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contents
Preface and Acknowledgments, ix
Introduction: The Worst President in History? 1
1 Bush’s Role Models, 22
2 Bush’s Inheritance:
An Imperiled Presidency, 51
3 John Paul Stevens, Commander in Chief, 68
4 Slouching Toward 9/11, 92
5 War President, 110
6 A Bold but Excessively Loyal Commander in Chief, 132
7 Bush’s “Diabolical” Signing Statements, 148
Conclusion:
An Unfair Indictment, 161
Notes, 179
Index, 221
Illustrations follow page 109.
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p re face a n d ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts
I wrote this book for anyone and everyone who is interested in the
American presidency and in American history writ large. It is not
intended as a primer for partisans, although undoubtedly there is
much here that will delight the more politically conservative reader.
The only bias I in fact bring to this work is a bias in favor of the
presidency, an institution that, as historian Forrest McDonald has
rightly observed, is “responsible for less harm and more good, in the
nation and in the world, than perhaps any other secular institution
in history.”1
Rush to Judgment offers an alternative to the widely popularized
account of the presidency of George W. Bush, which contends that
Bush was a failure, and worse, that his administration engaged in
an unparalleled effort to usurp power and trample on the Constitution. It is my hope that this book will be read with an open mind,
especially by those who found themselves at odds with the principles and practices of the Bush administration. As the presidency of
Barack Obama has demonstrated, dealing with the nation’s foreign
policy and security challenges is a remarkably challenging job, and
the simple solutions of the campaign trail usually do not survive
the transition from candidacy to residency at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue.
I am indebted to a number of friends and colleagues who provided
valuable advice and encoura gement, including Mike Waters, Delane
Clark, Katrina Gosdin Kuhn, Ken Masugi, Jeremy Bailey, Mac Owens, Melanie Marlowe, Gil Troy, Greg Schneider, and John Duck. Special thanks are due to Fred Woodward, Susan Schott, Kelly Chrisman
Jacques, and Sara Henderson White at the University Press of Kansas, along with Kathleen Rocheleau of A to Z Indexing, and, first and
foremost my wife, Maryanne, and Maura, to whom this book is dedicated.
[ ix ]
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Rush to Judgment
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Introduction
The Worst President in History?
The American presidency can be a crucible for whoever occupies the
office, the ultimate test of a person’s character and abilities. Before
serving as president Thomas Jefferson described the presidency as
a “splendid misery,” and near the end of his second term he wrote,
“Five more weeks will relieve me from a drudgery to which I am no
longer equal.” James Buchanan referred to the presidency as a “crown
of thorns,” and Grover Cleveland saw his election to the highest office in the land as “a dreadful self-inflicted penance for the good of
my country.”1 George W. Bush left office with his spirits seemingly
intact, despite having been subjected to a level of criticism that set a
new low for demagoguery, equaled perhaps only by the vitriol leveled against other wartime presidents, including Abraham Lincoln
and Harry S. Truman.
The accusation that President Bush abused his power and presided over a “lawless” administration was leveled repeatedly against
the forty-third president and persists to this day, as this book will
demonstrate. In some ways this is nothing new, for partisans on
both sides of the political spectrum have long engaged in displays of
hypocrisy regarding presidential power, criticizing only presidents
belonging to the party (or parties) opposing their own. But although
presidents have always been the target of heated rhetoric from their
political opponents and the media, much of the demagoguery directed toward President Bush came from historians and political
scientists, including those who consider themselves presidential
scholars. This is a relatively new and disturbing development. The
[ 1 ]
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[ 2 ] int ro duc t ion
fact that scholarly concerns over executive power seem to emerge during the
tenure of assertive Republican presidents undermines the argument of those
favoring a restrained presidency. The principle of the “rule of law” and deference to the courts and Congress, in order to be credible, should be consistently applied regardless of partisan affiliation or the “charismatic” personal
qualities of whoever happens to be president at a given time.
Far too many historians and presidential scholars abandoned any pretense
of objectivity during and after the Bush administration and seemed unwilling to place Bush’s actions into historical context. These scholars helped to
shape the perception that Bush’s presidency, particularly his “War on Terror,” fell outside the parameters of acceptable presidential conduct as set by
the Constitution and by his predecessors in office. This book challenges the
conventional wisdom regarding the presidency of George W. Bush, arguing
that a revisionist account of the forty-third president, at least regarding his
national security policies, is urgently required. Indeed, the security policies
of President Barack Obama, which bear a remarkable similarity to George W.
Bush’s, should hasten such revisionism.
It is not my intention to mount a defense of the entire Bush record; in fact,
I was as frustrated as any American with the weapons of mass destruction
fiasco and Bush’s failure to respond robustly to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. However, I do wish to defend Bush’s (and Vice President Dick Cheney’s)
conception of presidential power and their conduct of the War on Terror.2
And this is not insignificant, for one of the main indictments of the Bush
presidency focuses on the very question of abuse of presidential war power.
It is my belief, his critics to the contrary, that George W. Bush conducted the
War on Terror in a manner consistent with the principles and practices of the
framers of the Constitution and of his presidential predecessors. It is Bush’s
critics who have applied a relatively recent, revisionist understanding of the
Constitution in arguing that Bush’s handling of such matters was out of the
norm.
George W. Bush was a Hamiltonian chief executive, and to paraphrase
Alexander Hamilton himself, Bush understood that ambivalence in the
executive is a leading character in the definition of dysfunctional government. His conduct as chief executive was rooted in a tradition extending as
far back as the presidency of George Washington. For better or for worse,
Americans tend to celebrate those presidents who push the boundaries of
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int ro duc t ion [ 3 ]
their office, especially in the national security realm. The type of presidency
thus promoted is not an “imperial presidency” but an activist presidency that
energetically executes its prerogatives. It adheres to the practices of its predecessors in a manner that is constitutionally sound and frequently more
coherent and effective than could be achieved with a less expansive view of
presidential power. It is by no means a mistake-free presidency, as the Bush
years testify, but it offers the possibility of success to a far greater degree than
any “power-sharing” arrangement.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution attempted to strike a balance between the sometimes contradictory demands of protecting liberty and preserving order, a vital task in light of the fact that an inability to balance this
tension had been the undoing of republics throughout history. Abraham
Lincoln summarized the conundrum this way: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”3 Threats to the nation’s existence could come from
within or without, and the Framers vested the president with extraordinary
powers to deal with these unforeseen emergencies. Recognizing that no written constitution could provide for a complete and perfect specification of all
the potential threats to national security and the means needed to counter
these threats, a degree of executive discretion was built into the American
system. Known as the prerogative power, it is a doctrine the Framers adopted
from one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, John Locke, who
in his Two Treatises of Government argued that the executive has “the power
to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription
of the Law, and sometimes even against it.” Locke added, “Many things there
are, which the law can by no means provide for and those must necessarily
be left to the discretion of him that has the executive power in his hands.”4
This notion that the federal government, in particular its chief executive, can
act where the law is silent, or in contradiction to the law if need be, was
embraced in various forms by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Supreme
Court Justice Joseph Story, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, the two Roosevelts, and other assorted luminaries, including the
Supreme Court in an important but somewhat neglected case known as In
Re Neagle (1890).5
The authors of the first line of Article Two of the Constitution had something specific in mind when they wrote that “the executive power shall be
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[ 4 ] int ro duc t ion
vested in a President of the United States of America” and gave him, unique
among the three branches of government, a constitutionally mandated oath
requiring him to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. The term
“executive power” was fraught with national security significance, as is the
president’s oath, according to Abraham Lincoln, whose actions as president served as a model for those confronting national security crises, including George W. Bush. The Constitution established the president as the
commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces, mandated a method of
presidential election that reinforced executive independence from Congress,
and gave the president the authority to “take care that the laws be faithfully
executed.” It granted him the somewhat monarchical pardon power, which
allowed him, in essence, to halt judicial proceedings or overturn judicial penalties. In addition, the language of the Constitution seems to give the president the power to unilaterally remove executive branch officials, even those
confirmed by the Senate, an interpretation endorsed by tradition.
As mentioned, Abraham Lincoln believed that the Constitution’s “executive power” gave him the authority to engage in extraordinary measures
in a time of emergency, whereas Thomas Jefferson believed this power was
extra-constitutional, but that the laws of necessity would require its exercise
in extraordinary circumstances. With the passing of a crisis, these powers
would revert to the people’s representatives and the people themselves, with
the latter judging the legitimacy of the action. For Jefferson, both the source
and the limit on this extraordinary presidential power was to be found in
“popular judgment” — the president “throws himself ” on the people for their
approval or censure, and his power is thus limited and liberty protected.6 For
Alexander Hamilton, this power was rooted in the Constitution’s “implied”
powers,7 and thus, it would seem, any abuse of this power could be checked
by the processes embedded in the Constitution, including impeachment. Regardless of their differences over the source and limits on prerogative power,
these Founding Fathers, along with the other aforementioned luminaries,
would all disagree with a constrained interpretation of the power of the
president to deal with national security crises, which the president alone is
ultimately responsible for handling. While there has been and will continue
to be principled arguments opposing presidential prerogative power, including the fact that the power is subject to potential abuse, the fact remains that
presidential prerogative is as American as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham
Lincoln. Suffice it to say that George W. Bush was in good company.
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int ro duc t ion [ 5 ]
Bush was also in good company when it came to the “unitary” theory of
executive power, which his administration proudly defended in a series of
signing statements that will be dealt with later in this book. In sum, the idea
of a unitary executive, which has been embraced in various permutations
by every American president since George Washington, is based on the idea
that the “vesting” clause of Article Two of the Constitution grants all “executive power” to the president, generally without exception, including the
aforementioned prerogative powers. The president’s constitutionally mandated oath permits him to independently determine the constitutionality
of laws and, if need be, to refuse to enforce those laws the president deems
unconstitutional. Finally, the Constitution’s mandate that the president “take
care” that the laws be faithfully executed requires him to ensure that the laws
“as understood by the President” are faithfully executed. Congress, with its
penchant for passing vague or ill-defined laws, and its habit of delegating
authority to the executive branch, gives the president the latitude to shape
the substance of the law.8
Bush administration officials repeatedly invoked the term “unitary executive” in defense of some of its more controversial measures in the War on
Terror, and they did so in an assertive manner that roiled sensitivities on
Capitol Hill. As political scientists Ryan Barilleaux and Christopher Kelley
have noted, the administration used the phrase in various public documents
145 times between 2001 and 2007. But the notion of a unitary executive was
developed long before George W. Bush, having its roots in the early days of
the republic, although it was invoked overtly and implemented at an accelerated pace during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies, as these three
chief executives attempted to fend off congressional efforts to micromanage
or usurp presidential power.9 As with many of the controversies associated
with George W. Bush, the notion that Bush (and Cheney) invented the unitary theory of executive power is a partisan myth. And, as Christopher Kelley
has noted, “much like all partisan logic,” it “overlook[s] certain truths.”10
Despite the fact that George W. Bush conducted himself in a manner consonant with his predecessors, the idea that his presidency was a dangerous
aberration and one of the nation’s worst trickled down from academia and
the media and from his political opponents to the public at large. Just months
before he left office, a Rasmussen poll found that 41 percent of the American
people believed that George W. Bush was the worst president in the nation’s
entire history.11 Prior to this poll, prominent figures in the academy and the
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[ 6 ] int ro duc t ion
media had spent years condemning Bush as a “failed” chief executive. Many
of the academics who took the lead in condemning Bush frequently appeared
on television or were cited in various print and Internet outlets. These were
not fringe elements of the scholarly community, such as Ward Churchill, but
historians and political scientists from many of the nation’s most prestigious
universities. In their rush to judgment against President Bush, far too many
scholars breached their professional obligations, engaging in a form of professorial malpractice by failing to do what all historians are trained to do,
which is to take a breath, bide their time, and offer perspective as the evidence emerges and the passions of the day have cooled.12
Foremost among Bush’s academic critics was Sean Wilentz, the DaytonStockton professor of history and the director of the American Studies program at Princeton University. In April 2006, during one of the many low
points of George W. Bush’s presidency, a month that saw eighty-two American servicemen killed in Iraq, Wilentz published an essay in Rolling Stone
entitled “The Worst President in History?” The magazine cover was quite unflattering: Looking like a winged monkey from the Wizard of Oz, but dressed
in a dunce-cap and cowboy boots, the forty-third president was seated in a
corner while having a “time-out.” Rolling Stone was an unusual venue for
Wilentz’s work, wedged as it was between a story on Jessica Simpson’s exhusband and Pearl Jam’s latest album. Wilentz opened his essay with the
claim that “George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace.” The essay caused quite a media stir, with Wilentz approvingly
noting to a reporter from the New York Times that “young people are sort of
amused when a teacher gets in something like [Rolling Stone].” The reporter
added, without the slightest touch of irony, that “Sean Wilentz says he is often
circumspect about his historical opinions. The perspective of 200 years usually mitigates too much enthusiasm or vituperation on a subject.”13
Wilentz objected to Bush’s management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his expansion of the powers of the presidency. “Until the twentieth
century, American presidents managed foreign wars well,” Wilentz claimed,
“including those Presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars.” This remarkable claim would come as a shock to historians and political scientists who
have studied James Madison’s conduct of the War of 1812, which is a textbook
case of presidential mismanagement.14 For those familiar with the history of
American “commanders in chief,” Madison makes George W. Bush look like
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int ro duc t ion [ 7 ]
Karl von Clausewitz. Wilentz went on to note, as did many of Bush’s supporters, the similarities between Bush and the nation’s thirty-third president,
Harry S. Truman, along with Bush’s fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson. Bush’s
failure to enlist the opposition, in fact his “demoniz[ation]” of the Democrats, Wilentz argued, hurt the nation’s ability to wage war. “No other president,” Wilentz added, focusing on Lincoln, FDR, and John F. Kennedy in the
Cold War, “failed to embrace the opposing political party” to wage a national
struggle.
This is simply not true, and is perhaps indicative of the ideological bias
dominating much of the history profession. Other wartime presidents had
passed on embracing the opposing political parties of their day, including
James K. Polk, Harry S. Truman, and, Wilentz to the contrary, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who in 1944 compared his Republican opponents to Fascists.15
President Truman not only failed to embrace the Republican opposition during the early days of the Cold War and the Korean War but relished taunting
them in some of the most polarizing language imaginable.16 Most recently,
President Obama, in an interview in 2010, referred to his Republican opponents as the enemy, warning of the consequences if “Latinos sit out the
election instead of saying, ‘we’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna
reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.’”17
The bulk of Wilentz’s essay was devoted to the idea that history would
hold Bush in “greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency
beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution.” Wilentz compared
Bush’s actions to some of his illustrious predecessors, including Abraham
Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus “while Congress was out of session.” Lincoln’s actions were problematic not because of his disregard for
scheduling coordination but for many of the same reasons critics, like Sean
Wilentz, were upset at President Bush — because Lincoln was perceived to
have “overturn[ed]” the Constitution “in favor of presidential absolutism.”
Wilentz added that Lincoln “did not operate in secret, as Bush has.”18 This
is not correct either, as will be noted later. Wilentz argued further that Vice
President Cheney was a major player in Bush’s effort to overturn the Constitution. Wilentz said that Cheney, a “Nixon administration veteran,” had little
regard for the “healthy tension” the Framers incorporated into our founding
document. (Playing the “Nixon card” is a tactic frequently used to paint one’s
opponent as dangerously misguided and to thereby stifle debate, although
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[ 8 ] int ro duc t ion
it may be in the process of being replaced by a “George W. Bush card”).19
It was not Cheney’s limited Nixon administration experience but rather his
Ford administration experience as chief of staff that led him to question the
inroads that the courts and Congress had made in areas previously viewed
as part of the president’s portfolio. Bush and Cheney’s “aberrant take on the
Constitution” is only aberrant if you adopt, as Wilentz apparently did, the
belief that Congress and the courts are the final arbiters of the Constitution’s
war power.
Sean Wilentz was not alone in believing that Bush’s War on Terror could be
“extended indefinitely” and that it ran the risk of “permanently endangering
rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.” Many of his academic
colleagues believed this, including Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor
of history at Columbia University, who argued that Bush had “taken his disdain for law even further [than Nixon]” and that he “sought to strip people
accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta.”20 Historian Robert Dallek echoed the Nixon comparison, noting that from his
reading of the New York Times, he believed Bush had “abused power.” He
added: “I wouldn’t say necessarily the same against him as Richard Nixon,
but sui generis. He may have abused power in his own special way.”21 Dallek
was so appalled by Bush’s presidency that he proposed an amendment to
the Constitution that would allow for the “recall” of a sitting president — after securing passage of a 60 percent majority in both Houses of Congress,
the American public would then vote “yes” or “no” to remove the president
and the vice president, who would then be replaced by the Speaker of the
House.22 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who coined the term “imperial presidency,”
and had a tendency to apply it rather liberally to Republican presidents, at
first considered Bush an “amiable mediocrity,” but would later see him as a
threat to the nation. Schlesinger observed in April 2004 that “it appears to be,
once again, the politics of fear and the imperial presidency redux. We have
been through paranoid phases before, succumbing to panic and forgetting
our constitutional guarantees.” He would add that the presidency of George
W. Bush presented “the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the
rule of law in American history.”23
Echoing Arthur Schlesinger’s fears, historian Joyce Appleby claimed that
“the founders never imagined a Bush administration” and issued a clarion
call in 2006 for the public to “wake up to this constitutional crisis.”24 Pulitzer
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int ro duc t ion [ 9 ]
Prize–winner Joseph Ellis said of Bush in 2009: “I think that George Bush
might very well be the worst president in American history. . . . He’s unusual.
Most two-term presidents have a mixed record. . . . Bush has nothing on the
positive side, virtually nothing.” Historian Douglas Brinkley, the author of
a glowing 2004 biography of Senator John Kerry, observed that “it’s safe to
bet, that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder. . . . He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be
President.” Brinkley would later add, “I think President Bush was a good man
so infuriated and angered by 9/11 that he put on his ideological blinders and
forgot that we have other things we represent — civil liberties here at home, a
Constitution . . . George Bush is one of the five worst presidents in American
history.”25 To make matters worse, Bush believed “in bullying over the power
of persuasion” and “purposely tries to brutalize his opponents.”26 Historian
H. W. Brands echoed the Herbert Hoover theme while contemplating George
W. Bush’s presidency: “Before Bush,” he said, “Americans could have guns
and butter both; after Bush, we’ll be lucky simply to have butter.”27
Pulitzer Prize–winner Garry Wills argued that not only was Bush the worst
president, “a strong claim could be made for Dick Cheney as the worst Vice
President and Alberto Gonzales as the worst Attorney General.”28 Bush’s reelection in 2004 marked, for Wills, the death of modernity, for it was “the day
the enlightenment went out.”29 Another Pulitzer winner, Stanford History
Professor Jack Rakove, argued that Bush’s use of signing statements meant
that the United States “face[d] a constitutional crisis” and if this practice
were not halted, “our freedoms will become a thing of the past, impossible to
recover.”30 The dean of the Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, declared that
the administration’s efforts to strip the courts of jurisdiction in cases involving captured terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay were comparable to the actions of “dictatorships” and were “fundamentally lawless.”31 Kagan’s Yale Law
School counterpart, Dean Harold Koh, wrote that the Bush administration’s
disregard for international law had earned it a place in the “axis of disobedience,” along with Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.32
In April 2008, an informal poll conducted by the History News Network
of 109 historians found that 98 percent considered George W. Bush a failed
president, while 61 percent of these same historians considered Bush to be
the nation’s worst president. As one of the participants observed, Bush combined the worst of his predecessors, “the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of
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[ 10 ] int ro duc t ion
Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover.” Another historian claimed
that Bush had “broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is
not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man.” Another scholar
added that the Bush administration was “the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible . . . [presidency] in all of American history.”33 A C-Span survey
conducted in 2009 was somewhat kinder and gentler toward Bush, ranking
him thirty-sixth out of forty-three presidents, below Nixon and Hoover and
just squeaking past Millard Fillmore and Warren G. Harding (in the subcategory of “moral authority,” Bush was again ranked thirty-sixth, four notches
above Harding and six above Nixon).34 A July 2010 Siena College Research
Institute survey of 238 presidential scholars ranked Bush thirty-ninth out of
forty-three, cementing for the moment his reputation as one of the nation’s
five worst chief executives. According to the professors who conducted the
survey, Bush “found himself in the bottom five at 39th [and] rated especially
poorly in handling the economy, communication, ability to compromise,
foreign policy accomplishments and intelligence. Rounding out the bottom
five are four presidents that have held that dubious distinction each time the
survey has been conducted: Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren G.
Harding, and Franklin Pierce.”35
The fact that over two hundred presidential scholars would rank George
W. Bush below Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, Millard Fillmore, and Benjamin Harrison is not surprising in light of the bias inherent in the relatively
new field of “presidential studies.” For example, in 2007 Sean Wilentz became
editor of the Times Books series The American Presidents, replacing Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. as the unofficial dean of this new unofficial field. Schlesinger
tapped Wilentz as his heir for a reason, for he believed, as many of his peers
did, that a successful presidency was one based on the promotion of a progressive agenda. The American Presidents series is a classic example of the
politicized slant that prevails among today’s presidential scholars, a group
that has long been dominated by proponents of an activist presidency pursuing progressive policies.
During Schlesinger’s reign as editor of The American President series, he
lived up to the criticism that Washington Post columnist David Broder once
leveled against him — that he was “James Carville in a cap and gown.”36 Schlesinger, a former Kennedy confidant, selected an ideologically compatible
group of authors, including Wilentz and former senators George McGovern
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int ro duc t ion [ 11 ]
and Gary Hart. He also selected Charles Peters (a former JFK campaign official and aide to Sargent Shriver), John Seigenthaler (an aide to Robert Kennedy), Ted Widmer (a Bill Clinton speechwriter), and Lewis Lapham (the
editor of Harper’s, who, in one of his more restrained moments, wrote that
Ronald Reagan was incapable of writing “a simple declarative sentence”),
among others, all with solid liberal credentials.37 John Dean, the author of
Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, was among
the token “Republicans” selected to write for the series, along with John S.D.
Eisenhower, although the latter had demonstrated his ideological bona fides
by publicly supporting Senator John Kerry in the 2004 election against President Bush. Schlesinger had employed a similarly ideologically unbalanced
“jury” for a 1996 New York Times ranking of the presidents, which included
New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Illinois Senator Paul Simon, along
with assorted progressive historians, with perhaps two exceptions. In this
poll Ronald Reagan was ranked below Jimmy Carter, Chester A. Arthur, and
Benjamin Harrison.38
The visceral animus some American historians felt toward the BushCheney “regime” — the term of choice for critics of the Bush presidency — bordered on the unprofessional and made a mockery of the principle of academic objectivity. A typical example of this animus occurred at the annual
meeting of the American Historical Association, which was held in New York
City in January 2009. One event, entitled “The Bush-Cheney Years, A Historians Against the War Roundtable,” featured history faculty from Columbia, Yale, Trinity College, New York University, and Yeshiva University. These
scholars compared the Bush “regime’s” security practices to those of Joseph
McCarthy and assorted “war criminals.” One scholar was appalled that in the
2008 election Barack Obama’s relationship with William Ayers was more of
an issue than Senator John McCain’s “bombing missions over North Vietnam.” The cover of the roundtable’s report featured Bush and Cheney seated
on a pile of human skulls.39
Much of the political and media criticism matched that of the scholarly
community in propagating the notion that the nation was in the midst of a
constitutional crisis generated by Bush. Former vice president Al Gore, who
lost the presidency to Bush in the infamous Bush v. Gore decision in 2000,
was highly critical of the “unprecedented claims of the administration to a
truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.” In a speech delivered in
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[ 12 ] int ro duc t ion
January 2006, Gore claimed, incorrectly, that “the President has also declared
that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison
any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation.”
Gore to the contrary, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin
Roosevelt also recognized this inherent power. The former vice president
joined the chorus of those convinced that George W. Bush was a threat to
the Constitution, saying that, “as a result of this unprecedented claim of new
unilateral power, the executive branch has now put our constitutional design
at grave risk. The stakes for America’s democracy are far higher than has been
generally recognized.”
