Showing posts with label Presidency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Presidency. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
TR
Originally broadcast on PBS television series, the American Experience. One incongruity: David McCollough is a talking head in the program, not its narrator. Yet nothing can take away from Theodore Roosevelt. In turn maddening and inspiring, he is truly bigger than life. Some of his views are appalling, yet he is the president who started to conserve the national resources of this nation: in a day when developers were planning to "improve" the Grand Canyon, he declared it a national treasure. He busted trusts, yet was an unrepentant capitalist.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Seven Days in May
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Bluffing at the Highest Levels
When Harry S. Truman was sworn in to office, his poker buddies from the previous war were afraid he might stop playing now that he 
had been "promoted." They need not have worried. The new chief executive even requisitioned a set of chips embossed with the presidential seal for use in the White House, though he tried to avoid being photographed gambling on its premises. The prudes of America would put up with only so much.
Truman had learned to play cards from his aunt Ida and uncle Harry on their Missouri farm back in the 1890s. In a letter to Bess Wallace, the woman he was courting, in February 1911, the sincere 26-year-old suitor wrote, "I like to play cards and dance . . . and go to shows and do all the things [religious people] say I shouldn't, but I don't feel badly about it."
Truman's preference for poker over fussier country-club pastimes helps explain the temperament of "Give 'Em Hell Harry" during American labor disputes, hot wars with Japan and North Korea, and the cold war with Russia and China.
Throughout his 88 years, Truman used poker as both a personal and political means of expression. His motto, "The buck stops here," refers to the dealer's button or placeholder, because during the 19th century hunting knives with buckhorn handles often served that function. It was the president's folksy way of letting Americans know he was responsible for what happened on his watch.
James McManus is the author of "Positively Fifth Street." This essay is adapted from "Cowboys Full," recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
had been "promoted." They need not have worried. The new chief executive even requisitioned a set of chips embossed with the presidential seal for use in the White House, though he tried to avoid being photographed gambling on its premises. The prudes of America would put up with only so much.Truman had learned to play cards from his aunt Ida and uncle Harry on their Missouri farm back in the 1890s. In a letter to Bess Wallace, the woman he was courting, in February 1911, the sincere 26-year-old suitor wrote, "I like to play cards and dance . . . and go to shows and do all the things [religious people] say I shouldn't, but I don't feel badly about it."
Truman's preference for poker over fussier country-club pastimes helps explain the temperament of "Give 'Em Hell Harry" during American labor disputes, hot wars with Japan and North Korea, and the cold war with Russia and China.
Throughout his 88 years, Truman used poker as both a personal and political means of expression. His motto, "The buck stops here," refers to the dealer's button or placeholder, because during the 19th century hunting knives with buckhorn handles often served that function. It was the president's folksy way of letting Americans know he was responsible for what happened on his watch.
James McManus is the author of "Positively Fifth Street." This essay is adapted from "Cowboys Full," recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Bill Clinton After Hours
The Clinton tapes: wrestling history with the president by Taylor Branch707 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.
No cigar?
Saturday, April 18, 2009
One-Vehicle Presidential Motorcade
"Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure"By Matthew Algeo
Chicago Review Press, 262 pages, $24.95
973.918 A
When Harry and Bess Truman took their vacation, they were part of a growing American pastime: the automobile vacation. Postwar prosperity, brand-new highways and an itch to see the country made road travel popular with the middle class. In the golden age of the American family vacation, Detroit's Big Three auto makers manufactured family-friendly cars that were both roomy and affordable. The price of gas was 27 cents per gallon, and uniformed attendants filled up the tank and cleaned the windshield. Motels -- where you could pull right up to the door of your room -- were a new phenomenon.
27 cents? A gallon of regular gas went for 29.9 cents in 1970, 1971.
In keeping with one of the book's conceits, Mr. Algeo makes a pilgrimage to the Grand Ballroom of Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, where Truman spoke. "I was standing in the very spot where Harry had stood exactly fifty-five years earlier, front and center in his white dinner jacket, under the blazing klieg lights, measuring an imaginary fish, and giving Ike hell." Through such vignettes Mr. Algeo takes us back to a time, despite Cold War anxieties, "of unbridled optimism," then brings us forward to our supposedly more cynical age.
Truman was criticizing Eisenhower for the latter's proposal to cut defense spending. A rich irony.
Harry Truman drinks a Coke at a service station in Frederick, Md.
The author retraced the Trumans' trip in stages from fall 2006 to summer 2008, hunting down the service stations where the couple bought gasoline, the diners where they ate a square meal and the hotels where they stayed the night. He even tracked down eyewitnesses who remembered the Trumans passing through, including one man who had saved the Coke bottle that Truman drained at a Gulf gas station in Maryland. The station owner asked the former president to take his mechanic to task for being a Republican, Mr. Algeo reports, but Truman replied that it was "too hot to give anybody hell." We even see the former president polishing off the soda in one of the many charming snapshots of the traveling Trumans that Mr. Algeo unearthed.
Former President Harry Truman unloads his car's trunk at a motel in Decatur, Ill., on June 19, 1953.
The small-town America that Truman visited -- where he seems to have been enthusiastically greeted by folks eager to thank him for his service -- is of course much changed when Mr. Algeo arrives, following in the president's footsteps. Those same towns are now generally in a decline that began a few years after Truman passed through, when President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and created the interstate highway system that sent travelers whizzing past towns where once they might have stopped for gas or a meal or an overnight stay. As Mr. Algeo reports, the Parkview Motel in Decatur, Ill., where the Trumans stayed in 1953, is now owned by the Illinois Department of Corrections, home to prisoners finishing out the last year of a sentence.
Harry Truman speaking in Philadelphia
Monday, January 12, 2009
Presidential command
In a recent interview, Vice President Dick Cheney outlined his view of presidential power by noting that the American president is followed at all times by a military aide carrying the so-called nuclear football, which can be used to launch an immediate nuclear attack. "He could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen," Mr. Cheney said. "He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in."
The president may have the power to annihilate the world, but the experience of the past half-century shows that he may find it harder to get his own cabinet agencies to do what he wants. Peter Rodman's "Presidential Command" is a brilliant tutorial on the way presidents, regardless of party or ideology, have struggled to control the vast national-security bureaucracy that they inherit after taking the oath of office.
Mr. Rodman, who died in August at the age of 64, knew this world as well as anyone. Beginning as a 26-year-old assistant to Henry Kissinger in President Nixon's National Security Council, he worked under five presidents in the State Department, the Pentagon and the NSC. "Presidential Command" should be required reading for President-elect Barack Obama's national-security team and, if he has the time, for Mr. Obama himself.
"Every President in our history," President Truman wrote in his memoirs, "has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy." Truman faced the problem most dramatically in 1948, when he recognized the state of Israel over the objections of virtually everybody at the State Department, from the secretary on down. "I wanted to make it plain," he explained, "that the President of the United States, and not the second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making foreign policy, and, furthermore, that no one in any department can sabotage the President's policy."
Presidential Command
By Peter W. Rodman
(Knopf, 351 pages, $27.95)
President Nixon's approach was to pretend that the State Department didn't exist. He conducted policy through what Mr. Rodman calls "a committee of two." When Nixon met with foreign leaders, Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, was frequently the only other person in the room (aside from an interpreter). Transcripts would be forwarded to State, but they were often edited. The transcripts of Nixon's early exchanges with the Soviets, for example, left out references to a summit meeting he was secretly trying to arrange.
The secrecy was driven by Nixon's paranoia about press leaks but also by his well-founded belief that the senior ranks of the State Department were hostile to his policies. When the possibility that Nixon would pursue a diplomatic opening to China became public, Mr. Rodman writes, "delegations of senior State Department diplomats even came to the White House to counsel him against it, since it risked provoking the Soviet Union."
The "committee of two" approach brought coherence to Nixon's policy, but at a cost. The Pentagon set up a spying operation to figure out what President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were up to. They even placed a "mole" on Mr. Kissinger's NSC staff. Pentagon officials learned about Mr. Kissinger's plans to visit China only because their spy had rummaged through papers in Mr. Kissinger's hotel room while on a trip to Pakistan.
Nixon's abuses of power led to an effort to rein in the "imperial presidency." President Gerald Ford also had to deal with fallout from the investigations of the Senate's Church Committee, which revealed publicly, for the first time, the assorted misdeeds of the CIA. As Congress attempted to assert control over intelligence operations, Mr. Ford's CIA director, William Colby, decided that the CIA was more beholden to Congress than the White House because, he later explained, "the center of political power had moved to Congress." Colby defied a presidential order not to give highly classified documents to the Church Committee by "lending" them instead.
Like Nixon, Jimmy Carter installed a strong national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. But for balance he also picked a strong secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who held often opposing views. This meant loud disagreements over policy and theoretically gave the president a wider range of options to choose from. Mr. Carter's approach made sense on an organizational chart, but in fact, Mr. Rodman contends, it "only enshrined the philosophical schizophrenia of its chief."
