1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Revisited

Presidential historian Robert Dallek as a long piece in Smithsonian about the evolution of the President’s control of foreign policy. Dallek’s article focuses much on the Kennedy Administration which shows how the “imperial” presidency started taking shape. But Dallek drifts back to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and up to Barack Obama. On Harry Truman:

But Truman would learn a paradoxical, and in his case bitter, corollary: with greater power, the president also had a greater need to win popular backing for his policies. After the Korean War had become a stalemate, a majority of Americans described their country’s participation in the conflict as a mistake—and Truman’s approval ratings fell into the twenties.

Dallek writes about how Eisenhower learned from Truman’s mistakes. He then spends much time reviewing the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis and the beginnings of the Viet Nam war which I can only deduce forever changed the Presidency and its grasp of foreign policy.

The article ends with this quote from Kennedy advisor and historian Arthur Schlesinger and another from Theodore Roosevelt.

“The effective means of controlling the presidency lay less in law than in politics. For the American President ruled by influence; and the withdrawal of consent, by Congress, by the press, by public opinion, could bring any President down.” [Schlesinger]

“I think it [the presidency] should be a very powerful office and I think the president should be a very strong man who uses without hesitation every power that the position yields; but because of this fact I believe that he should be closely watched by the people [and] held to a strict accountability by them.” [Roosevelt]