Practicing History: Selected Essays

  The second reason, stemming perhaps from the age of television, is the growing tendency of the Chief Executive to form policy as a reflection of his personality and ego needs. Because his image can be projected before fifty or sixty or a hundred million people, the image takes over; it becomes an obsession. He must appear firm, he must appear dominant, he must never on any account appear “soft,” and by some magic transformation which he has come to believe in, he must make history’s list of “great” Presidents.

  While I have no pretensions to being a psychohistorian, even an ordinary citizen can see the symptoms of this disease in the White House since 1960, and its latest example in the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam. That disproportionate use of lethal force becomes less puzzling if it is seen as a gesture to exhibit the Commander-in-Chief ending the war with a bang, not a whimper.

  Personal government can get beyond control in the U.S. because the President is subject to no advisers who hold office independently of him. Cabinet ministers and agency chiefs and national-security advisers can be and are—as we have lately seen—hired and fired at whim, which means that they are without constitutional power. The result is that too much power and therefore too much risk has become subject to the idiosyncrasies of a single individual at the top, whoever he may be.

  Spreading the executive power among six eliminates dangerous challenges to the ego. Each of the six would be designated from the time of nomination as secretary of a specific department of government affairs, viz:

  1. Foreign, including military and CIA. (Military affairs should not, as at present, have a Cabinet-level office because the military ought to be solely an instrument of policy, never a policy-making body.)

  2. Financial, including Treasury, taxes, budget, and tariffs.

  3. Judicial, covering much the same as at present.

  4. Business (or Production and Trade), including Commerce, Transportation, and Agriculture.

  5. Physical Resources, including Interior, Parks, Forests, Conservation, and Environmental Protection.

  6. Human Affairs, including HEW, Labor, and the cultural endowments.

  It is imperative that the various executive agencies be incorporated under the authority of one or another of these departments.

  Cabinet government is a perfectly feasible operation. While this column was being written, the Australian Cabinet, which governs like the British by collective responsibility, overrode its Prime Minister on the issue of exporting sheep to China, and the West German Cabinet took emergency action on foreign-exchange control.

  The usual objection one hears in this country that a war emergency requires quick decision by one man seems to me invalid. Even in that case, no President acts without consultation. If he can summon the Joint Chiefs, so can a Chairman summon his Cabinet. Nor need the final decision be unilateral. Any belligerent action not clearly enough in the national interest to evoke unanimous or strong majority decision by the Cabinet ought not to be undertaken.

  How the slate would be chosen in the primaries is a complication yet to be resolved. And there is the drawback that Cabinet government could not satisfy the American craving for a father-image or hero or superstar. The only solution I can see to that problem would be to install a dynastic family in the White House for ceremonial purposes, or focus the craving entirely upon the entertainment world, or else to grow up.

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  New York Times, February 13, 1973.

  A Fear of the Remedy

  THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, fearing the advantage that incumbency would give Mr. Agnew in 1976, shrinks from the idea of impeachment. So do the Republicans, fearing the blow to their party. All of us shrink from the tensions and antagonisms that a trial of the President would generate. Yet this is the only means of terminating a misconducted Presidency that our system provides.

  If it is the sole means, then we should be prepared to undertake it, no matter how uncomfortable or inexpedient. Political expediency should not take precedence over decency in government.

  Fear of the remedy can be more dangerous in ultimate consequences than if we were to show ourselves capable of the nerve and the will to use a constitutional process when circumstances demand it. The show itself, if realistic, could well bring about the best solution: a voluntary termination of Mr. Nixon’s Presidency. This would be a boon to the country because the Nixon administration is already Humpty-Dumpty; it cannot be put together again credibly enough to govern effectively.

  The present crisis in government will not be resolved on the basis of whether or not Mr. Nixon can be legally proved to have personally shared in obstructing justice in the Watergate case. His administration has been shown to be pervaded by so much other malfeasance that the Watergate break-in is no more than an incident. To confine the issue to that narrow ground seems a serious error. Forget the tapes. What we are dealing with here is fundamental immorality.

  The Nixon administration, like any other, is an entity, a whole, for which he is responsible and from which he is indivisible. Its personnel, including those now under indictment, were selected and appointed by him, its conduct determined by him, its principles—or lack of them—derived from him. Enough illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral acts have already been revealed and even acknowledged to constitute impeachable grounds. The Domestic Intelligence Program of 1970, authorized by the President, and startling in its violation of the citizen’s rights, would alone be sufficient to disqualify him from office. Indeed, this item is the core of the problem, for it indicates not only the administration’s disregard for, but what almost seems its ignorance of, the Bill of Rights.

  The Dirty Tricks Department with its forgeries and frame-ups, burglaries and proposed firebombings, operated right out of the White House under the supervision of the President’s personal appointees. Is he separable from them? Key members of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, who have already pleaded guilty to perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice, were lent by or transferred from the White House. Is Mr. Nixon separable from them? Two of his former Cabinet officers are now awaiting judicial trial. Is he separable from them? His two closest advisers, his director of the FBI, his second nominee as Attorney General have all resigned under the pressure of mounting disclosures. Is he separable from them? Corrupt practice in the form of selling government favor to big business as in the case of ITT and the milk lobby have been his administration’s normal habit. Is he separable from that—or from the use of the taxpayer’s money to improve his private homes?

  Finally, under his authorization, the Pentagon carried on a secret and falsified bombing of Cambodia and lied about it to Congress, while the President himself lied to this country about respecting Cambodia’s neutrality. There will be no end to the revelations of misconduct because misconduct was standard operating procedure.

  In the light of this record, the question whether Mr. Nixon did or did not verbally implicate himself in the cover-up of Watergate is not of the essence. The acts that needed covering and the process of covering were performed by members of his administration.

  The lesson being taught to the country by Senator Ervin and his colleagues is an education itself. Next to letting the people know, the prosecution and legal punishment of individuals is secondary. Yet I wish the Senate select committee would enlarge its focus because the emphasis on documentary or tape-recorded proof contains perils. If, as is conceivable, the proof fails, we will be left with a government too compromised ever to be trusted and too damaged to recover authority. In such case an impotent or paralyzed government will, like Chiang Kai-shek’s, harden its monarchial or dictatorial tendencies, already well developed in the Nixon regime. Worse, we will have demonstrated for the benefit of Mr. Nixon’s successors what measure of cynicism and what deprivation of their liberties the American people are ready to tolerate. From there the slide into dictatorship is easy.

  At this time in world history when totalitarian government is in command of the two other largest powers, it is imperative fo
r the United States to preserve and restore to original principles our constitutional structure. The necessary step is for Congress and the American public to grasp the nettle of impeachment if we must.

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  New York Times, August 7, 1973.

  A Letter to the House of Representatives

  “THOSE WHO EXPECT TO REAP the blessings of freedom,” wrote Tom Paine, “must undergo like men the fatigue of supporting it.” In the affairs of a nation founded on the premise that its citizens possess certain “inalienable” rights, there comes a time when those rights must be defended against creeping authoritarianism. Liberty and authority exist in eternal stress, like the seashore and the sea. Executive authority is forever hungry; it is its nature to expand and usurp.

  To protect against that tendency, which is as old as history, the framers of our Constitution established three co-equal branches of government. In October 1973 we have come to the hour when that arrangement must be called upon to perform its function. Unless the Executive is brought into balance, the other two branches will dwindle into useless appendages. The judiciary has done its part; by defying it the President brought on the crisis. The fact that he reversed himself does not alter the fact that he tried, just as the fact that he reneged on the domestic-surveillance plan of 1970—a fundamental invasion of the Bill of Rights—does not cancel the fact that he earlier authorized it, nor does withdrawing from Cambodia cancel the fact of lying to the public about American intervention.

  The cause for impeachment remains, because President Nixon cannot change—and the American people cannot afford—the habit of illegality and abuse of executive power which has been normal to him. Responsibility for the outcome now rests upon the House of Representatives, which the framers entrusted with the duty of initiating the corrective process. If it does not bring the abuse of executive power to account, it will have laid a precedent of acquiescence—what the lawyers call constructive condonement—that will end by destroying the political system whose two-hundredth birthday we are about to celebrate.

  No group ever faced a more difficult task at a more delicate moment. We are in the midst of international crisis; we have no Vice-President; his nominated successor is suddenly seen, in the shadow of an empty Presidency, as hardly qualified to move up; the administration is beleaguered by scandal and criminal charges; public confidence is at low tide; partisan politics for 1976 are in everyone’s mind; and the impeachment process is feared as likely to be long and divisive and possibly paralyzing. Under the circumstances, hesitancy and ambivalence are natural.

  Yet the House must not evade the issue, for now as never before it is the hinge of our political fate. The combined forces of Congress and the judiciary are needed to curb the Executive because the Executive has the advantage of controlling all the agencies of government—including the military. The last should not be an unthinkable thought. The habit of authoritarianism, which the President has found so suitable, will slowly but surely draw a ruler, if cornered, to final dependence on the Army. That instinct already moved Mr. Nixon to call out the FBI to impound the evidence.

  I do not believe the dangers and difficulties of the situation should keep Congress from the test. Certainly the situation in the Middle East is full of perils, including some probably unforeseen. But I doubt if the Russians would seize the opportunity to jump us, should we become embroiled in impeachment. Not that I have much faith in nations learning from history; what they do learn is the lesson of the last war. To a would-be aggressor, the lesson of both world wars is not to count on the theory held by the Germans and Japanese that the United States, as a great lumbering mush-minded degenerate democracy, would be unable to mobilize itself in time to prevent their victory. I am sure this lesson is studiously taught in Russian General Staff courses.

