what happened in the Second World War. The Second World War was the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause."

Even more cynically, the people may desire a strong leader not out of innate psychological need, but out of pure pork-barrel public-choice theorized expediency. Healy quotes political scientist Andrew Reeves as stating, "A highly competitive state can expect to receive over 60% more presidential disaster declarations than an uncompetitive state, holding all else constant, including the damage caused by the disaster."

Or maybe presidents are simply employing the most rational strategy for a Paris Hilton-esque low stakes objective, in which it is better to be famous for something, anything, than not at all. No president earns thick biographies or high rankings from historians for overseeing unmemorable periods of peace and calm. As Healy notes, "Historians and political scientists seem to have little use for the presidential equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath. In the presidential rankings game, "doing no harm," gets you nowhere; it might even cost you points."

Over the past 30 years, America has seen Presidential scandals ranging from Watergate to Iran-Contra to Travel-gate, Whitewater, the Lewinsky scandal, and the Valerie Plame affair. We've learned the truth about some of the truly nefarious actions undertaken by some of most beloved Presidents of the 20th Century, including the iconic FDR, JFK, and LBJ. And, yet, despite all of that, Americans still have a reverential view of the President of the United States that borders on the way Englishmen feel about the Queen or Catholic's feel about the Pope.

How did that happen and what does it mean for America ?

Gene Healy does an excellent job of answering those question in The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, making it a book that anyone concerned with the direction of the American Republic should read.

As Healy points out, the Presidency that we know today bears almost no resemblance to the institution that the Founding Fathers created when they drafted Article II of the Constitution. In fact, to them, the President's main job could be summed up in ten words set forth in Section 3 of Article II --- "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." The President's other powers consisted of reporting the state of the union to Congress (a far less formal occasion than what we're used to every January), receiving Ambassadors, and acting as Commander in Chief should Congress declare war. That's it.

For roughly the first 100 years of the Republic, Healy notes, President's kept to the limited role that the Constitution gave them. There were exceptions, of course; most notably Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War but also such Presidents as James Polk who clearly manipulated the United States into an unnecessary war with Mexico simply to satisfy his ambitions for territorial expansion. For the most part, though, America's 19th Century Presidents held to the limited role that is set forth in Article II, which is probably why they aren't remembered very well by history.

As Healy notes, it wasn't until the early 20th Century and the dawn of the Progressive Era that the idea of the President as something beyond what the Constitution said he was took forth. Healy documents quite nicely the ways in which Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to FDR went far beyond anything resembling Constitutional boundaries to achieve their goals, and how they were aided and abetted in that effort by a compliant Supreme Court and a Congress that lacked the courage to stand up for it's own Constitutional prerogatives. Then with the Cold War and the rise of National Security State, the powers of the Presidency became even more enhanced.

One of the best parts of the book, though, is when Healy attacks head-on the "unitary Executive" theory of Presidential power that was advanced by former DOJ official John Yoo in the wake of the September 11th attacks and the War on Terror. As Healy shows, there is no support for Yoo's argument that the Founders intended for the President to have powers akin to, or even greater than, those of the British Monarch that they had just spent seven years fighting a war to liberate themselves from. The dangers of Yoo's theories to American liberty and the separation of powers cannot be understated.

If the book has one weakness, it's in the final chapter where Healy addresses only in passing reforms that could be implemented to restrain the Cult Of the Presidency. I don't blame Healy for only giving this part of the book passing attention, though, because what this book really shows us is that no matter of written law can stop power from being aggregated in a single person if that's what the people want and, to a large extent, we've gotten the Presidency we deserve.

The Cult of the Presidency was perhaps one of the most enlightening political books I have ever read. The degree to which the office of the presidency has changed in the past 200 years is extraordinary. I wish this book was required reading for all students in the United States. Gene Healy does a remarkable job balancing his book between research and humerous examples to illustrate his point. A MUST for anyone interested in history or politics. It changed my views on what a president should be and what we should expect of him.

The government of the United States was originally based on 3 branches of government, the legislative, the judicial, and the executive. This book explains how the decision making power has slowly been usurped by the executive branch, aka the president. Throughout history this has constantly proven to be a recipe for tyranny, because eventually these unchecked powers end up in the wrong hands. Unfortunately, Americans seem to have taken to relying on their president to make all of their decisions for them, and have allowed their constitutional rights to be trampled in the process. A system of checks and balances in government is absolutely necessary to protect the rights of the citizens granted by the constitution. We need more political awareness in this country, and The Cult of the Presidency is a great start.

THE CULT OF THE PRESIDENCY: AMERICA'S DANGEROUS DEVOTION TO EXECUTIVE POWER emphasizes that just changing the presidency does not eliminate the concerns the Bush years have provoked over a resurgent Imperial Presidency. This book argues that the fault lies not in what leader is in office, but in our own expectations and definitions of the commander-in-chief, and chapters offer a blend of scholarly research, legal analysis, and cultural commentary suitable for any college-level library strong in American politics and government.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch