The Rise and Fall of Presidential Power?
by Patrick D. Reagan
Tennessee Technological University
preagan@tntech.edu
Presidential Power from
the New Deal to the New Right.
By Herbert S. Parmet. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company, 2002. 232 pp.
ISBN # 0-89464-837-3 $19.95 paperback.
Political
trends that seem obvious or inevitable at one point in time often look very
different at a later point in time. Just consider how our view of presidential
power since 1933 has changed over time.[1] After Franklin D. Roosevelt's
unprecedented election to the presidency four times, Republican activists so
feared for the future of the party, they fought hard for passage of the 22nd
Amendment (1951) limiting later candidates for that office to two terms. In the
wake of Richard Nixon's landslide reelection victory in 1972, Democrats worried
if the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, and FDR would ever recover. After
twelve years of Republican rule under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush,
Democrats turned to Bill Clinton, "the man from Hope," to revive the
party's fortunes. In the wake of Travelgate, Whitewater, and Monicagate,
Republicans rejoiced at the prospect of a George W. Bush landslide in 2000. Yet
Al Gore won the popular vote, only to lose the presidency over a month after
the election in the wake of a hotly disputed result decided by the U.S. Supreme
Court rather than the voting public or the electoral college. How often have we
heard about the rumored demise of one of the two major parties as a result of
major cultural, economic, demographic, political or regional shifts?
Most
historians and political scientists address this issue by examining changes in
the role, scope, institutional complexity, and power of the presidency. Our
twentieth-century creation myth centers on the rise of presidential power as a
result of the challenges of the Great Depression and World War II, leaving FDR
in one of the top spots of those perennial ratings polls by scholars discussed
with so much heat and so little light in the popular press. Politicians,
pundits, pedants, and pollsters note the rise of the modern presidency under
FDR, its consolidation under Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, and LBJ and its
devolution under Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton. From the positive state
created under the exigencies of depression and global war, the story moves on
to postwar prosperity and the revival of liberal reform in the 1960's, to the
end stage of political reaction with the rise of the New Right coalition
symbolized by the Reagan-Bush era. Denouement comes with the pale imitations of
a once-powerful executive branch under Clinton who promised that "the era
of big government is over."
Who
better to chronicle this story than one of our most prolific presidential
historians, Herbert S. Parmet, professor emeritus at the City University of New
York? While social and cultural historians emerged as the darlings among
academic historians after 1970 [2], the American reading public continued to
feast on massive biographies of U.S. presidents seen from either a very
personal perspective or the more traditional life and times narratives. Unlike
many fellow academics, Parmet has been a contrarian when it comes to
intellectual fashions. In 1968 while many in his generational cohort were
participating in social protest and leading the revisionist efforts of New Left
scholarship, Parmet published his first work on the 1940 presidential campaign
when FDR ran for an unprecedented third term against Republican moderate
Wendell Wilkie.[3] In 1972 when many Democrats bemoaned the fate of their party
in the wake of Richard Nixon's landslide reelection victory, Parmet published
one of the earliest revisionist biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower helping to
shape what has now become a floodtide of "I Like Ike" books.[4] In
1976, when many commentators were still examining the impact of the Watergate
scandal on Nixon's legacy, Parmet wrote a narrative history of the Democratic
party after FDR.[5] In the early 1980's as the country basked in the afterglow
of Ronald Reagan's election, scholars began trying to make sense of the New
Deal Democrat-turned-conservative Republican. Parmet researched the life and
times of John F. Kennedy, trying to bring light and balance to a raft of highly
critical revisionist works on JFK.[6] By 1990, as most Americans and historians
sought to make sense of the legacy of the conservative turn in national
politics under Reagan and Bush, Parmet published one of the first revisionist
works on Richard Nixon.[7] Shortly after the reelection of Bill Clinton in
1996, Parmet published what is still the only scholarly biography of George
H.W. Bush in print.[8] While Parmet built a professional reputation on
political history and biography against the grain of historiographical fashions
among scholars, he provided the reading public with some of the best
researched, well-written presidential biographies of post-1945 America. Little
wonder that publication of a short summary overview of the rise and fall of
presidential power by Parmet should engender high expectations.
