Presidential Machismo: Executive Authority, Military Intervention, and Foreign Relations (review)

Presidential Machismo: Executive Authority, Military Intervention, and Foreign Relations. By Alexander DeConde (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2000) 391 pp. $40.00.

Presidential war making, both open and covert, along with related foreign-policy initiatives and domestic-security activities, has attracted significant attention from historians, political scientists, and academic lawyers since early in the twentieth century--especially from World War II onward. In Presidential Machismo, DeConde documents that both the practice of executive unilateralism and the political debate about it extend as far back as the first years under the Constitution, although recent presidents have more forthrightly avowed independent authority. He examines the record seriatim, president-by-president. James Garfield receives the least coverage (two sentences), and William Jefferson Clinton the most (twenty-five pages). Garfield aside, only John Adams and Herbert Hoover escape DeConde's censure, and in Adams' case, refusal to exploit the "Quasi-War" with France involved a degree of political calculation and emerged only after his own actions had helped stimulate war fever.

DeConde's treatment is largely descriptive and his methodology traditional. Drawing on an impressive range of secondary studies and a selection of printed primary sources, he demonstrates an eye for the apt quotation. Although specialists will find little new, his characterizations of differing presidential styles and rationales, such as Woodrow Wilson's moralism, Franklin Roosevelt's reliance on prerogative, and Ronald Reagan's mesmerizing simplifications, are on target and should reward the general reader. So too should DeConde's judgments about landmark events.

Even general readers, however, may rightly suspect that DeConde slights the Constitutional case to be made on behalf of presidential initiative. He somewhat uncritically accepts the Whiggish arguments of the present reviewer and others regarding an original understanding of war making and then uses their conclusions as a standard through the book. Likewise, he downplays distinctions between initiatives with arguably adequate Congressional sanction and those lacking authorization. Thus, for example, while DeConde includes John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 1993), in his bibliography, he fails to examine Ely's plausible distinction between the largely open war in Vietnam and the largely secret operations against Laos and Cambodia.

The book's title identifies DeConde's primary foray into interdisciplinary history. "Macho" and "machismo" regularly appear as terms of both description and psychological explanation. They refer to "a self-consciously tough individual who flaunts virility, disparages feminine behavior, and cherishes faith in manhood . . . [and they] connot[e] an exaggerated masculine pride, an admiration of physical aggressiveness, and an entitlement to dominate, associated often with military violence" (4-5). DeConde portrays American presidents as almost universally acting in a "macho" manner; he applies the terms and the underlying concept to such arguably different presidential approaches in the national-security arena as Theodore Roosevelt's and Wilson's and Jimmy Carter's and Reagan's. In recent decades the words themselves seem, too, to have been used increasingly by public and academic critics of presidential unilateralism.

Both the introduction and conclusion discuss the reasons for the persistence of presidential machismo. Not the least is its public appeal, as reflected in the polling data that the book's later chapters usefully mine for the period since the 1930s. DeConde also notes debates among social scientists about possible genetic and cultural roots of the behavior, but he resists any definitive or systematic evaluation of either the endurance of the trait or the explanatory power of the concept. Nor does he push far in distinguishing between machismo as a descriptive category and as an explanatory tool, or between machismo and related concepts (for example, a sense of the presidential office for its occupants, or patriotism for the public). This is not a theoretically or analytically heavy book, nor, I suspect, was it intended to be.

Charles A. Lofgren
Claremont McKenna College

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