War and the American Presidency (review)

The first page of Arthur Schlesinger's latest book, War and the American Presidency, following the title, lists his other 17 books, a very impressive list that includes The Age of Jackson (1945); The Age of Roosevelt, a three-volume work published from 1957 to 1960; and A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965). One of the country's most distinguished American historians, Schlesinger has written a book that unfortunately deserves to be at the bottom of that list. In fact, the list would be more impressive if he left this work off of it entirely.

The book is a diatribe against Bush and his war in Iraq. It is strewn with invective:

• • "Given the Bush administration's purposeful drive toward the domination of the world, Adams [John Quincy] would not have been at all surprised by the wicked things Americans did at Abu Ghraib" (xiii).

• • "Looking back over the forty years of the Cold War, we can be everlastingly grateful that the loonies on both sides were powerless. By 2003, however, they ran the Pentagon, and preventive war—the Bush Doctrine—is now official policy" (23).

• • "Mr. Bush has led us into a ghastly mess—a 'quagmire'—as a result of his administration's spectacular incompetence in planning for the aftermath" (39).

• • "Since Ashcroft was presumably in favor of the Vietnam War, he joins the serried ranks of chickenhawks that adorn the second Bush presidency. In Vice President Cheney's felicitous phrase, the Bush chickenhawks had 'other priorities' than military service in Vietnam" (57).

• • "And yet the American presidency has come to see itself in messianic terms as the appointed savior of a world whose unpredictable dangers call for rapid and incessant deployment of men, arms, and decisions behind a wall of secrecy" (66).

Schlesinger's theses, which are presented in the first six chapters of this short seven-chapter book, are quite simple and straightforward. The unilateral actions of American presidents that commit troops to war, especially those initiated by the Bush administration in Iraq, are dangerous, unconstitutional, undemocratic, vainglorious, and ultimately self-defeating (chap. 1). The Bush Doctrine of Preventive War is wrong-headed, unpopular, sets a bad precedent for other countries and for other U.S. presidents, and is dependent upon information that the weapons of mass destruction fiasco suggests we did not have nor had the capacity to obtain (chap. 2). The Bush Doctrine and actions to support it revive all the worst features of the imperial presidency, undercutting the balance of powers that the framers so wisely wrote into the constitutional fabric of our governmental system (chap. 3). Discouraging and punishing dissent in the period leading up to and during a war are more unpatriotic and un-American than the content of any critical dissent is or would be (chap. 4). America needs to be more democratic in its selection of the president, and the way to accomplish this goal is to give a bonus of two electoral votes per state to the overall national popular vote winner (chap. 5). Schlesinger does not favor direct election of the president, which, he states, "would offer potent incentives to radical zealots (e.g., Ralph Nader), freelance media adventurers (e.g., Pat Buchanan), eccentric billionaires (e.g., Ross Perot), flamboyant characters (e.g., Jesse Ventura) to jump into presidential contests; incentives too to green parties, pro-choice parties, anti-gun-control parties, homosexual rights parties, prohibition parties, and so on down the single-issue line" (101). So much for the radical idea of one person, one vote! Finally, the author argues that Western-style democracy has undergone significant pressures generated by race relations, new communication technologies, and the inequities that a capitalistic economic system inevitably produces. Transplanting such a system to a non-Western culture is fraught with danger but also hope (chap. 6).

Schlesinger's final chapter, "The Inscrutability of History," is far more reflective, more academic, and less overtly directed at the policies and actions of the...