This new threat to the American way of life came from Bush’s adoption of
the “unitary executive” theory and, according to Gore, “this effort to rework
America’s carefully balanced constitutional design” was intended to create
“an all-powerful executive branch, with a subservient Congress and subservient judiciary.” He then attributed the worst possible motives to the Bush administration, arguing that “the common denominator seems to be based on
an instinct to intimidate and control.” Bush had consistently resorted to “the
language and politics of fear” in order to control the debate over the issues
of his day, the former vice president said. He called for “immediate steps” to
“safeguard” the Constitution against the “present danger” posed by Bush’s
belief that “he need not live under the rule of law.”40
Former President Jimmy Carter considered Bush’s presidency to be worse
than Nixon’s and in fact one of the worst in American history. He said: “I
think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history. The overt reversal of America’s
basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including [those of]
George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has
been the most disturbing to me.”41
Carter’s old rival, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, following
revelations of warrantless domestic eavesdropping by the National Security
Agency, reminded President Bush that “he is not King George” and observed
that the Bush administration “believes that it does not have to follow the law
of the land. . . . Incredibly, we are now in an era where reading a controversial book may be evidence of a link to terrorists.”42 Bush’s opponent in 2004,
Senator John Kerry, stated that he would “appoint an attorney general who
will uphold the Constitution of the United States” and vowed that he would
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int ro duc t ion [ 13 ]
“never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution.”43 Senator Barack Obama seemed to share this
view, claiming in 2007, “I was a constitutional law professor, which means
unlike the current president [Bush] I actually respect the Constitution.”44
In 2009, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of
Vermont, called for the creation of a “truth commission,” a “nonpartisan
commission of inquiry” to expose “one of the most secretive administrations
in the history of the United States.” Leahy added, apparently forgetting the
Vietnam era, “during the past several years, this country has been divided as
deeply as it has been at any time in our history since the Civil War.”45
Bush’s critics were not entirely confined to the liberal side of the American
political spectrum. William Safire, a former Nixon administration speechwriter, argued that the president’s use of military tribunals for captured terrorists meant that nation was in the midst of a dictatorial seizure of power.
Bush’s decision to try captured al-Qaeda members before military tribunals
was a “Soviet-style abomination” that had the effect of “letting George W.
Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts.” A former Reagan Justice Department official, Bruce
Fein, claimed that Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, along with other
actions encouraged by “the Emperor Cheney,” were designed to “gather political intelligence against his domestic critics, to chill dissent by creating an
aura of intimidation, [and] to cripple Congress as a check on presidential
power.” Another Reaganite, Paul Craig Roberts, who served as an assistant
treasury secretary, noted that the “only possible reason” for warrantless wiretapping was to “collect information that can be used to silence critics.”46
This criticism was echoed by one of the leaders of the Clinton impeachment effort, former congressman Bob Barr, who argued that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies amounted to “assaults on our fundamental civil
liberties.” In 2007 Barr formed an interest group called American Freedom
Agenda to counter the administration’s assault. It was led by prominent conservatives and libertarians, including Bruce Fein; fundraising entrepreneur
Richard Viguerie; David Keane, chairman of the American Conservative
Union; and John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute.47 Conservative
columnist Patrick Buchanan was also critical of Bush’s national security policies, seeing a “neo-conservative clique” behind the American invasion of Iraq
in 2003. These neoconservatives, according to Buchanan, were composed
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[ 14 ] int ro duc t ion
of “ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern
revolution who rafted over to the GOP.” Buchanan, along with many of the
writers for the magazine The American Conservative, appealed to America’s
ancient isolationist creed by urging the nation to “come home again” and
avoid the siren call of “Woodrow W. Bush.”48
According to many of his critics, George W. Bush’s America had become
something of an Orwellian nightmare. Senator Hillary Clinton observed in
2003 that she was “sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and
you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic, and we
should stand up and say, ‘We are Americans and we have a right to debate and
disagree with any administration.’”49 Congressman John Olver of Massachusetts informed his constituents that he could not support the impeachment
of Vice President Cheney in 2007, despite saying, according to a newspaper in
his district, “that he could envision the United States attacking Iran and Bush
declaring martial law, [and] suspending the 2008 elections.”50 Media commentary was equally flamboyant and alarmist. The editors of the New York
Times echoed the Orwellian nightmare theme in a 2004 editorial:
American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers
or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish
in what the Justice Department’s own inspector general found were often
“unduly harsh” conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice
Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international
laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during
wartime.
From the tone of this editorial one would think that scores of American citizens were being held for “long periods without access to lawyers or family
members.” In fact, at this time only one American citizen, Jose Padilla, the socalled “Dirty Bomber,” was being held as an enemy combatant in a military
prison. The only other American citizen who had been held under similar
conditions was Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured on the battlefield in
Afghanistan in 2001. Hamdi had been released weeks before this editorial
was published.51
Charlie Savage, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the Times, was one
of the Bush administration’s sharpest media critics. The author of Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American
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Democracy (2007), he believed that 9/11 “unleashed a new climate of extraordinary fear and uncertainty across the United States,” a climate somewhat
similar to that of the Cold War, which had the effect of “diminishing criticism
of the president’s policies as essentially unpatriotic and borderline treasonous.”52 President Bush, pushed by Vice President Cheney, was determined to
restore the presidency to its pre-1970s’ “imperial” status, Savage argued, and
the War on Terror was the perfect way to achieve this goal. The war’s “climate
of perpetual emergency provided a vehicle for turning his [Cheney’s] vision
of an unfettered commander in chief into a reality.” Cheney sought to “permanently alter the constitutional balance of American government” in such
a way that the founding fathers would not recognize.53
Savage was an admirer of Arthur Schlesinger’s influential book The Imperial Presidency (1973), written at a time when the former proponent of an activist presidency had turned against the institution during the Nixon years.54
Savage adopted much of Schlesinger’s thesis, including the idea that the rise
of an “imperial presidency” was a Cold War phenomenon. The underlying
theme for Savage was that a series of Cold War presidents, and later George
W. Bush, egged on by Dick Cheney, defied the intentions of the Framers in
order to enhance their own power. In a 2006 article he wrote:
Cheney’s ideal of presidential power is the level of power the office briefly
achieved in the late 1960s, the era of what historian Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. called the “imperial presidency.” Early in the Cold War, presidents began invoking national security to seize greater power from Congress. This
concentration of authority peaked under President Richard Nixon, who
famously asserted that “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” But Watergate reawakened Congress, which passed new laws to regulate presidential power.55
There was no “seizure” of power by America’s Cold War presidents, and
as we will see, a series of American presidents broadly interpreted their national security powers long before the Cold War. Savage also claimed that the
principal concern of the Framers of the Constitution was limiting executive
power, but while this has taken hold as a cherished American myth, the fact
is that the Framers were more concerned with legislative abuses of power.
As James Madison put it at the Constitutional Convention, “experience had
proved a tendency in our governments to throw all power into the Legislative
vortex. The Executives of the States are in general little more than Cyphers;
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[ 16 ] int ro duc t ion
the legislatures omnipotent. If no effectual check be devised for restraining
the instability & encroachments of the latter, a revolution of some kind or
other would be inevitable.”56
Charlie Savage’s website described Takeover as an account of a “plot” that
“would allow the White House to return to, or even surpass, the virtually
unchecked powers that Richard Nixon had briefly tried to wield.” In this
so-called plot, “Congress would be defanged, and the commander in chief
would be able to assert a unilateral dominance both at home and abroad.”
“Today,” Savage claimed, “this plot is coming to fruition.” The Los Angeles
Times hailed the book as “a meticulously reported and lucidly recorded account of the executive quasi-coup,” while political analyst David Gergen observed of the Bush years that, “considered in totality, the record is not just
breathtaking; it is hair-raising.” Booklist noted that “this troubling look at
the abuse of power . . . details Cheney’s involvement in seizing presidential
power.” The Village Voice described it as a “frightening account of the construction of ‘the imperial presidency.’” It was “a tautly told tale of executive
power lust,” according to the Legal Times, and “astute and harrowing . . . [a]
chilling volume,” according to the New York Times. Dean Harold Koh at Yale
noted that “until Takeover, no one has pieced together in such readable prose
the systematic effort at constitutional revolution pressed by the Bush-Cheney
Administration since September 11. With this definitive account, a prizewinning journalist paints a chilling vision of an Imperial Vice-Presidency and
the officials who built it.”57 A “plot,” a “quasi-coup,” a “seiz[ure]” of power
resulting from a “lust” for power, a “frightening” “revolution” during a “hairraising” era — suffice it to say that it was not a wonderful life in George W.
Bush’s America.
Savage’s mythology of a pre–Cold War Eden on the Potomac, where presidents deferred to Congress and the courts on national security matters, is a
figment of his imagination no less than it was of Schlesinger’s and Wilentz’s.
Unfortunately, this distorted account of an “imperial presidency” that began
with the advent of the Cold War, and was partially brought to heel by congressional and judicial intervention in the 1970s, has become gospel. To his
credit, however, Savage was at least attempting to make a case against Bush
and Cheney by resorting to a rational discussion of the constitutional and
historical context of the administration’s view of presidential power. Other
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members of the media seemed less reasonable, resorting instead to emotion
or conspiracy theories to explain the “dangerous” trends in Bush’s America.
The nation, according to these critics, was kept in a perpetual state of fear
by an administration determined to hold onto power. USA Today columnist
Julianne Malveaux observed that George W. Bush “is a terrorist. He is evil.
He’s arrogant and he’s out of control.”58 CBS News anchorman Dan Rather
found that post-9/11 America was an oppressive place for journalists and all
who sought the truth about the Bush administration’s policies: “There was
a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people’s
necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your
neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of
the tough questions.”59
Beyond the oppression of the press were the even darker implications that
the House of Bush knew more about 9/11 than they let on. Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) lent credence to the “Truther” movement by
opining that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks in advance. The president turned a blind eye, apparently, so that his
father, George Herbert Walker Bush, could profit on some of his investments
in the Carlyle Group, which had “at the time of the attacks[,] joint business
interests with the bin Laden construction company and many defense industry holdings, the stocks of which have soared since September 11.”60 A survey
taken in July 2006 found that 36 percent of the American people believed
that U.S. government officials assisted in the 9/11 attacks or deliberately took
no action to prevent the attacks. The same survey found that 16 percent of
Americans believed that secretly planted explosives, not jet aircraft, brought
down the Twin Towers, while 12 percent believed the American military fired
a cruise missile at the Pentagon on 9/11. This was followed by a survey in May
2007 that found that 22 percent of the American people, including 35 percent
of the nation’s Democrats, believed that President Bush knew in advance of
the 9/11 attacks.61
Hollywood turned on President Bush with a vengeance — actor George
Clooney noted that the Bush administration was running itself “exactly like
The Sopranos,” a popular organized crime drama on HBO.62 Additionally,
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 captured Tinseltown’s attitude toward the
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[ 18 ] int ro duc t ion
Bush administration and helped foster a conspiratorial view of 9/11 among
many Americans. It is worth noting, not surprisingly, that Moore’s film won
the prestigious Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 and
many other awards from film critics in the United States and around the
globe.63 Media celebrities such as Charlie Sheen, Rosie O’Donnell, Janeane
Garofalo, James Brolin, David Lynch, and Ed Asner, among others, endorsed
various 9/11 “Truther” conspiracies. They were joined by Ralph Nader, Code
Pink founder Medea Benjamin, Daniel Ellsberg, and Howard Zinn, of A People’s History of the United States fame.64
The harsh rhetoric directed at George W. Bush gave new meaning to the
term “incivility,” and in many cases it came from those who claimed to aspire for peace. Nobel Peace Prize–winner Betty Williams argued that drastic
action was needed regarding President Bush. She traveled in 2007 to Dallas,
Texas, the site of the last successful assassination of an American president,
and exclaimed in a speech, “Right now, I could kill George Bush, no problem.
No, I don’t mean that. I mean — how could you nonviolently kill somebody?