  Nor should we be paralyzed by fear of exacerbating divisions within this country. We are divided anyway and always have been, as any independently minded people should be. Talk of unity is a pious fraud and a politician’s cliché. No people worth its salt is politically united. A nation in consensus is a nation ready for the grave.

  Moreover, I think we can forgo a long and malignant trial by the Senate. Once the House votes to impeach, that will be enough. Mr. Nixon, I believe, will resign rather than face an investigation and trial that he cannot stop. If the House can accomplish this, it will have vindicated the trust of the founders and made plain to every potential President that there are limits he may not exceed.

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  Washington Post, October 28, 1973.

  Defusing the Presidency

  THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY has become a greater risk than it is worth. The time has come to consider seriously the substitution of Cabinet government or some form of shared executive power.

  There is no use continually repeating that the form arranged by the Framers of the Constitution must serve forever unchanged. Monarchy too was once considered immutable and even divinely established, but it had to give way under changed conditions. The conditions of American executive power today, commanding agencies, techniques, and instruments unimaginable in the eighteenth century, no more resemble the conditions familiar to Jefferson and Madison than they do those under Hammurabi.

  The Framers may have been the most intelligent and far-seeing political men ever to operate at one time in our history, but they could not foretell the decline of the Congress. In too willing subservience it confirmed as Vice-President an appointee of an already discredited President and will doubtless do so again in the case of Nelson A. Rockefeller. The executive will then consist of an appointee and his appointee, which is not what the Framers designed. The checks and balances they devised are out of balance.

  For one brief euphoric moment when the House Judiciary Committee functioned, it seemed the system might have revived, but when the House failed to carry through a vote on impeachment and the Senate said nothing, the self-emasculation was completed. If lost virginity cannot be restored, neither can lost virility. I do not think the trend is toward righting the balance.

  The Presidency has gained too great a lead; it has bewitched the occupant, the press, and the public. While this process has been apparent from John F. Kennedy on, it took the strange transformation of good old open-Presidency Gerald R. Ford to make it clear that the villain is not the man but the office.

  Hardly had he settled in the ambiance of the White House than he began to talk like Louis XIV and behave like Richard M. Nixon. If there was one lesson to be learned from Watergate, it was the danger in over-use of the executive power and in interference with the judicial system. Within a month of taking office Mr. Ford has violated both at once. The swelling sense of personal absolutism shows in those disquieting remarks: “The ethical tone will be what I make it …,” “In this situation I am the final authority …,” and, in deciding to block the unfolding of legal procedure, “My conscience says it is my duty.…” Our judicial system can operate well enough without the dictate of Mr. Ford’s conscience. To be President is not to be czar.

  But Mr. Ford is not alone responsible. The press overplayed him as it overplayed John Kennedy and the absurd pretensions of Camelot. The New York Times published Mr. Ford’s picture twelve times on the front page in the first fourteen days of his tenure. Why? We all know what he looks like. But if it can be said that the press gives the public what it wants, then all of us are responsible. By packing our craving for father-worship into the same person who makes and executes policy—a system no other country uses—we have given too much greatness to the Presidency. It seizes hold of the occupant as we have seen it do with Mr. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Mr. Nixon. It has led Mr. Ford into an entirely unnecessary breach of our last rampart, the judicial process, an act that can only be explained as being either crooked—that is, by some undercover deal with his predecessor—or stupid. We cannot at this date afford either at the head of the American government.

  Nor is the Presidency getting first-rate men. The choice between can
didates in the last three elections has been dismal. Things now happen too fast to allow us time to wait until the system readjusts itself. The only way to defuse the Presidency and minimize the risk of a knave, a simpleton, or a despot exercising supreme authority without check or consultation is to divide the power and spread the responsibility. Constitutional change is not beyond our capacity.

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  New York Times, September 20, 1974.

  On Our Birthday—America as Idea

  THE UNITED STATES IS A NATION consciously conceived, not one that evolved slowly out of an ancient past. It was a planned idea of democracy, of liberty of conscience and pursuit of happiness. It was the promise of equality of opportunity and individual freedom within a just social order, as opposed to the restrictions and repressions of the Old World. In contrast to the militarism of Europe, it would renounce standing armies and “sheathe the desolating sword of war.” It was an experiment in Utopia to test the thesis that, given freedom, independence, and local self-government, people, in Kossuth’s words, “will in due time ripen into all the excellence and all the dignity of humanity.” It was a new life for the oppressed, it was enlightenment, it was optimism.