Alas,
this 151-page extended essay by one of our most talented political historians,
complemented by twenty-six primary source documents, intended for an
undergraduate college student audience does not live up to those expectations.
In the course of seven chapters, Parmet provides a narrative history of the
rise and fall of presidential power from FDR through Nixon with a last chapter
on the New Right presidencies of Reagan and Bush.
Calling
FDR's tenure "the presidency reborn," Parmet details the domestic
achievements of New Deal reform with an all-too-often overlooked section on the
impact of the Supreme Court plan, the recession of 1937, the failed purge of
the Democratic party in the 1938 congressional elections, and the limits of executive
branch reorganization in 1939. He concludes that the American public
"understood that they were the beneficiaries of an activist government and
a chief executive whose primary attention was in adopting capitalism and the
market economy to make the system work." (p. 24). A second chapter on
"Dr. Win-the-War" examines the wartime mobilization, the debate over
the surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, FDR's conferences with Allied
leaders Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, Roosevelt's leadership as commander-in-chief,
and the elections of 1940 and 1944. Parmet argues that by the end of World War
II, the public had come "to accept the presidency as an institution
indispensable for fine-tuning the interests of both the domestic economy and
the mass of its citizens as well as matters of war and national security."
(p. 47).
While
emphasizing how different Truman and Eisenhower were from FDR, Parmet gives
high marks to Truman's leadership in domestic and foreign policy. McCarthyism,
intervention in the war in Korea, and declining public support over time left
Truman underappreciated at the end of his tenure. A chapter on
"Presidential Style, Ike's Way" nicely summaries his own and other
revisionist histories of a presidency that "held the line" in terms
of containing communism abroad while neither expanding nor contracting the
social welfare reforms of the New Deal era at home. The Eisenhower chapter is
one of the best in this book.
Surprisingly,
a chapter on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, entitled "the
Imperial Presidency," is the weakest section of the work. Rather than
build on his own superb works on Kennedy, Parmet marches quickly through the
Kennedy years with a series of vignettes on the inaugural address, the Bay of
Pigs, the Laotian crisis, the Berlin crisis, and the Cuban missile crisis in
hopscotch fashion that undergraduates will find confusing and incomplete. Using
intervention in Vietnam as the transition point from JFK to LBJ, Parmet takes
both presidents to task for ill-considered policies that had begun under
Eisenhower, only to become "the endless war." Johnson's obsession not
to become "the first American President to lose a war" (cited from a
conversation with news anchor David Brinkley, p. 108) made Vietnam the foreign
policy disaster that destroyed his Great Society reforms at home, the postwar
foreign policy consensus on anticommunist containment, and ultimately his
presidency. While focusing on Johnson's role in prosecuting the war in Vietnam
in the text, Parmet includes the May 22, 1964 speech on the Great Society at
the University of Michigan as the sole primary source for the LBJ presidency.
Almost nothing is said about the domestic reforms sponsored by Johnson in the
greatest outburst of domestic policy change since the New Deal (pp. 107-108).
While many historians argue that the election of 1968 proved to be a crucial
turning point,[9] Parmet gives no analysis about the meaning of 1968 for
presidential power, the shift in party dominance, or the consequences for later
two- and three-party politics.
In
the wake of a narrowly won 1968 election, Nixon began what Parmet calls
"the postmodern presidency," which is never defined, only to be
ensnared in the coils of the war in Vietnam, antiwar protest, and the Watergate
scandal. Gerald Ford receives short shrift in the chapter on Nixon as the
traditional post-Watergate caretaker president. Parmet views Jimmy Carter as a
victim of changing circumstances encompassing inflation, cultural dissent, two
oil crises, a recession, and the Iranian hostage crisis. Kinder to Ford and
Carter than some recent studies [10], Parmet devotes little space to narrative
or analysis of how their leadership changed the presidency, arguing, for
example, that Carter was a "classic example of how political impotence
crippled a president from coping with a series of setbacks not of his own
making." (p. 131)
In
the final chapter, Parmet nicely details the rise of the New Right, explaining
the parts of the Reagan coalition, and emphasizing the increasing roles of
personality, the media, and institutional gridlock between a Republican
presidency and a mostly Democratic-controlled Congress under Reagan and Bush.