I would love to be able to do that.”65 Another Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, a Princeton University professor who serves as a New York Times columnist, observed that “George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror” of 9/11. As
a result, “the memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an
occasion for shame.”66Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, who briefly captured
the media’s attention as a Gold Star Mother, referred to Bush as “a bigger terrorist than Osama bin Laden.”67Aging calypso singer Harry Belafonte called
Bush “the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world,” while
“Funny Girl” Barbra Streisand, who claimed that Bush had stolen the 2000
and 2004 elections, said he was comparable to Nazi leader Herman Goering.68
Janeane Garofalo, while hosting CNN’s Crossfire, claimed that Bush’s support
for the Patriot Act was part of “a conspiracy of the 43rd Reich.” Fellow comic
Sandra Bernhard agreed, observing that the “real terrorist threats are George
W. Bush and his band of brown-shirted thugs.”69 This description, in turn, was
echoed by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who referred to Bush as a “fascist.”70
Major figures in the literary world were equally intemperate toward Bush,
considering him a greater threat than many of history’s worst dictators. The
winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter, condemned the
Bush administration as “the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is
more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its
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int ro duc t ion [ 19 ]
activities and intentions worldwide.”71 Future Poet Laureate of the United
States W. S. Merwin, meanwhile, claimed that Bush and his cronies used his
post-9/11 presidency “to silence all criticism of the man and his words as unpatriotic, and to provide the auspices for a sustained assault upon civil liberties.” Merwin added that Bush was “a greater danger to the United States than
Saddam Hussein.”72 Philip Roth noted that Bush was “unfit to run a hardware
store” and “too horrendous to be forgotten. . . . He won’t be forgotten. Someone has said he’s the worst American president we’ve ever had. I think that’s
true. . . . So he’s done a lot of harm.” According to Roth, Bush won reelection
in 2004 because “the Republicans are brutes. Brutes win.”73Author Naomi
Wolf charged that the Bush administration was following a blueprint laid
down by Hitler and Stalin. In an article entitled “Fascist America, in 10 Easy
Steps,” she claimed that, “as difficult as this is to contemplate . . . it is clear,
if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush Administration.”74 Poet Amiri
Baraka contended, in his poem “Somebody Blew Up America” and in interviews with the media, that the Bush administration acted in concert with the
Israelis to destroy the World Trade Center.75 Author Nicholson Baker’s book
Checkpoint, published in 2004, was, as one reviewer described it, a “scummy
little book [that] treats the question of whether the problems that now beset our cherished and anxious country may be solved by the shooting of its
president.”76
In 1965, historian Richard Hofstadter published his celebrated collection of
essays, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which went on to become
something of a standard resource for those interested in examining the “paranoid” tendencies of American conservatives. Hofstadter delivered his paper
on “The Paranoid Style” within days of the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy. “No other word [besides ‘paranoid’] adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” he
observed, in language applicable to the views of many of George W. Bush’s
critics in the academy, the media, and politics. He would also note that
the restlessness, suspicion, and fear shown in various phases of the pseudoconservative revolt give evidence of the anguish which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to
be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed,
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[ 20 ] int ro duc t ion
and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been
arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything
that has happened in the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of
Franklin D. Roosevelt.77
Substitute George W. Bush for Franklin D. Roosevelt, liberal paranoia for
conservative paranoia, eight years for twenty years, and it appears that the
same neuroses that liberals diagnosed in conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s
could be found in the Bush years among the ideological heirs of mid-century
liberalism. Sean Wilentz, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Douglas Brinkley, Charlie
Savage, the New York Times, and assorted American political and media figures may not have been 9/11 “truthers” or attention-seeking Hollywood celebrities. But, considering the positions of responsibility they held, in some ways
their overheated rhetoric and fear mongering, and their ahistorical accounts
of Bush’s presidency, particularly when placed in the context of actions taken
by his predecessors, were all the more disturbing. Many of them should have,
and likely did, know better. To borrow once more from Hofstadter, American political life during the presidency of George W. Bush “served again and
again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.”78 All too often, to quote the
famous American literary critic Lionel Trilling, criticism of Bush’s presidency
resembled “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”79 Some of
the anger toward Bush seemed linked to his reputation as a Bible-thumping
Texan and a perpetual “C” student who stole the election of 2000 and was
incapable of putting a complete sentence together. But that is only part of
the story.
This book will address the allegations raised by Bush’s critics: Was power
truly “seized” during the Bush years? Was the nation in the midst of a constitutional crisis after 9/11? Were Bush’s actions contrary to the intentions of
the Founding Fathers? Was the Bush/Cheney interpretation of presidential
power, as Wilentz put it, an “aberrant take on the Constitution,” or, as Savage
said, a “very aggressive, out-of-the-mainstream understanding of presidential power” designed “to re-establish, although he [Cheney] wouldn’t use this
word, the imperial presidency”?80 Was the Supreme Court’s intervention in
matters related to war and national security the historical norm? Was George
W. Bush a greater threat to civil liberties and the Constitution than Richard
Nixon was? And was Bush, as the dean of the White House press corps, Helen
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int ro duc t ion [ 21 ]
Thomas, exclaimed in January 2003, “the worst president ever . . . the worst
president in all of American history”?81
All of these questions are the focus of this book. As I have already indicated, it is my belief that George W. Bush, for all of the problems associated
with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for the intelligence failures of the
Iraq War, for his share of the responsibility for the housing and stock market
collapse, for all of his rhetorically challenged statements, has been unfairly
treated by those who shape history, particularly by presidential historians
and the media. If so, then why the notion that Bush is one of our worst presidents, or the worst? For that answer, we need to look to the past.
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Bush’s Role Models
1
The fallacy that George W. Bush was the worst president in history,
especially the notion that his administration represented an unparalleled threat to the Constitution, is not true, as expansive notions of
presidential power, particularly in the national security arena, are as
old as the nation itself. Arguably, the Constitution itself was an act
of lawlessness, since the delegates who assembled in Philadelphia in
1787, operating under strict secrecy, changed the rules by which the
existing Articles of Confederation could be amended; in many cases
they far exceeded their instructions by discarding instead of reforming the Articles. Madison noted that the delegates:
were neither authorized by their commission, nor justified by circumstances[,] in proposing a Constitution for their country . . .
[and] if they had exceeded their powers, they were not only warranted, but required, as the confidential servants of their country,
by the circumstances in which they were placed, to exercise the
liberty which they assume; and that finally, if they had violated
both their powers and their obligations, in proposing a Constitution, this ought nevertheless to be embraced, if it be calculated to
accomplish the views and happiness of the people of America.1
Along the same lines, Alexander Hamilton, writing as Publius in The
Federalist Papers, spoke of the need to avoid “fettering the government with restrictions, that cannot be observed” when necessity intervenes.2 In light of this, the authors of The Federalist Papers argued
for an “energetic executive” characterized by “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.”3
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 23 ]
The founding fathers’ penchant for secrecy was incorporated in one of
the first legislative acts adopted by the new government at the request of
President George Washington. The “contingency” or “secret service” fund
proposed by Washington in his First Annual Message to Congress in 1790 allowed the president to spend money for services of a sensitive nature without
revealing to Congress how those monies were spent. It was used for a variety
of purposes throughout the nineteenth century. President Thomas Jefferson,
for example, bribed Native American chiefs to relinquish territory and urged
the Madison administration to employ arsonists to attack Great Britain during the War of 1812. While serving as Jefferson’s secretary of state, James Madison procured a prostitute for a foreign emissary as a means of facilitating,
as he put it, “foreign intercourse.” After his election to the presidency, Madison overthrew a tottering Spanish colonial regime in West Florida using this
fund, attempted to do the same in East Florida, and then dissembled about
his actions to Congress and the Spanish government.4
Andrew Jackson attempted to acquire Texas by bribing Mexican officials,
while President James K. Polk covertly arranged for the return of a Mexican
general (who was secretly on the U.S. payroll) to his homeland during the
war with Mexico. All of these clandestine operations were supported by this
secret service fund, and the president did not report the details to Congress.
Some, like John Tyler and Abraham Lincoln (who will be dealt with later),
conducted covert operations against their own citizens. Under Tyler, the U.S.
government ran a covert operation under the direction of Secretary of State
Daniel Webster against the citizens of Maine in order to lessen the threat
of war with Great Britain over a boundary dispute with Canada. Interestingly, Webster also enlisted the aid of the British government, which provided some of its own secret service funds to undermine prowar sentiment
in Maine.5 This may be the first and only time in the history of the republic
that the U.S. government accepted foreign funds to conduct a covert operation against its own citizens.
Thomas Jefferson, who is frequently cited as a champion of openness and
deference to the people, noted that “all nations have found it necessary, that
for the advantageous conduct of their affairs, some of these [executive] proceedings, at least, should remain known to the executive functionary only.”
Echoing John Yoo (one of the legal architects of Bush’s War on Terror) and
proponents of the unitary executive, Jefferson argued that the Senate “is not
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[ 24 ] chap ter one
supposed by the Constitution to be acquainted with the concerns of the executive department.”6 This view of presidential power was widely shared by
most of the key founders. Jefferson’s conception of executive power would
have undoubtedly inflamed the editorial writers at the New York Times. He
wrote: “On great occasions every good officer must be ready to risk himself
in going beyond the strict line of the law.” He added that there were “extreme
cases where the laws become inadequate to their own preservation, and where
the universal recourse is a dictator, or martial law.”7 For Jefferson, “a strict observance” of the rule of law was “one of the high duties of a good citizen,” but
it was not the highest duty. “The laws of necessity, of self preservation, of saving our country when in danger,” he wrote, “are of a higher obligation.” And,
he noted, in a lesson lost in our increasing legalistic, process-obsessed nation,
“to lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to
lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying
them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”8
George W. Bush was no Thomas Jefferson. And yet this truism applies for
all the reasons one might expect, as well as for reasons frequently omitted
from polite conversation. For Jefferson, as historian Leonard Levy observed,
“at one time or another supported loyalty oaths; countenanced internment
camps for political suspects; drafted a bill of attainder; urged prosecutions
for seditious libel; trampled on the fourth amendment; condoned military
despotism [a reference to the aforementioned quote]; used the Army to enforce laws in time of peace; censored reading; [and] chose professors for their
political opinions.”
President Jefferson’s response to the major national security crisis of his
second term, the embargo of 1807 to 1809, was, according to two other historians, “more draconian than anything attempted by British authorities
throughout the years leading up to the American Revolution.”9 Jefferson
wanted to “crush” those American citizens who dared violate his embargo by
running contraband across the border with Canada.10
Jefferson was not alone in believing in the need for discretionary executive authority on “great occasions” or in “extreme cases.” This power has been
understood by America’s greatest presidents to be part of their constitutional
portfolio, although in Jefferson’s case he believed it to be an extra-constitutional
power checked, and legitimated, only by the will of the people.11 Without
question this power can be abused, but, to borrow a phrase, the power to do
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 25 ]
good is always the power to do evil. American presidents of the past wielded
power, oftentimes in situations far less threatening than post-9/11 America, in
such a way that illuminates the fact that George W. Bush’s “abuses of power”
were remarkably tame in comparison.
Andrew Jackson: Lawlessness Personified
Oddly, progressive historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., H. W. Brands,
and Sean Wilentz, see Andrew Jackson as something of their presidential
lodestar, for Jackson transformed the presidency from an institution designed to check popular sentiment into a “tribune” of the people. The nation’s first populist president delighted in rattling the conservatives of his
day with claims that the “majority is to govern.”12 In light of his affinity for
Jackson, Sean Wilentz took particular offense at comparisons made between
George W. Bush and Old Hickory, whom he considered the champion of, as
Jackson liked to put it, “the people, the great laboring and producing classes”
where only “true virtue” resides.13 Wilentz noted in his Rolling Stone essay
that:
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense
President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he
called “the rich and powerful” from bending “the acts of government to
their selfish purposes.” Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New
Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson’s famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton’s version of
“The Battle of New Orleans” won the Grammy for best country & western
performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it
will be a blues number.14
There are, in fact, legitimate comparisons to be made between George
W. Bush and Andrew Jackson. Both had a propensity to murder the English
language, and both practiced a form of populist politics that drove the respective opinion leaders of their day to distraction. Both were despised by
Ivy League professors of their time, though both received honorary degrees
from Ivy League schools. (The semiliterate Jackson was reluctantly awarded
an honorary degree from Harvard, and the rhetorically challenged Bush was
begrudgingly awarded one from his alma mater, Yale.) Their attitudes toward
America’s security interests were similar as well, revealing a propensity for
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[ 26 ] chap ter one
“going it alone” if they determined the national interest required such a step.
As historian Walter Russell Mead has noted:
Jackson took the U.S. Army across the international frontier into Spanish
territory without any permission or any U.N. resolutions. He went in there,
arrested the two Brits [Englishmen suspected of selling arms to the British], brought them back to the United States, tried them before a military
tribunal and hanged them. And this did cause outrage in Europe. They said
“These people have no respect for international law.” But it made Jackson
so popular in the U.S. that his election to the presidency was just a matter
of time after 1818. [The idea is]: “Don’t bother with people abroad, unless
they bother you. But if they attack you, then do everything you can.”15
This Jacksonian strain of American foreign policy, which Bush personified,
at least during his first term, had a strong sense of right and wrong, a sense of
“us” against “them,” and retained vestiges of the old southern code of honor.
