Assessing an 'arrogant' presidency
War and the American Presidency
By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Norton, 160 pp., $23.95
Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency
By Robert C. Byrd
Norton, 128 pp., $19.95
Two elder statesmen assess the presidency of George W. Bush in these volumes, and they find him seriously deficient as a leader.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger warns in ''War and the American Presidency" of the dangers of Bush's ''unilateralism" in a rush to war in Iraq that was ''all for naught," as he puts it. In ''Losing America," Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who has served in the Congress for 51 years, accuses the president, whom he characterizes as ''lackluster, inarticulate and visionless," of ignoring his promise to change the ''tone" in Washington. ''It was all a sham," Byrd says.
Byrd sees Bush's goals as an effort to ''amass power, reward friends, all the rest was window dressing." Byrd is equally critical of the Congress, referring to his beloved Senate as supine when it declined to debate the president's ''free rein in Iraq for the foreseeable future."
Schlesinger brings a historical dimension to his analysis of Bush's presidency, and his view is perhaps the more substantive of the two. He notes the importance of history to debates on policy, observing that ''unilateralism is as old as the republic." He notes that Washington warned against ''permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" and Jefferson declaimed against ''entangling alliances." Further, he criticizes the Bush doctrine of ''preventative war as the basis of U.S. policy," cautioning that ''it downplays containment and deterrence -- the combination that won us the Cold War."
Schlesinger says that the attitude of the imperial presidency toward due process and individual freedom is cavalier, but not unprecedented. He cites Henry Adams, who wrote during the Civil War that ''the time obliterated the Constitution." The reader is led to conclude that the imperial presidency, lacking accountability, is upon us. Schlesinger points to the USA Patriot Act's provisions as evidence. He gives as examples ''the administration's contention that a presidential pronouncement of 'enemy combatant' can justify suspension of habeas corpus; the Guantanamo prisoners consigned for years to a legal limbo without access to lawyers or families."
These are gloomy prospects, according to Schlesinger, who says: ''But has democracy a future anyway? The world got along without democracy until two centuries ago and there is little evidence that constitutional democracy is likely to triumph in the century ahead." He answers: ''Sure it does, but not the glorious, irresistible, inevitable future. . . . Democracy has survived the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth."
The former special assistant to President Kennedy says that dissent is essential when governments indulge in ''hyperpatriotic binges." It appears that the nation is staggering through such a delusional time. Schlesinger writes, ''After the presidential case for a war on Iraq, no one can accept the word of the U.S. Government on anything. The Bush Doctrine is already obsolete." ''War and the American Presidency" is his elegant, cogent, and civilly argued contribution to the battle that is raging for the soul of the nation.
In ''Losing America," Byrd reacts to what he characterizes as Bush's precipitous invasion of Iraq. Byrd was the only one in the Senate to make the case that the legislative branch was irresponsible in its failure to exercise its balance of power in offsetting an arrogant, calculating president ''who has little respect for the role of the Congress."
Byrd chronicles the poor job the Congress has done in living up to its separation-of-powers responsibilities in checking a wayward executive branch. He sees Bush, whom he quotes from Bob Woodward's ''Bush at War," as exemplifying this behavior. Bush says, ''I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
This puffery makes Byrd see red. When this happens he summons up historical, elegiac, and, on occasion, jeremiad-like perorations in defense of the Senate that he loves. (Republicans would argue that he summons up a heavy load of cant and arcane trickery.) In fact, Byrd's message may contain a bit of both, but it has a certain resonance and charm. His book illustrates what an impassioned advocate of civil liberties can do when he draws on five decades of legislative experience to lay out the calamitous decline of citizens' prerogatives under Bush.
The governed have thought that they almost always lived in dangerous times. Schlesinger and Byrd lead a growing chorus of that refrain. The war on terror may have turned into a terror of war.
Michael D. Langan is a retired Treasury official who served as a senior expert for the United Nations' Taliban and Al Qaeda Monitoring Group.
