The Emperor Is Dead—Long Live the Empire: The Enduring Legacy of the Imperial Presidency

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of two important texts on excessive presidential war power. The first, the War Powers Resolution, is the subject of this forum; it is still in effect today, though how effective it has actually been is a matter of debate. The second text celebrating its half-century is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s bestseller The Imperial Presidency, published in late 1973 to positive reviews and widespread cultural acceptance.¹ The influence of Schlesinger's book—or, more precisely, its title—is clear, and it has arguably had the more enduring effect on American understandings of executive war powers.

The Imperial Presidency has a basic thesis that is easy to understand: over time, beginning with the World War II era and accelerating rapidly in the early Cold War, the presidency sidelined Congress from its constitutionally defined role in foreign policy and military affairs. Before the 1940s, the White House and Capitol Hill had sometimes bickered but mostly respected each other's prerogatives and did not dare overstep their boundaries marked by the Constitution. There were exceptions, of course, and in some periods either the president or Congress might dominate, but on the whole the system worked. Things broke down in World War II, not because Franklin Roosevelt had an imperial disposition but because the unprecedented nature of the world crisis coincided with congressional isolationism, thus forcing FDR to experiment with imperfect means to achieve a necessary end, much as Abraham Lincoln had done during the Civil War. In normal times, such as after the Civil War, executive war powers quickly snapped back into place. But the globally existential challenges posed by Japan and Germany, and then by the Soviet Union and China, ensured that the presidency remained supreme in the conduct of war and diplomacy. “The new American approach to world affairs, nurtured in the sense of omnipresent crisis,” Schlesinger wrote, “set new political objectives, developed new military capabilities, devised new diplomatic techniques, invented new instruments of foreign operations and instituted a new hierarchy of values. Every one of these innovations encouraged the displacement of power, both practical and constitutional, from an increasingly acquiescent Congress into an increasingly imperial Presidency.”²

Schlesinger had never planned to write a book on the growth of presidential power; he was supposed to be writing a biography of Robert F. Kennedy but was finding it difficult to get motivated. By the spring of 1973, the unending nature of the war in Vietnam and the unfolding of the Watergate scandal had a combined effect on his outlook, and he resolved to ring the national alarm bell. Schlesinger was known for being prolific, but even by his standards, his work rate on The Imperial Presidency beggars belief. In March 1973, he began what was meant to be a pamphlet; by August, five months and 200,000 words later, he was finished and a major book of more than five hundred pages was published in November.³

Schlesinger's superhuman efforts paid off, and The Imperial Presidency was an instant success. In a lengthy, detailed review for the New York Times, Gary Wills confessed up front that while he had been skeptical Schlesinger could treat the subject with detachment, it was clear he had “done his homework for this book.” A decade later, Wills would pour scorn on Schlesinger as a sycophantic “honorary Kennedy” who would go “rather weak in the knees” at tales of John F. Kennedy's heroics, but in 1973 he praised The Imperial Presidency as “our best current book on the subject.”⁴ The Washington Post gave it an unequivocal rave.⁵ Scholars also lauded the book even if they could not resist pointing out, as Richard S. Kirkendall put it in the American Historical Review, that Schlesinger was writing “history for political purposes.”⁶ Even Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual gurus of the New Right and certainly no fan of Schlesinger's, found it “heartening” that such a high-profile chronicler of Democratic presidents could develop a “healthy apprehension” for unchecked government power.⁷

To be sure, Schlesinger's thesis was not exactly new. As political scientist Edward S. Corwin famously put it in 1940, by its very nature the Constitution is “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.”⁸ Corwin was not making an analytically original point; it was more an observation of something already widely recognized thanks to the battles of the 1930s with outcomes—the Neutrality Acts on one hand, the Supreme Court case United States v. Curtiss-Wright on the other—that pulled in opposite directions. In adjudicating Corwin's struggle, however, historians and political scientists mostly agreed with the Court's decision in Curtiss-Wright that the executive was “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations,” and that presidential primacy over war powers was a necessary evil in the nuclear age.⁹ As a strident critic of presidential authority and defender of congressional prerogatives, Corwin was a hostile exception to this presidential consensus, outnumbered by various theories of presidential leadership in foreign affairs by the likes of Charles E. Merriam, Harold Laski, Clinton Rossiter, James MacGregor Burns, and Richard Neustadt.¹⁰ Indeed, in defending Harry Truman's authority to go to war in Korea, Schlesinger himself had once been part of this chorus of presidential supremacists, leading Corwin to single him out as one of the “high-flying prerogative men” who enabled excessive presidential power.¹¹

But Vietnam and Watergate razed the presidential consensus to the ground, and Schlesinger's book, though timely, was not unusual.¹² In fact, Schlesinger had not even coined the phrase “imperial presidency.” In a searing critique of Kennedy's use of presidential power, published earlier in 1973, journalist Henry Fairlie had come close, portraying the chief executive as a “personal emperorship.”¹³ But Fairlie thought the president was an emperor because he headed an actual empire, not because the presidency itself had usurped, anomalously and unconstitutionally, the powers of the legislative branch. The honor of coining such a memorable phrase instead fell jointly to two critics of runaway executive war powers, both writing in 1972, a year before Schlesinger even began his book. First came New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, who started using it to refer to the Nixon White House in January 1972.¹⁴ Wicker was followed by Senator J. William Fulbright, a stern critic of the war who warned that the “Imperial Presidency” had become an “elected, executive dictatorship” with “serious, even dangerous shortcomings” stemming from Americans viewing the office “with something of the awe and reverence accorded to monarchs of an earlier age.”¹⁵