It is a motif that has had an impact on the way Jacksonians fight wars: “Honorable” foes are treated one way; “dishonorable” ones are met with an unmitigated fury where the rules frequently don’t apply. Thus, the foreign policies
of Jacksonians (at least of living Jacksonians [dead Jacksonians are occasionally venerated]) are seen by the American professoriate and by many foreign
observers as “an unhealthy mix of ignorance, isolationism, and irresponsibly
trigger-happy cowboy diplomacy.”16
As president, Jackson dispatched an agent to Mexico to acquire the territory of Texas for the United States, instructing him to bribe Mexican officials
to achieve this goal. As Old Hickory observed in his characteristically crude
manner, “I scarcely ever knew a Spaniard who was not the slave of avarice,
and it is not improbable that this weakness may be worth a great deal to us,
in this case.” Jackson spent considerable energy trying to maintain plausible
deniability throughout his bribery operation, and he reprimanded his hired
agent for being too frank in some of his written comments to his superiors
back in Washington.17
For all of Sean Wilentz’s admiration for Jackson, it should also be noted
that Old Hickory’s record on civil rights and civil liberties was far worse
than George W. Bush’s. In one instance, General Jackson ordered the arrest
of a civilian legislator who had the audacity to write an editorial questioning Jackson’s decision to maintain martial law in New Orleans at the end of
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 27 ]
the War of 1812. When a federal district judge issued a writ of habeas corpus
ordering Jackson to turn the man over to the civilian courts, Jackson arrested
the judge and jailed him with the offending journalist in a military stockade.
The military tribunal acquitted the legislator, but Jackson refused to release
him. He had his soldiers march the judge out of the city and warned him
not to return until the British had completely evacuated southern Louisiana.
As Jackson’s foremost contemporary biographer, Robert Remini, noted, “the
extent of Old Hickory’s lunatic militarism had now reached comic proportions.”18 President Jackson also ordered the censoring of the mail in 1835 after
it was discovered that northern abolitionists were sending antislavery literature to their fellow citizens in the South. Suspicious-looking letters were to
be confiscated, and unless the addressee demanded the letter, it would not
be delivered. Those who demanded their mail, Jackson ordered, were to have
their “names [taken] down, and have them exposed thru the Publick journals
as subscribers to their wicked plan of exciting the negroes to insurrection
and to massacre.” All “moral and good” southerners, Jackson argued, would
shun the violators.19
Jackson was arguably our nation’s most lawless president, and yet in addition to gracing the $20 bill (an odd tribute to an opponent of a national bank
and paper money) he symbolizes for progressives the triumph of the common man over wealth and privilege. This persists only because of historians
like Arthur Schlesinger, who, as historian Daniel Walker Howe has noted,
never even mentioned Indian Removal [in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The
Age of Jackson], the number one item on the agenda of Jackson’s first term
in office. In a single allusion to the Supreme Court decision in Worcester v.
Georgia (1832) that vindicated the Cherokee Nation’s treaty right to refuse
removal — a decision that President Jackson famously felt free to ignore — Schlesinger simply calls it “the case of the Georgia missionaries.” An unwary reader would have no inkling of all that the case involved. Indian
Removal was by no means overlooked by historians at this time; Marquis
James had recently treated the subject. Similarly, Schlesinger also ignored
Jackson’s personal slaveholding, public support for slavery, and attempts
to ban criticism of slavery from circulating through the mails. Schlesinger
preferred to avoid any topic that might cast doubt on his characterization
of Jackson as an appropriate hero for New Deal liberals. His work on Jackson became the first of a long series of volumes that established him as the
more or less official historian of the Democratic Party.20
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[ 28 ] chap ter one
Sean Wilentz picked up the torch from Arthur Schlesinger. According to
Howe:
Wilentz re-states Schlesinger’s thesis. He fully acknowledges changing liberal priorities and Jackson’s ambiguous status in current American opinion, both popular and scholarly. Nevertheless he is determined to restore
Jackson’s image as a liberal hero. “Jackson aligned himself, in his own mind
and those of his supporters, with the forces of movement rather than of
order, on the side of egalitarianism and against privilege,” writes Wilentz.
Well, maybe in his own mind and those of his supporters, but not in the
minds of the abolitionists whose mailings Jackson ordered his Post Office to censor, nor in the minds of stout Yankee commercial farmers or of
enterprising traders who wanted the sound currency provided by the national bank. Not in the minds of the Native Americans and their Evangelical white allies, nor in the minds of the free black men who, wherever they
were permitted the suffrage, voted solidly against Jackson.21
Jackson the symbol has replaced Jackson the man, to the point where the
man is completely distorted in the American mind.22 This is all due to the attempt to link the policies of modern-day progressives to the early history of
the nation and thereby validate their agenda. They are, supposedly, as American as “Old Hickory.” It is a symptom of the ideological perversion of the
historical profession that Andrew Jackson, the murderer of Native Americans who chafed at the idea of the “rule of law,” should be exalted as a great
president, while George W. Bush is labeled one of our “worst” — a man who
“threaten[ed] to overturn the Framers’ healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism.”23
With Malice Toward Some: The Clandestine Lincoln
When, in 2009, the United States marked the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, it was clear that the Great Emancipator’s hold on the American
imagination remained as firm as ever. He routinely wins the top spot on those
lists of “greatness” conducted by presidential historians. At the same time the
torrent of Lincoln scholarship continues unabated. There are dissenters, to
be sure, mostly libertarians or unreconstructed Confederates, as well as some
on the left who question his civil rights bona fides. But Lincoln remains for
most Americans an icon on par with George Washington. The accolades are
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 29 ]
well deserved, although there is an aspect of his presidency, albeit somewhat
isolated, that Lincoln scholars tend to avoid, perhaps fearing damage to the
great man’s reputation. Conventional wisdom holds that Lincoln’s devotion
to republican principles was pure and unwavering, and that at the height of
the rebellion he was attempting to defeat he never violated the sanctity of
the electoral process. Yet in early 1863, at the absolute nadir of his presidency,
Lincoln authorized a domestic covert operation designed to ensure that prowar Republican governors would win reelection in two key states.
The litany of Lincoln’s emergency measures is well known: the suspension
of habeas corpus, his blockade of southern ports, his permission to bombard Maryland’s cities should that state’s legislature vote to arm its people,
his enlarging the army and navy — all unilateral actions sanctioned by Congress and the courts months after the fact. Lincoln deprived hundreds of
thousands of Americans who fought for the Confederacy of “due process.”
Perhaps worst of all, he deported a former member of Congress from Ohio
who objected to his war policies (imagine a hypothetical scenario of George
W. Bush deporting a recently retired Dennis Kucinich). The allegations of a
Lincoln “dictatorship” linger to this day, and not just in the fevered imagination of Internet bloggers. These events have been addressed repeatedly by
historians and political scientists, with a consensus that Lincoln conducted
himself with considerable moderation in the face of an unprecedented domestic insurrection.
One frequently finds the sixteenth president’s defenders proclaiming that
Lincoln never interfered with the electoral process and that he never dealt
with the “fire in the rear”24 — that is, opposition from northern Democrats
and some Republicans to his policies — in anything but an aboveboard fashion. But his conduct during the gubernatorial elections of 1863 reveals another side of Lincoln: his willingness to use extraordinary measures to ensure
the “proper” electoral outcome. In the wake of his issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and in the aftermath of a series of battlefield defeats,
Lincoln and his “war party” were reeling from attacks by northern “peace”
Democrats who promised, in some cases, to remove their states from the
war. The conflict had now taken on a controversial raison d’être: the emancipation of the slaves in rebel-held territory. This rationale was abhorrent to
many northern voters, particularly in the industrial states where immigrant
competition for jobs could be fierce. In Connecticut, incumbent Republican
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[ 30 ] chap ter one
Governor William Buckingham was locked in a tight reelection campaign in
a state vital to the Union war effort.
The central figure in Lincoln’s domestic covert operation was his favorite
political operative, Thurlow Weed, the Republican “boss” of New York City
and an ally of Secretary of State William Seward. Lincoln, through John Nicolay, urgently summoned Weed to Washington during the second week of
February 1863. Weed was asked to be in Washington on the next morning
train from New York. After meeting Seward for breakfast on the morning
of February 9, 1863, Weed left for a face-to-face meeting in the White House
with the president. Lincoln told Weed, “We are in a tight place. Money for legitimate purposes is needed immediately; but there is no appropriation from
which it can be lawfully taken. I didn’t know how to raise it, and so I sent for
you.”25 The president asked Weed if he could raise the funds from wealthy
New York businessmen, and he gave Weed a note that he could show the
potential contributors to prove that Weed was operating at the president’s
request. Lincoln wrote on the note, “The matters I spoke to you about are
important, & I hope you will not neglect them. Truly yours, A. Lincoln.”26 On
the bottom of this page and on to the reverse side, Weed was to ask for the
signatures of fifteen corporations and individuals who would pledge $1,000
each to help the president. (Using the Consumer Price Index as a way of
computing the relative value of that amount in 2009 dollars, the sum would
be approximately $265,369).27
It was fitting that Lincoln would turn to Weed, for the New Yorker was already a veteran of missions designed to overtly and covertly influence public
opinion in favor of the Union cause. In 1861, Weed had traveled to Europe
with Archbishop John Hughes of New York, who was asked to use his influence with the Catholic Church in Europe to win support for Lincoln’s policies. According to Confederate agents on the scene in Europe, Hughes sought
to enlist Irish citizens for the Union Army. The U.S. government paid Archbishop Hughes $5,200 for his services, and as a bonus the Lincoln administration informed the Vatican that it would be most pleased if the archbishop
were elevated to a cardinal within the church. While Hughes was enlisting
Irish soldiers and working to influence the government of Napoleon III of
France, Weed was busy bribing British journalists and planting stories in the
European press with a pro-Union slant.
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 31 ]
These efforts were all part of a large, coordinated, covert campaign to deny
the Confederacy weapons, markets, and diplomatic support. This campaign
involved bribing European journalists, subsidizing pro-Union newspapers,
sabotaging Confederate ships being built in British shipyards, outbidding
Confederate agents who were purchasing weapons, bribing postal officials
and telegraph officers to hand over messages between Confederate agents,
and organizing “spontaneous” rallies in favor of the Union cause. Secretary Seward’s clandestine network ultimately expanded beyond Britain and
France to include Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Prussia. By war’s end, Seward
had spent $41,000 (equivalent to $559,051 in 2009 dollars) on “special agents”
and $1 million (equivalent to $13,635,402) on “special activities” abroad.28
These operations were undertaken in the face of frequent protests from the
American ambassadors in these countries who objected to secret operations
being conducted outside of their purview. Nonetheless, Lincoln and Seward
never wavered in their support for the covert efforts.
In asking Weed to undertake his delicate domestic mission in February
1863, the president tapped someone who was capable of acting with discretion, for Weed was a master of the underside of politics. Seward found Weed
to be a “very secretive man” and entirely dependable in carrying out these
types of operations. According to Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, Gideon
Welles, Seward once remarked in a Cabinet meeting that “Weed is Seward,
and Seward is Weed; each approves what the other says and does.” Welles
considered Weed to be an “unscrupulous man,” an assessment shared by
many of his contemporaries and by Civil War historians. As James G. Randall
noted, “the name of Weed connoted tricky politics.”29 As such, Weed had no
problem raising the $15,000 Lincoln was hoping for from New York, which
was distributed in Connecticut and possibly New Hampshire. There is no
indication as to exactly how the money was spent. Gideon Welles, however,
gave us some indication of the purpose of the “scheme,” noting in his diary
on February 10 that “Thurlow Weed is in town. He has been sent for, but my
informant knows not for what purpose. It is, I learn, to consult in regard
to a scheme of Seward to influence the New Hampshire and Connecticut
elections.”
Additional evidence that the money was used to “influence” the elections
is evident in a letter that Weed wrote to Lincoln on March 8, 1863. Weed
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[ 32 ] chap ter one
wrote: “The Secession ‘Petard’ in Connecticut has probably ‘hoisted’ its own
Engineers. Thank God for so much.” Weed was likely anticipating Governor Buckingham’s victory in April 1863 over his “peace” Democrat opponent,
former governor Thomas H. Seymour. Buckingham would go on to win by
2,637 votes out of a total vote of 79,427. Oddly, the 1863 off-year election generated 9,000 more votes than the previous year’s election (governors in Connecticut served one-year terms until 1875), and 2,000 more votes than the
presidential vote of 1860. As Horace Greeley noted, the “War Party” won the
election in Connecticut only as a result of “the most vehement exertions” of
the party. In New Hampshire, Republican governor Joseph A. Gilmore was
barely reelected. He held on to his seat when the election was thrown into
the New Hampshire House of Representatives; no candidate had achieved a
plurality of the popular vote. One of his Democratic opponents had been a
“peace” candidate; the other, a “unionist.”30
What was Lincoln and Seward’s “scheme” to “influence” these elections?
