ABSTRACT
When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published The Imperial Presidency in 1973, its title reflected the mood of the moment. The President was too powerful. Congressional prerogatives had been usurped. Constitutional proprieties had been set aside. The nation had been led into an unwinnable war. The White House had condoned criminal activities. The core argument was straightforward enough. Schlesinger described how America’s rise to a position of international pre-eminence had helped the President, the most important actor in deciding and conducting the nation’s foreign policy, to assume a position of unrivalled authority within the American political system. Furthermore, the Commander-in-Chief’s arrogation of the warmaking initiative eroded Congress’s constitutional power to declare war. It gave Presidents the vital capacity to back diplomatic language with the threat or use of military force. At the same time war had fuelled the Executive’s insurgent assault on the framework of American constitutionalism. If World War II saw the Presidency ‘resurgent’, during the Korean War it was ‘ascendant’ and by the Vietnam War it was ‘rampant’. As it reached its apogee, therefore, the Imperial Presidency, ‘essentially the creation of foreign policy’, had ‘overwhelmed the traditional separation of powers in foreign affairs’ and had started ‘to aspire toward an equivalent centralization of power in the domestic polity’.1