Still, it was the phenomenal success of Schlesinger's book that popularized the phrase “imperial presidency” and took it from obscurity to instant iconic status. Toward the end of 1973, for example, the president of the American Society of International Law confessed he was “haunted” by “this imperial presidency.”¹⁶ Partisans at the extremities of the political spectrum similarly pointed to the consequences of executive war power: on the left, Noam Chomsky feared the “centralizing power in an imperial presidency”; on the right, Irving Kristol warned of a sprawling, unaccountable “imperial presidency” bureaucracy—perhaps a forerunner to today's “deep state”—even as he chided liberals for once having encouraged this very sprawl in the face of conservative opposition to big government.¹⁷ Walter LaFeber, a historian of the New Left–influenced Wisconsin School that had once attracted Schlesinger's ire, later reflected, “I used The Imperial Presidency in my lecture course, my senior seminar and my graduate seminars. It was a very important book.”¹⁸ If the phrase is now commonplace, that is down to Schlesinger, and even if he is often uncredited, his influence on broader academic, political, and cultural understandings of the executive branch is palpable.¹⁹

By 1980, the chief executive seemed to be in full retreat. That year, Gerald Ford bemoaned, “We have not an imperial presidency, but an imperiled presidency” that was “harmful to our overall national interests.”²⁰ According to a second edition of The Imperial Presidency, published with a new epilogue in 1989, Ronald Reagan revived some but not all aspects of Nixon's national-security excess, and in 1998, with Bill Clinton “harried and enfeebled” by a special prosecutor, Schlesinger agreed that the imperial presidency was now dormant.²¹ A little over two years later, Michael Beschloss, the doyen of popular presidential history, definitively declared “the end of the imperial presidency.”²² This was clearly not the most astute prediction, as George W. Bush soon took the imperial presidency to new levels. The age of terror came as a profound shock to Schlesinger, who republished The Imperial Presidency in 2004 with a new introduction to take account of the “unprecedented, and at times unbearable, strain” Bush's war on terror placed on the Constitution.²³

Yet Schlesinger should not have been so shocked, for the seeds for this development were there all along. In the first edition of The Imperial Presidency, he confessed that, despite his book's provocative title, he did not worry about a strong executive per se, and he took pains to clarify that, while he did not want “a strong Presidency in general,” he did think the fast-moving crises of the modern age required “a strong Presidency within the Constitution.”²⁴ He believed that U.S. foreign policy required “vigorous presidential leadership,” even “presidential primacy,” just not “presidential supremacy.”²⁵ Not coincidentally, two of his heroes, Roosevelt and Kennedy, maintained their glowing reputations because, while they did as much as any president to concentrate war powers in the White House, they exercised their power responsibly in times of genuine national crisis.

Schlesinger's principal concern was thus the lack of constitutional legitimacy of a system in which the presidency had come to dominate the other two branches of government. Paraphrasing Lincoln, he argued that the “indispensable … principle was surely that no one man should have the power to send the nation into war.” Instead, the “decision to go to war must above all be made by Congress and the President together.”²⁶ What Schlesinger wanted in the machinery of foreign affairs, then, was what he wanted in all things political—a vital center in which neither extreme could prevail: “The American democracy must discover a middle ground between making the President a czar and making him a puppet.”²⁷ Thus for all its praise by conservatives like Kirk and radicals like Chomsky, The Imperial Presidency was still, at heart, a manifesto for vital-center liberalism.

Schlesinger walked a fine line, finer than his categorical title suggested, and this explains how he could devise a conceptually powerful tool to envision the president as an emperor yet also recoil from the legislative method to restrain the imperial presidency. In its drafting stages, he criticized the War Powers Resolution as imposing unsound, possibly even counterproductive, restraints on the presidency. While other critics of the presidency, such as Wicker, felt that Congress did not go nearly far enough in harnessing the executive, Schlesinger feared it had gone too far.²⁸

Schlesinger was correct about the War Powers Resolution's limitations—it was hardly a congressional “power to declare ‘peace,’” as some observers claimed—but not for the reasons he assumed.²⁹ Its limitations are not due to the discovery of some elusive constitutional equilibrium and the occasional resurgence in the midst of crisis, but because the nature of U.S. power projection in the world, as well as the national security state that makes it possible, have grown beyond what the Constitution can handle. Schlesinger's “strong Presidency within the Constitution” does in fact exist, but only because the latter has evolved to accommodate the former; if the imperial presidency endures, it is not simply because the executive has colonized congressional war powers, but because, as Fairlie pointed out, the United States itself has become a kind of empire. Just because it is different from the typology of colonialism a century ago does not mean it is any less of an empire—extraterritorial, perhaps, with a normative and regulatory basis, but an empire all the same.³⁰ Schlesinger actually realized this, even if he could not bring himself to admit the extent to which his Cold War liberalism had helped bring it about: the American president, he wrote, had become “the most absolute monarch … among the great powers of the world.”³¹

In the face of such power, which has seen not only the bipartisan militarization of U.S. foreign policy but a growing militarism within American society, tinkering on the margins with a congressional resolution can hardly suffice.³² As comforting as they feel, ad hoc congressional resolutions do not have nearly the same authority as the actual constitutional powers vested in Congress: a declaration of war and the power of the purse. Lawmakers may revoke resolutions for wars they regret, but that is just as symbolic as the passage of the resolution in the first place.³³ In being shoved aside, Congress has not exactly put up much of a fight beyond symbolic gestures. Perhaps this is unfair; maybe an imperial presidency is the inescapable fate for a superpower in the modern international system, and we should all just learn to live with it. But either way, as long as U.S. global interests remain expansive, and as long as “national security” threat-perception remains virtually limitless, the imperial presidency will endure.