To this day, no one really knows. We can only say with certainty that it was
something so sensitive that all of the men involved took the secret to their
grave. Was it outright bribery of election officials? The unusually high voter
turnout in Connecticut adds credence to this theory. Were payments made
to Connecticut arms manufacturers to get out the vote? This is also a possibility, since we do know that these same arms manufacturers were “advised” that future contracts with the government might depend on a large
pro-Republican turnout among their workers.31 If the model developed by
Seward for overseas covert operations was followed at home, the Connecticut operation might have included bribes paid to journalists, clergymen, and
other opinion shapers and payments of “walking around money,” as modern
parlance would have it, to other receptive individuals. But unlike the European operations, which Lincoln delegated to Seward, the Weed operation in
the early months of 1863 had Lincoln’s fingerprints all over it. As previously
mentioned, the president had a Contingency Fund — or Secret Service fund,
as it was routinely called — at his disposal, but that fund was designated by
Congress for foreign use only. Moreover, Congress had limited oversight of
the Contingency Fund. The Weed operation, with its domestic focus and
its sensitivity, was therefore unlikely to have been funded by it in any way.
The administration instead decided to privatize the operation. Interestingly,
there would be no “plausible deniability” in this case, as Lincoln was directly
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 33 ]
engaged in authorizing it. Seward, perhaps recognizing the sensitivity of the
operation, wanted “cover” from the president himself.
Doris Kearns Goodwin and legions of historians to the contrary, Lincoln
interfered with the American electoral process, the very heart of the nation’s
democratic process. This goes against much of the mythology associated
with the Great Emancipator, who is nonetheless deserving of all his posthumous monuments. Lincoln is frequently praised for his reputable conduct in
standing for reelection in 1864, an election conducted freely and openly in
the midst of war. The same cannot be said for the off-year elections of 1863.
And rightly so, for the loss of a state as critical as Connecticut to the Union
cause could have destroyed the Union. Lincoln’s understanding of warfare
was quite Machiavellian; he embraced the idea that the battle to control public opinion, whether in Europe or the United States, was as critical as the
battle on the front lines. To win that aspect of the war, he employed not only
secret agents, but members of the clergy and the media.
And, it needs to be added, Lincoln would not agree with contemporary
observers who insist on a high wall of separation between the media and their
government. Government appointments were dangled in front of prominent
newspaper editors to garner editorial support for the Union cause. For instance, James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald, was approached by Lincoln’s Karl Rove, the aforementioned Thurlow Weed, to alter
his news coverage toward a pro-Union, pro-Lincoln slant in return for a government job for Bennett’s son. As Weed later observed, “Mr. Lincoln deemed
it more important to secure the ‘Herald’s’ support than to obtain a victory in
the field.” The Herald altered its coverage for a time, the editor’s son received
his government job, and Lincoln would later go on to offer an ambassadorship to France to James Gordon Bennett himself.32
“Mr. Lincoln’s War” was a precursor to the Cold War and the War on Terror
in that many key victories were achieved far from the battlefield using methods at odds with contemporary notions of transparency and accountability
and deference to the supremacy of international law. We would do well to
keep this aspect of Lincoln’s presidency in mind when we judge the actions
of his successors in confronting their own crises, particularly that of George
W. Bush, who faced an attack that killed almost 3,000 innocent victims, a
single-day casualty count exceeded only by the Battle of Antietam during
the Civil War.33 One of these presidents ended up on Mount Rushmore, the
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[ 34 ] chap ter one
other wearing a dunce cap on the cover of Rolling Stone. Assuredly, Lincoln
deserves to be on Rushmore, and Bush does not, but not because of any issues related to alleged violations of “the rule of law.”
Woodrow Wilson: The “Firm Hand of Stern Repression”
Woodrow Wilson is one of the founding fathers of the contemporary American presidency and of the modern bureaucratic state. The nation’s first president with a Ph.D., he was a proponent of an activist federal government
possessing broad powers to regulate the nation’s economy. He also favored
political reforms that democratized American politics and enhanced the possibilities for progressive change. Despite a despicable record on civil rights for
African Americans, Wilson is generally well regarded by American historians.
Their assessment is due in part to Wilson’s activist position on presidential
power. For instance, Wilson argued in 1907 that “the President is at liberty,
both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.”34
In light of these sentiments, it comes as no surprise that Wilson was comfortable with the notion of presidential prerogative power, as his actions during a violent coal strike in Colorado in 1914 reveal. Wilson dispatched the U.S.
military to restore order after violence threatened to spiral out of control in
the wake of the “Ludlow Massacre” in which nineteen people were killed in
April of that year, including two women and eleven children. Wilson’s instructions to the military could have been written by Alexander Hamilton
or Thomas Jefferson: “The measure of your authority is what necessity dictates.” Basic rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, including the Second
Amendment’s right to bear arms, were suspended by the U.S. forces in the
occupied area, which covered well over 400 square miles of the state. The
military ordered the deportation of strikebreakers from the region; state militia forces were ordered to disarm; local government was, for all practical
purposes, shut down; private citizens were ordered to turn in their weapons;
and saloons were ordered shut. While addressing a group of strikers, one U.S.
officer said, “When the United States speaks it is a matter of serious moment.
The President of the United States must be obeyed. We have soldiers and
officers here to see that he is obeyed.” Order was eventually restored to the
region, fulfilling Wilson’s objective “that no person . . . shall be permitted to
do that which may give rise to disorder.”35
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 35 ]
During his second term in office, while presiding over America’s entry
into World War I, Wilson followed through on his expansive view of presidential power, suppressing domestic dissent and subversion in a manner that
exceeded Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams. Interestingly, none of this has kept
Wilson out of the top echelon of the rankings of America’s greatest presidents. Earlier presidents had violated the civil liberties of the citizenry in
times of emergency, but the Wilson administration was the first to create
what might be called the modern American national security state. The bureaucratization of a federal security apparatus was something of a change,
for, prior to Wilson, American presidents had largely relied on “free lancers”
or responded to passing threats and then dismantled the assembled federal
force designed to meet the threat. The bureaucratization of the federal security apparatus was rooted in Wilson’s belief in an activist federal government
supported by a professional administrative apparatus. Wilson noted in 1919:
You have got to think of the President of the United States, not as the chief
counsellor of the Nation, elected for a little while, but as a man meant constantly and every day to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy
of the United States, ready to order them to any part of the world where
the threat of war is a menace to his own people. And you cannot do that
under free debate. You cannot do that under public counsel. Plans must be
kept secret. Knowledge must be accumulated by a system which we have
condemned, because it is a spying system. The more polite call it a system
of intelligence. You cannot watch other nations with your unassisted eye.
You have to watch them with secret agencies planted everywhere.36
Some 2,168 Americans were prosecuted under the controversial sedition
and espionage acts that Wilson signed into law, including socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.37 Debs was convicted and sentenced to
ten years in prison for voicing his support for Americans who resisted the
draft. Domestic mail was routinely opened and sometimes confiscated, and
newspapers with an antiwar or socialist slant were harassed or shut down.
Foreign-language magazines had to submit prepublication copies of their articles translated into English for U.S. government approval. Wilson remained
silent or in some cases encouraged the aggressive approach taken by two of
his attorneys general, Thomas W. Gregory and A. Mitchell Palmer, and his
postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson. Wilson occasionally urged his subordinates to act with moderation, but on the whole he gave them free rein
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[ 36 ] chap ter one
to suppress antiwar dissent and labor agitation. Unlike Bush, Wilson truly
condoned “chilling” actions: For instance, he urged Attorney General Gregory to indict the editor of the Kansas City Star in 1918. Wilson overruled the
zealous Burleson only once, when his censorship czar tried to ban the magazine The Nation from the U.S. mail. Notwithstanding the attempt by some
of his defenders in the academic community to downplay his role, Wilson
undoubtedly set the tone of his government’s security-conscious approach.
In his request for a declaration of war against Germany, Wilson observed that
Germany,
from the very outset of the present war[,] . . . has filled our unsuspecting
communities and even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of counsel, our
peace within and without, our industries and our commerce.
There were millions of German Americans in the country, and “most of
them,” he said, were
as true and loyal Americans as if they had never known any other fealty or
allegiance. They will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining the few who may be of a different mind and purpose. If there should be
disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of stern repression; but, if it lifts
its head at all, it will lift it only here and there and without countenance
except from a lawless and malignant few.38
The Wilson administration also encouraged, or turned a blind eye toward,
the actions of local citizens groups aiming to suppress antiwar activists and
labor agitators. The most notorious of these, the American Protective League
(APL), worked in concert with the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (soon to be called the Federal Bureau of Investigation) to inform on various “disloyal” Americans. The 250,000-member APL became an “officially
recognized auxiliary” under the control of the various U.S. attorneys scattered throughout the nation. Wilson was informed of this arrangement, and
although he expressed some concerns to Attorney General Gregory about the
APL, he did not terminate the information-sharing program. At one point in
1917, the attorney general proclaimed that “those disloyal persons and moral
and physical degenerates who believe nothing [is] worth fighting for” should
be prepared to face “an avenging government.”39 Wilson remained largely silent in the face of some of the atrocities that occurred, including the lynching
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 37 ]
of a German American citizen in 1918, Robert Prager, an Illinois coal miner40
(it should be noted that Wilson had a penchant for ignoring the problem of
lynching).
As a prominent historian of Wilson’s civil liberties record observed, the
twenty-eighth president “was frequently harshly critical of the groups accused of disloyalty when he referred to them in his public addresses. . . . His
abdication of personal responsibility left the fate of civil liberties to subordinate officials . . . and the public, at a time when few were inclined to be
moderate.”41 Wilson’s government remained an “avenging” force in American life even after the armistice of November 1918 brought the war to a close.
As late as December 1919, Wilson urged Congress to pass a sedition bill to
confront the rising tide of Bolshevism, and he refused to sign legislation that
would have shut down some of the emergency wartime measures zealously
enforced by Burleson, Gregory, and the latter’s successor, A. Mitchell Palmer,
of the infamous Palmer Raids. Wilson was also stingy with applications for
clemency from those who had been subjected to his administration’s disloyalty dragnet. Even hardliners such as Attorney General Palmer urged him to
grant pardons for persons convicted under the espionage and sedition acts,
but the president refused. Wilson was especially vindictive toward Eugene
Debs, whom Palmer, along with countless labor leaders and liberal members of Wilson’s “New Freedom” coalition, urged Wilson to pardon. Across
Palmer’s January 1921 plea for Debs’s pardon, the embittered president wrote
simply “Denied. W.W.”42 It would fall to Wilson’s beleaguered successor,
Warren G. Harding, to pardon Debs.
It is worth noting that the lowly Harding is often at rock bottom on those
lists of presidential greatness, in the august company of George W. Bush. Part
of this is due to the fact that Harding had a problem with the “vision thing”
and lacked those elements of cosmopolitanism so important to progressive
intellectuals. And yet this bête noire of progressives was far more advanced
on civil rights and civil liberties than his racist predecessor, who is repeatedly
ranked as a “great” or “near great” president. In C-Span’s 2009 Historians
Presidential Leadership Survey, released in February 2009, Wilson ranked
ninth overall in presidential “leadership,” down from sixth in 2000.43
Woodrow Wilson’s hold on the American imagination, bolstered by his
Nobel Peace Prize, continues to this day, especially among academics and
supporters of international institutions such as the United Nations. “I am
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[ 38 ] chap ter one
in complete sympathy with Wilson’s broad program and with his vision
for the future,” wrote Thomas A. Bailey, a prominent diplomatic historian
at Stanford University. The primary keeper of the Wilson flame was his biographer Arthur S. Link, a professor of history at Princeton and onetime
president of the American Historical Association. Wilson, according to Link,
laid “the foundations of a new world order.” Pulitzer Prize–winning author
David Kennedy noted that “Woodrow Wilson matters because he is one of
the shapers of the modern presidency.” Wilson understood “that the president, as he put it himself, is free to be as big a man as he can be.” Columbia
professor Ira Katznelson echoed Kennedy by noting that Wilson’s presidency
was a time of “extraordinary new assertion of governmental capacity . . . as
well as presidential ambition.”44
Undoubtedly, Woodrow Wilson was a significant American president. He
transformed the presidency and contributed to the rise of America as a world
power. But his progressive admirers seem inclined to downplay his record on
civil rights and civil liberties,45 while many of these same individuals condemn the Bush presidency for offenses far less onerous than Wilson’s. They
would do well to note that Wilson’s interpretation of presidential power
and his internal security measures make Cheney and Bush look like charter
members of the American Civil Liberties Union. As for believing in the unitary theory of presidential power, no one said it better than Woodrow Wilson
himself: The presidency “is anything he [the president] has the sagacity and
force to make it.”46
Wilson “popularized” the presidency, moving it away from its constitutional moorings in order to provide the kind of visionary leadership he believed was essential to enacting a progressive agenda for twentieth-century
America. Wilson believed that the cumbersome system of separation of powers, while appropriate for 1787, was outmoded in the industrialized world.