Rejecting the idea of a "Reagan revolution," Parmet argues that
Reagan used "government against itself" (pp. 144 ff.) to push his
domestic agenda in 1981, only to face declining support in the wake of the
Iran-Contra scandals. He briefly details the debate over who "won"
the Cold War, while arguing that George H.W. Bush "held the line with continued
conservative domestic policies." (p. 149). Parmet views Clinton as a
"New Democrat" whose success in passing the North American Free Trade
Agreement and welfare reform "signaled the end of New Deal and Fair Deal
policies." (p. 150). Ending with a short note on the disputed election of
2000 resulting in the selection of George W. Bush over Al Gore by the U.S.
Supreme Court, Parmet prognosticates that institutional gridlock will continue
for the near future in light of charges of a "stolen" election that
left the new president's legitimacy in considerable doubt.
In
the second half of the work, Parmet provides students with a selection of
primary source documents that are hard to find in one place and could provide
the opportunity for good class discussions. Many of the sources are traditional
choices one would expect to find: inaugural addresses of FDR and JFK and
foreign policy statements such as the Atlantic Charter, the Truman Doctrine,
Truman's response to the invasion of South Korea, Eisenhower's letter to Ngo Dinh
Diem of South Vietnam, Kennedy's speeches on the quarantining of Cuba and the
nuclear test ban, Nixon's Vietnamization policy and the trip to China, Reagan's
"evil empire" speech, and George Kennan's famous 1947 Foreign
Affairs article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," by Mr. X.
For domestic policy changes, Parmet selects documents on FDR's Supreme Court
plan, Eisenhower's private letter about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WISC) and
his public 1961 farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex,
and LBJ's call for building the Great Society. Less commonly found sources
include the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the legal decision in the
1952 steel strike, and a series of documents tracing the declining power of the
presidency: the impeachment articles against Nixon, Nixon's White House
farewell, the findings of the Iran-Contra investigating committee, Clinton
v. Jones (1997), the articles of impeachment against Clinton, and the
Supreme Court case of Bush v. Gore (2000) that decided the
election of 2000.
All
told, what's missing from this work is any kind of analysis of how the
presidency as an institution changed over time. Instead, we get the traditional
story of the rise of executive branch power from FDR through LBJ and Nixon followed
by decline from Nixon through Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Parmet neither
provides an introductory chapter setting the stage for what did and did not
change in terms of personalities, ideology, partisan interests, changing
circumstances, and the relative balance of political power among and between
parties and factions within parties over time nor a concluding chapter about
major patterns of change and continuity. What little intellectual analysis that
does appear comes in the form of direct quotations from various works written
by authors known to scholars, but oddly missing in the citations included in an
otherwise useful bibliography at the end of the work. Some of the choices for
works cited will strike scholars as incomplete. More troubling is that many
works one would expect to find are not cited at all. While David McCullough's
bestselling Truman (1992) is selected, Alonzo Hamby's more
thoroughly researched and insightful Man of the People: A Life of Harry
S. Truman (1995) fails to show up. Citing his own work on Eisenhower
but not on Nixon, Parmet does not list either of the two-volume biographies of
Eisenhower or Nixon by Stephen Ambrose.[11] While listing Arthur M Schlesinger,
Jr.'s A Thousand Days (1965), Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy
(1965), Garry Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power
(1981), and Thomas C. Reeves' A Question of Character: A Life of John F.
Kennedy (1991), Parmet fails to cite either his own two well done books
on Kennedy or James N. Giglio's superbly written The Presidency of John
F. Kennedy (1991). One would think that the massive biographies of LBJ
by bestselling author Robert Caro and prize-winning historian Robert Dallek are
worth noting, but there's no mention of either.[12] While appropriately listing
the volumes on Carter and Bush published in the distinguished University Press
of Kansas series on the American Presidency[13], none of the standard works on
Reagan show up here.[14] Since maverick scholar Garry Wills may be among the
closest we have to a public intellectual in contemporary America, why not
mention his thought-provoking works on Nixon and Reagan?[15]
Presidential Power from the New Deal to the New Right raises justifiably high expectations as a career-capping overview by a contrarian scholar who built a superb reputation as a political historian when political history was not in academic fashion and published in the arena of trade books widely read by the broader public. Unfortunately, this work disappoints in its brevity, lack of overarching analysis of changes in the presidency since 1933, a very uneven mix of chapters ranging from mediocre to superb, and a good bibliography that could have been even better. As a place for an undergraduate student to begin study of this key American political institution, Parmet's work is a good start. Yet had it been more carefully organized and written, this could have been an extremely valuable work by a leading political historian and presidential biographer of our time.
