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

by Gene Healy (Author)
Key Phrases: imperial presidency, founding generation, chief legislator, United States, White House, President Bush (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Rhetorical--and related--excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year's most pertinent and sobering public affairs book, The Cult of the Presidency. -- Newsweek 5/27/2008

Product Description
The Bush years have given rise to fears of a resurgent Imperial Presidency. Those fears are justified, but the problem cannot be solved simply by bringing a new administration to power. In his provocative new book, The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy argues that the fault lies not in our leaders but in ourselves. When our scholars lionize presidents who break free from constitutional restraints, when our columnists and talking heads repeatedly call upon the "commander in chief " to dream great dreams and seek the power to achieve them--when voters look to the president for salvation from all problems great and small--should we really be surprised that the presidency has burst its constitutional bonds and grown powerful enough to threaten American liberty?

The Cult of the Presidency takes a step back from the ongoing red team/blue team combat and shows that, at bottom, conservatives and liberals agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility. For both camps, it is the president's job to grow the economy, teach our children well, provide seamless protection from terrorist threats, and rescue Americans from spiritual malaise. Very few Americans seem to think it odd, says Healy, "when presidential candidates talk as if they're running for a job that's a combination of guardian angel, shaman, and supreme warlord of the earth."

Healy takes aim at that unconfined conception of presidential responsibility, identifying it as the source of much of our political woe and some of the gravest threats to our liberties. If the public expects the president to heal everything that ails us, the president is going to demand--or seize--the power necessary to handle that responsibility.

Interweaving historical scholarship, legal analysis, and trenchant cultural commentary, The Cult of the Presidency traces America's decades-long drift from the Framers' vision for the presidency: a constitutionally constrained chief magistrate charged with faithful execution of the laws. Restoring that vision will require a Congress and a Court willing to check executive power, but Healy emphasizes that there is no simple legislative or judicial "fix" to the problems of the presidency. Unless Americans change what we ask of the office--no longer demanding what we should not want and cannot have--we'll get what, in a sense, we deserve.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: Cato Institute (June 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933995157
• ISBN-13: 978-1933995151
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #126,137 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Timely and Necessary Read for all Americans, May 26, 2008

By	Jeff K. (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

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.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book Americans need to read--especially this year, May 7, 2008

By	Thomas P. Jenney "Tom Jenney" (Phoenix) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.)

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Healer-, Pastor-, Comforter-, Soul Toucher-, Motivator-, and Messiah-in-Chief, May 7, 2008

By	Radley P. Balko "Radley Balko" (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.