He sought to redefine the presidency, and the entire American government,
by enhancing the power of the chief executive through extra-constitutional
means, including assuming the role of party leader and national spokesman.
In circumventing the constitutional barriers to effective, energetic leadership,
Wilson was ensuring, as he put it, that “the president can never again be the
mere domestic figure he has been throughout so large a part of our history.
. . . Our president must always, henceforth, be one of the great powers of the
world.”47 The Wilson model was followed by his progressive successors in
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 39 ]
the White House, while most of the opposition to his conception of executive power came from conservative Republicans and those who adhered to a
strict reading of the Constitution’s Article II powers. The dangers of defining
the office in terms of the president’s ability to muster all the “sagacity and
force” at his disposal were ignored by those who embraced the economic
and social reforms of Wilson as well as those of his ideological heir, Franklin
Roosevelt. As we will see, it was only when assertive Republican presidents
such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush applied Wilsonian principles and practices to their exercise of power that many progressives experienced a change of heart.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: We Have Nothing to Fear
but German and Japanese Saboteurs
Franklin Roosevelt is in select company in the pantheon of presidential
“greats,” frequently joining George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the
exclusive “top three.” Faced with the Great Depression and World War II,
Roosevelt brought the nation through some of its most trying times. Yet, like
Wilson, Roosevelt’s record on internal security issues is checkered at best.
During FDR’s presidency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation became a major presence in American life, viewing as part of its portfolio the monitoring
of domestic dissenters, most of whom were American citizens. Roosevelt encouraged J. Edgar Hoover to move the bureau in this direction, and the FBI
director eagerly embraced this role. Hoover, in return, provided Roosevelt
with intelligence updates on his critics in the news media, on the Republican
Party, and on many who were opposed to America’s entry into World War
II. Hoover and FDR were far from ideological soul mates; nevertheless, a
large-scale surveillance program begun in 1936 gradually transformed the
FBI into “the intelligence arm of the White House.” Hoover fed Roosevelt’s
appetite for political intelligence, while Roosevelt referred domestic critics to
Hoover’s attention, including those who had the audacity to send letters to
the White House criticizing Roosevelt’s “fireside chats.”
A primary target of the FBI was the nation’s news media, especially
Roosevelt’s isolationist critics, with particular focus placed on editors and
publishers of conservative newspapers hostile to Roosevelt’s policies. In a letter to his attorney general in 1942, Roosevelt urged the FBI to investigate a
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publication called The Hour, for “there is absolutely no valid reason why any
suspected subversive activities on their part should not be investigated by the
Department of Justice.” Roosevelt repeatedly urged J. Edgar Hoover to move
“against publishers of seditious matter,” displaying an utter disregard for the
First Amendment to the Constitution — a disregard that, in a conservative
president, would have doomed him to eternal damnation in the eyes of presidential scholars.48
It comes as no surprise then that Roosevelt was equally unconcerned with
the due process rights of Americans involved in the infamous 1942 Nazi saboteur case. It involved eight men who had arrived on a Florida beach via German submarine. They had not yet committed any acts of sabotage, though
they had been trained in Germany to do so. FDR made it clear that he wanted
a guilty verdict and wanted the saboteurs executed. He created military tribunals for the captured Nazis, and the tribunals acted swiftly. The saboteurs
were rounded up by the FBI at the end of June 1942, and by August 8, six of
them had died in the electric chair. The other two, including an American
citizen, had informed on them. One of the six who received the death sentence, Herbert Haupt, was also an American citizen. His parents were convicted of treason for not turning him into the authorities; ultimately, they
were deported to Germany. The American informant, Ernest Burger, had
turned his back on his citizenship by enlisting in the German army but had
had a change of heart when he reached America. His death sentence was
commuted to life in prison with hard labor.
FDR clearly stated his belief in the merits of military tribunals to his attorney general, Francis Biddle: “I want one thing clearly understood, Francis. . . .
I won’t give them up. . . . I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal
armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?” The president added that,
for the American citizens involved, it seemed to him that the death penalty
was “almost obligatory,” and that for the captured Germans a death sentence
was appropriate because of “the extreme gravity of the war aim and the very
existence of the American government.”49
Roosevelt made sure the Supreme Court justices knew that he would try to
have the captured terrorists executed by means of a military tribunal whether
the Supreme Court approved or not. There is also evidence that Roosevelt
“twisted some arms” to ensure that he received a unanimous opinion from
the Court sanctioning the tribunal (in Ex parte Quirin).50 The president
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 41 ]
remained engaged with the details of the trial through his attorney general,
who served as the government’s lead prosecutor in the case. FDR’s management of the military tribunal was extensive: The president appointed the key
officials who conducted the trial, or “show trial,” as one historian has called it,
and he controlled it through Biddle from beginning to end. The defense team
included Major Lausen Stone, who just happened to be the son of the chief
justice whose Court had just approved the military tribunal in Quirin.
The six men who were executed were buried in a potter’s field in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C.51 FDR was delighted when the death penalty was administered, regaling his confidants at dinner that evening with
various “macabre” jokes about other individuals who had met their maker in
a gruesome fashion.52
The Haupt family’s ordeal went on for some time. Including his parents,
six of his relatives and friends were prosecuted and convicted of treason. Five
of the six ultimately had their convictions overturned. The executed saboteur’s father and two others were originally sentenced to death for sheltering the saboteur prior to his capture by the FBI. The saboteur’s mother was
convicted of treason as well, although her conviction was one of the five later
overturned. Nonetheless, the saboteur’s mother was deported to Germany in
1946; the father, who had been convicted of treason in a retrial and sentenced
to life in prison, had his sentence commuted by President Truman and was
deported in 1947.53
The Nazi saboteur case would not be the only time an American citizen
would be tried by military tribunal during FDR’s presidency. In 1945, William
Colepaugh, a Connecticut-born man who defected to the Germans and returned to spy on his native land, was sentenced to be hanged (Roosevelt’s
preferred method of execution for spies and traitors); however, his life was
spared by President Truman three days after FDR died.54 According to the
FBI, despite Roosevelt’s concern about German-sponsored sabotage, “not
one instance [in World War II] was found of enemy-inspired sabotage. Every
suspect act traced to its source was the result of vandalism, pique, resentment, a desire for relief from boredom, the curiosity of children ‘to see what
would happen,’ or other personal motive.”55
At the same time, the territory of Hawaii was subjected to a form of martial law under FDR not seen since the Civil War, as historian Greg Robinson
has noted:
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[ 42 ] chap ter one
Army courts were part of the military government that took power in the
then Territory of Hawaii following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in
December 1941. Commanding General Walter Short (who browbeat the
civilian governor into approving unlimited martial law) declared himself
military governor, dissolved the elected legislature and suspended the U.S.
Constitution. The military regime proceeded over the following weeks to
issue decrees regulating all aspects of civilian life. Meanwhile, the army
closed down all civilian courts. When the courts reopened one week after
Pearl Harbor, they were restricted to considering civil cases; a network of
military commissions and provost courts was established to try all criminal
cases. . . . Juries were forbidden and lawyers discouraged or even barred.
The courts were effectively rigged against defendants. Of the 22,480 trials
conducted in provost court in Honolulu in 1942–1943, 99 percent ended in
convictions. . . . Judges frequently issued severe sentences, including imprisonment and hard labor, for trivial offenses, and no machinery existed
for appeals.
FDR waited until October 1944 before ending martial law in Hawaii, while
the Supreme Court, as was its traditional practice, waited until after the conflict concluded, overturning the practices of Hawaii’s military government
in 1946.56
Much of this pales in comparison to FDR’s well-known Executive Order 9066 of February 19, 1942, which led to the internment of thousands of
American citizens of Japanese descent, and some German Americans as well.
Approximately 120,000 people, of whom 80,000 were American citizens,
were evacuated from locations designated as military areas (essentially the
entire West Coast of the United States) under FDR’s order, even though no
charges were brought against these citizens and they could not appeal their
detention. The Supreme Court endorsed FDR’s actions, which, while depriving these citizens of their basic constitutional rights, also cost them most of
their personal property, estimated at $2.8 billion. Income losses amounted
to some $5.8 billion in 2009 dollars.57 J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General
Francis Biddle opposed FDR’s executive order on the grounds that, as Biddle
put it, it was “ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel.”58 Eleanor
Roosevelt was also opposed to the internment policy, but the president ignored his wife’s opposition. He remained unbowed, arguing that military
necessity demanded such a move, although his military advisers were divided
on the issue.
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 43 ]
Indeed, there was far more military activity on the East Coast involving
German submarines than there was on the West Coast involving Japanese
submarines. Francis Biddle commented on the lack of a similar order for the
East Coast, which would have involved large-scale evacuations of German
and Italian Americans: “The decisions were made not on the logic of events
or on the weight of evidence, but on the racial prejudice that seemed to be
influencing everyone.” The president himself seemed to believe some of the
wackier conspiracy theories circulating at the time, informing his Cabinet in
early 1942 that “friends of his” who had traveled to the Baja region of Mexico
had discovered secret Japanese air bases that could be used in attacks on California.59 It was not until President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties
Act of 1988, formally apologizing on behalf of the U.S. government to the
Americans who had been forcibly relocated, and making a onetime payment
of $20,000 to the survivors, that this episode was brought to a close.60
Like Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt believed in the unitary theory of executive power; in fact, Roosevelt is the poster boy for an activist presidency of
almost unlimited power, and as such he is often hailed by presidential scholars for his robust leadership of the nation in times of crisis. Needless to say,
his broad conception of presidential power went far beyond that of George
W. Bush. For instance, in 1942, Roosevelt requested that the Congress grant
him the authority to impose wage and price controls in an effort to contain
wartime inflation: “I ask the Congress to take . . . action by the first of October. Inaction on your part by that date will leave me with an inescapable
responsibility to the people of this country to see to it that the war effort is
no longer imperiled by threat of economic chaos.” If the Congress did not
meet FDR’s deadline, he would “accept the responsibility and I will act.” The
Congress acceded to FDR’s demands.61
Near the end of his presidency, in one of his last State of the Union messages, FDR told the nation that he would not allow the hard-won gains of
World War II to be lost in a return to the Republican policies of the 1920s.
Warning of the dangers of a “rightist reaction” in the United States, he called
for the support of “all clear-thinking businessmen [who] share his concern.”
“Indeed,” he said, “if such reaction should develop — if history were to repeat
itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s — then
it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the
battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at
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[ 44 ] chap ter one
home.”62 This divisive, highly charged language in the midst of a conflict
makes President George W. Bush’s partisanship appear to be the essence of
magnanimity.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt remains a hero to many Americans and continues to fascinate students of the nation’s history. But his record on civil
liberties and political dissent in times of crisis is a grim one, and it puts a lie
to the notion that there was something new, something uniquely egregious,
about the post-9/11 security policies of George W. Bush.
