ABSTRACT
The Iran-contra affair made public an abuse of executive authority which began in 1981. The deeper issues raised by the trading of arms for hostages and the diversion of profits to the contras, however, harken back to the Vietnam period. The Constitution gave Congress the right to declare war, but it allowed the executive to repel attacks against the country in the absence of a formal declaration of war. The resulting ambiguity has led to continual dispute over the balance of power in foreign policy-making. The shift in the balance toward the executive began to take on alarming proportions in the Cold War decades that followed World War II. The executive developed a large independent peacetime national security apparatus whose centerpiece was the National Security Council, created in 1947. The formula that emerged after Vietnam and Watergate indicated congressional concern about the process of foreign policy decision making as well as the content of foreign policy.