In
the wake of the tragic nightmare of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, we may
well see the reemergence of presidential power led by a conservative Republican
conducting an international war on terrorism abroad and a search for order,
rule by the elite, and surface stability at home. Perhaps it's too early to
tell whether the history of presidential power since FDR can be written in
stone under the rubric of "the rise and fall of presidential power."
As nineteenth-century philosophers of history might have learned, the tides of
history stop for no one. While the twentieth-century incoming tide of
presidential power may have ebbed for a time, the tide always returns to wax
and wane anew. To his credit, Herbert S. Parmet may have been ahead of his
time. Political history not only remains popular with the American public, it's
also making a comeback within scholarly circles as well.[16]
[1] On shifting views of the presidency
during the postwar period, see Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power:
The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley, 1960); Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1972); Godfrey Hodgson, All Things to All Men: The False Promise
of the American Presidency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980); Sidney
M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the
American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993); The Presidents: A Reference History, 2nd ed.,
edited by Henry F. Graff (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1997); and
Mark Landy and Sidney M. Milkis, Presidential Greatness
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000).
[2] Representative examples of the recent
trend toward the intellectual hegemony of social and cultural history can be
seen in Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century,
eds. Stanley I. Kutler, Robert Dallek, David A. Hollinger, Thomas K. McCraw,
Judith Kirkwood (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996), 3 vols.; The
New American History, rev. ed., edited by Eric Foner for the American
Historical Association (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); and Oxford
Companion to United States History, ed. Paul S. Boyer (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
[3] Herbert S. Parmet and Marie B. Hecht,
Never Again: A President Runs for a Third Term (New York:
Macmillan, 1968).
[4] Herbert S. Parmet. Eisenhower
and the American Crusades (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
[5] Herbert S. Parmet. The Democrats:The
Years After FDR (New York: Macmillan, 1976).
[6] Herbert S. Parmet. Jack: The
Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980) and JFK:The
Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1983).
[7] Herbert S. Parmet. Richard
Nixon and His America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
[8] Herbert S. Parmet. George Bush:
The Life of a Lone Star Yankee. (New York: Scribner, 1997).
[9] William H. Chafe, "1968," The
Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986, 1991, 1995, 1999, 2003); Irwin Unger and Debi Unger, Turning
Point, 1968 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,1988); Lewis L. Gould, 1968:
The Election That Changed America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993); and
Alan Brinkley, "1968 and the Unraveling of Liberal America," in 1968:
The World Transformed, eds. Carol Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef
Junker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 219-236.
[10] John Robert Greene, The
Presidency of Gerald Ford (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995);
Burton I. Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr.
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Herbert D. Rosenbaum and Alexej
Ugrinsky, eds., The Presidency and Domestic Policies of Jimmy Carter
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994); and Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham, eds.
The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).
[11] Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower:
Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952 (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1983), Eisenhower: The President (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1984), Nixon: The Education of a Politician,
1913-1962 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), Nixon: The
Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972 (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1989), and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1972-1990 (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1991).
[12] Robert A. Caro, The Path to
Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Kopf, 1982), Means
of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1990), Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) and Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon
Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991) and Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[13] For a complete list of volumes in
the University of Kansas Press series on the American Presidency, see
http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/bipseries.html#anchor214026
[14] Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan:
The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1984); Lou Cannon, Reagan (New York: Putnam, 1982) and President
Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991);
and Michael Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in
the 1980's (New York: Oxford University Press,1992).
[15] Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes:
The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (New York: New American Library, 1970)
and Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1987)
[16] On the reemergence of political
history, see Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in
American Political History, 1775-2000, eds. Byron E. Shafer and
Anthony Badger (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).