ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the potential and the perils for presidential agenda leadership of Congress. Harry Truman was written off as a placeholder or accidental president by the press and pundits, who prognosticated that the president had no chance of defeating Republican standard-bearer Thomas Dewey in the 1948 election. Invoking memory of President Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal" a half-century earlier, Truman laid out a twenty-one-point program in his State of the Union Address in 1949. Several factors explain Truman's woes with the Fair Deal and beyond, despite nominal "unified government." There are several other important lessons regarding foreign policy leadership of Congress. In 1957, Dwight Eisenhower had his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, transmit a proposal for civil rights legislation to Congress. The legislation was an important first step in federal regulation of voting rights. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the cornerstone of the federal bureaucracy that seeks to provide a bulwark against the threat of domestic terrorism.