John F. Kennedy: “Will No One Rid Me of This
Turbulent Priest?”63
John F. Kennedy’s view of the presidency was no less sweeping and assertive
than that of Woodrow Wilson or FDR. His campaign for president in 1960
was an attempt to restore vigor to an office that had, in his view, become a
passive bystander as a result of the “detached, limited” concept of presidential power held by Dwight D. Eisenhower. In a speech to the National Press
Club in January 1960, Kennedy argued that the president must be “the chief
executive in every sense of the word. He must be prepared to exercise the fullest powers of his office — all that are specified and some that are not.”64
Kennedy presided over the height of America’s involvement in the Cold
War, typified by the showdown in Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Building on the practices of President Eisenhower, he elevated covert action to the
centerpiece of a foreign policy designed to get the nation moving again in
its “long twilight struggle” with the Kremlin. In his final debate with Republican candidate Richard Nixon, who was vice president under Eisenhower,
JFK said, “The Communists have been moving with vigor — Laos, Africa,
Cuba — all around the world today they’re on the move. I think we have to
revitalize our society. I think we have to demonstrate to the people of the
world that we’re determined in this free country of ours to be first — not first
if, and not first but, and not first when — but first.”65 Kennedy made Eisenhower’s alleged complacency regarding the Soviets a key issue in his campaign against Nixon, calling for the use of “fighters for freedom” to overthrow
Castro. He jokingly told a campaign aide that he had no qualms about doing
so, since “they [the Republicans] never told us how they would have saved
China.”66
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 45 ]
There were no internal security situations during Kennedy’s short term in
office comparable to those faced by Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. However, he did
view the situation in Cuba as a grave national security concern, and under that
pressure he opted for an unusual method of attempting to remove Castro and
his government from power. For Kennedy, Cuba was an embarrassing symbol
of the passivity of the U.S. government; Eisenhower’s failure to prevent a Soviet
incursion into the Western Hemisphere was a testament to the nation’s inability to enforce the cherished Monroe Doctrine. If he could reverse this failure he
could, with one dramatic action, prove that the United States was on the move
again, willing, as he said in his inaugural address, to “pay any price, bear any
burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.”
Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs operation, which ended disastrously
in April 1961, and in the aftermath of that failure pursued a more covert and
more robust policy of sabotage and assassination. At a rally in the Orange
Bowl in Miami in December 1962, in front of veterans of the Bay of Pigs
fiasco, Kennedy boasted, “I can assure you that this [brigade] flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.”67 How this pledge would be fulfilled
was a mystery at the time, but no longer.
The Central Intelligence Agency had entered the assassination business
under President Eisenhower, who, perhaps from his experience in World War
II, coupled with his belief in covert operations as an inexpensive way to assert
American power, appears to have approved a number of plots against various
Third World leaders with alleged pro-Soviet leanings. After the failure at the
Bay of Pigs, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was put in charge of the effort
to remove Castro, code-named “Operation Mongoose.” Shortly after RFK’s
appointment in November 1961, Richard Bissell, one of the architects of the
Bay of Pigs, told his deputy that he had been “chewed out” by the president
and the attorney general for “sitting on his ass and not doing anything about
getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime.” The aide later testified that
“there was no limitation of any kind. Nothing was forbidden, nothing was
withheld.” Regarding the pressure from RFK to remove Castro, the aide later
added, “It was unbelievable. I have never been in anything like that before or
since and I don’t ever want to go through that again.”
Later that same month the president issued a memorandum stating: “We
will use our available assets to go ahead with the discussed project in order
to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime.” Robert Kennedy reiterated
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[ 46 ] chap ter one
the high priority this held for the president early in 1962: “The solution to
the Cuban problem . . . [was] top priority. . . . It’s got to be done and will be
done.” These discussions occurred at the same time the administration began
contingency planning for dealing with a Cuba in which “Castro would in
some way or other be removed from the Cuban scene.”68
Richard Helms was one of the CIA’s point men for Mongoose and later
testified that “it was made abundantly clear to everyone involved in the operation that the desire was to get rid of the Castro regime and to get rid of
Castro. No limitations were put on this injunction.” Helms stated that the
attorney general “would not have been unhappy if [Castro] had disappeared
off the scene by whatever means.” The pressure from Robert Kennedy to remove Castro from power was like “white heat,” according to Helms.69 Robert
Kennedy viewed the Bay of Pigs as an “insult that had to be redressed,” and
he ensured that Mongoose received all of the funding it needed to carry out
its campaign of sabotage and terror against the Cubans. Mongoose was one
of the largest covert operations in the history of the CIA, ultimately involving
“four hundred agents, [and] an annual budget of over $50 million.”70 Organized crime played a role in this effort, having been brought into the fold at
the end of Eisenhower’s presidency; Robert Kennedy was informed of the
mob’s involvement on May 22, 1961, by J. Edgar Hoover.71
The notion of a “rogue CIA” (a term coined by former Idaho senator
Frank Church), acting beyond the control of the president, was put forward
by many of JFK’s defenders, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. But those who
were involved with Mongoose, including Richard Helms, the CIA’s deputy director for plans; Ray Cline, its deputy director for intelligence; and U. Alexis
Johnson, the State Department’s Mongoose point man, had no doubt that
the agency was doing the president’s bidding. As Cline put it in the context
of the times, “the assassination of Castro by a Cuban . . . might have been
viewed as not very different in the benefits that would have accrued from
the assassination of Hitler in 1944.” Johnson added, “There was never, to my
knowledge, any foundation for charges of free wheeling by the CIA.”72
Although no “smoking gun” exists to prove that JFK gave the green light
for assassinating Castro, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. The
best-case scenario for Kennedy acolytes was that the president was unaware
of the numerous attempts to kill Castro during his presidency. The matter
would thus have been an egregious example of executive negligence, similar
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 47 ]
to the Iran-Contra affair under President Reagan. But this theory strains credulity. Unlike Reagan, Kennedy was not a delegator. The absence of a direct
paper trail to the president proves little except that the Castro assassination
plots were conducted in such a way as to give JFK plausible deniability should
the operation be exposed, for the president of the United States could not be
linked to a murder plot. In the end, the Church Committee, which investigated the CIA in the mid-1970s, concluded that there were “at least” eight assassination plots directed at Castro between 1960 and 1965.73 The notion of a
“rogue CIA” was first used during the Church Committee hearings to protect
the reputation of two popular presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F.
Kennedy, and to allow Congress to deny any acquiescence on their part and
to preserve the myth of its own ignorance of CIA “abuses.”
The most persuasive piece of evidence linking JFK directly to Mongoose
involved a meeting in the Oval Office on March 16, 1962, in which President
Kennedy met with some of the key figures involved with formulating and
implementing the operation. At this meeting Robert Kennedy mentioned
a potential opportunity involving Castro that had all of the indications of
an attempted assassination of the dictator. Apparently a farm in Cuba once
owned by the American writer Ernest Hemingway was seen as a possible
site for an assassination. It was thought that Castro could be lured to the
“Hemingway Shrine.” According to a “memorandum for the record,” the operation involving this property was “so delicate and sensitive” that it could
not be revealed to anyone who was not part of the group that gathered in the
Oval Office that day until they “were ready to go.” The memorandum was
written shortly after the meeting by the CIA’s Mongoose operative, Brigadier
General Edward Lansdale, who was known to be someone who took “solid
notes — very accurate.” All of the matters discussed in that meeting, according to Lansdale, pertained to “fractioning the regime.” As Peter Kornbluth
at the National Security Archive has noted, the memo “is the closest thing
to a smoking gun that has been declassified. Only assassination would be
taboo for open discussion” among a larger group of advisers “who routinely
planned sabotage, violence and chaos to undermine Castro.” One former
CIA director, commenting years later, said that “the language of the memo
speaks for itself. The only thing Robert Kennedy can be referring to is the assassination of Castro. This paragraph [Lansdale’s memo] should never have
been written.”74
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[ 48 ] chap ter one
Despite the preponderance of evidence that President Kennedy approved
the liquidation of Fidel Castro, or, as mentioned above, was involved in one
of the greatest instances of presidential negligence in the history of the office,
he remains an admired figure among presidential scholars and the American
public. A Gallup poll of Americans taken in 2008 ranked JFK at the top of
the list in terms of presidents respondents wished they “could bring back”
to be the next president. JFK came in at 23 percent, followed by Ronald Reagan with 22 percent, Bill Clinton at 13 percent, and Abraham Lincoln at 10
percent.75 The 2009 C-Span presidential leadership survey ranked President
Kennedy sixth overall, ahead of luminaries such as Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, and Eisenhower.76
The evidence indicates that John F. Kennedy’s understanding of the national security powers of his office, which was shared by President Eisenhower,
included the use of extraordinary measures such as sabotage, assassination,
and various other “black arts.” Interestingly, despite the overwhelming evidence of Kennedy’s belief in the utility of these tools, some of his primary
defenders are leading lights in the history profession who believe that George
W. Bush was a clear and present danger to the Constitution and to the rule
of law. If waterboarding and warrantless wiretapping against captured terrorists or their domestic contacts represented a threat to the Constitution,
where does plotting assassination stand in the pecking order of presidential
lawlessness? At first glance one would imagine that it would rank quite high,
but a reading of the works of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Robert Dallek, and Sean
Wilentz, along with others who cling to the gauzy myths of “Camelot,” indicates otherwise. Schlesinger would have us believe that the Kennedy brothers
would have never countenanced assassination as a tool of American foreign
policy, for the brothers were, he contended, “so filled with love of life and so
conscious of the ironies of history.”77
Schlesinger contended, and rightly so, that it was Eisenhower who first engaged organized crime to eliminate Castro, and that it was Eisenhower who
planned the initial version of what would become the Bay of Pigs operation.
But he also argued that it was a rogue CIA that attempted to kill Castro under
Kennedy.78 Schlesinger frequently replied to media accounts that blamed the
Kennedy brothers for plotting assassination by seeking clarifications or corrections, and he met with some success. He succeeded in 1998 in getting the
New York Times to publish a correction stating that while some “historians
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bush’s role mo de ls [ 49 ]
and officials with knowledge of intelligence matters . . . have asserted” that
JFK ordered Castro’s assassination, “others, also close to the President, dispute their account.”79
Robert Dallek, in An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963, acknowledged President Kennedy’s awareness of and “account[ability]” for the assassination plotting, but he put the onus for the schemes on an “emotional,
messianic” Robert Kennedy rather than on the “dispassionate” president,
who, he said, saw the plots as “counterproductive.” Dallek concluded his
book by noting that John F. Kennedy’s “thousand days spoke to the country’s
better angels, inspired visions of a less divisive nation and world, and demonstrated that America was still the last best hope of mankind.”80 As for George
W. Bush, he, like Richard Nixon, dragged the nation through another round
of “anguish about an imperial presidency,” and, Dallek added, “I have my
biases in this case. . . . They are distinctly negative about Mr. Bush because I
think he’s abused power.” Dallek’s definition of an imperial presidency seems
remarkably ill-defined; it is unclear how Bush’s tactics in the War on Terror
could trump assassination plotting as the defining feature of the abuse of
power.81
Sean Wilentz endorsed Schlesinger’s narrative that President Kennedy
grew in office, that after the Bay of Pigs he effectively restrained the Pentagon
and “established firm control of his own intelligence service.” Wilentz argued
that the “counter-Camelot myth,” which says that Kennedy was a “reckless
cold warrior, knee-deep in conspiracies against Fidel Castro,” is “false,” as
“abundant historical evidence shows.”82 It should be noted that even the limited evidence released to date by a protective Kennedy family, which controls
access to the most relevant historical materials on this subject, points to the
contrary. (Robert Kennedy’s son Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy controls
the access to RFK’s most sensitive papers related to Cuba at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Many of the most important papers remain out of
reach despite the passage of half a century.)83 As recently as 2002, a skeptical
Evan Thomas, in Robert Kennedy: His Life, noted that “[Robert] Kennedy’s
closest aides flatly denied that he ever ordered an assassination or discussed
the possibility,” but this reveals only that the stonewalling among Kennedy
confidants continues.84 Ted Sorensen, a former JFK aide and longtime Kennedy defender, claimed that the CIA misunderstood JFK’s interest in overthrowing Castro. JFK “didn’t mean he [Castro] ought to be assassinated.
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[ 50 ] chap ter one
And for the CIA to assume that meant assassination only showed they didn’t
know John F. Kennedy very well. It was against his . . . moral principles, his
conscience.” Sorensen would later add, in a veiled swipe at President Bush,
that “John Kennedy believed in international law. . . . He never would have
dreamed of a unilateral, pre-emptive invasion of another country.”85 Those
who recall the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose may differ with Sorensen regarding Kennedy’s fidelity to international law.
John F. Kennedy was a fascinating figure, and his hold on the American
imagination persists to this day. But the myth spun by Arthur Schlesinger,
Ted Sorensen, Sean Wilentz, and others that the Kennedys were innocent bystanders while a rogue CIA plotted to kill Castro is a disservice to history,
an attempt to deny the reality that even progressive presidents will do what
they deem necessary to protect the security of the United States, including
plotting assassination. The continuing reluctance on the part of some progressive politicians and academics to acknowledge this fact is somewhat understandable, for it would require abandoning a cherished notion — that it is
conservative presidents who trample the rule of law in the name of national
security.