Mr. Rodman's central argument is that presidents perform best when they are consistently engaged in matters of national security and when they empower subordinates to impose policy on the bureaucracies at State and the Pentagon. President Clinton's successes, for example, came when he gave clear direction and appointed a powerful envoy -- George Mitchell for Northern Ireland and, eventually, Richard Holbrooke for Bosnia. President George W. Bush called himself the "decider," but Mr. Rodman argues that many of his foreign-policy failures -- including the incoherence of his approach to North Korea or the absence of a workable plan for postwar Iraq -- came in part from "a systematic failure to manage conflicts among his advisors."
We don't know what Mr. Rodman would think of Mr. Obama's incoming national-security team. He didn't know that Hillary Clinton would be heading the State Department when he wrote that the "pivotal" figure is a "strong and loyal Secretary of State." And he wasn't writing about Mr. Obama when he warned: "The risk involved in the future is that a president who is not a master in foreign affairs may have a difficult time keeping an energetic secretary under control."
Much has been made of Mr. Obama's Lincolnesque "team of rivals" approach to assembling his cabinet. Mr. Rodman's history lesson suggests that installing strong people to challenge the president can be a good thing -- if leadership ultimately comes from the top. Mr. Rodman offers the apocryphal story of Abraham Lincoln asking his cabinet to vote on whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. After all his cabinet secretaries voted "no," the story goes, Lincoln declared: "The ayes have it!"
Mr. Karl is the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11
* BOOKS
* JANUARY 12, 2009
Bookshelf
Team of One
How a president must manage his 'rivals' at the Pentagon and State Department.
By JONATHAN KARL
The president may have the power to annihilate the world, but the experience of the past half-century shows that he may find it harder to get his own cabinet agencies to do what he wants. Peter Rodman's "Presidential Command" is a brilliant tutorial on the way presidents, regardless of party or ideology, have struggled to control the vast national-security bureaucracy that they inherit after taking the oath of office.
Mr. Rodman, who died in August at the age of 64, knew this world as well as anyone. Beginning as a 26-year-old assistant to Henry Kissinger in President Nixon's National Security Council, he worked under five presidents in the State Department, the Pentagon and the NSC. "Presidential Command" should be required reading for President-elect Barack Obama's national-security team and, if he has the time, for Mr. Obama himself.
"Every President in our history," President Truman wrote in his memoirs, "has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy." Truman faced the problem most dramatically in 1948, when he recognized the state of Israel over the objections of virtually everybody at the State Department, from the secretary on down. "I wanted to make it plain," he explained, "that the President of the United States, and not the second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making foreign policy, and, furthermore, that no one in any department can sabotage the President's policy."
By Peter W. Rodman
(Knopf, 351 pages, $27.95)
President Nixon's approach was to pretend that the State Department didn't exist. He conducted policy through what Mr. Rodman calls "a committee of two." When Nixon met with foreign leaders, Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, was frequently the only other person in the room (aside from an interpreter). Transcripts would be forwarded to State, but they were often edited. The transcripts of Nixon's early exchanges with the Soviets, for example, left out references to a summit meeting he was secretly trying to arrange.
The secrecy was driven by Nixon's paranoia about press leaks but also by his well-founded belief that the senior ranks of the State Department were hostile to his policies. When the possibility that Nixon would pursue a diplomatic opening to China became public, Mr. Rodman writes, "delegations of senior State Department diplomats even came to the White House to counsel him against it, since it risked provoking the Soviet Union."
The "committee of two" approach brought coherence to Nixon's policy, but at a cost. The Pentagon set up a spying operation to figure out what President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were up to. They even placed a "mole" on Mr. Kissinger's NSC staff. Pentagon officials learned about Mr. Kissinger's plans to visit China only because their spy had rummaged through papers in Mr. Kissinger's hotel room while on a trip to Pakistan.
Nixon's abuses of power led to an effort to rein in the "imperial presidency." President Gerald Ford also had to deal with fallout from the investigations of the Senate's Church Committee, which revealed publicly, for the first time, the assorted misdeeds of the CIA. As Congress attempted to assert control over intelligence operations, Mr. Ford's CIA director, William Colby, decided that the CIA was more beholden to Congress than the White House because, he later explained, "the center of political power had moved to Congress." Colby defied a presidential order not to give highly classified documents to the Church Committee by "lending" them instead.
Like Nixon, Jimmy Carter installed a strong national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. But for balance he also picked a strong secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who held often opposing views. This meant loud disagreements over policy and theoretically gave the president a wider range of options to choose from. Mr. Carter's approach made sense on an organizational chart, but in fact, Mr. Rodman contends, it "only enshrined the philosophical schizophrenia of its chief."
Mr. Rodman's central argument is that presidents perform best when they are consistently engaged in matters of national security and when they empower subordinates to impose policy on the bureaucracies at State and the Pentagon. President Clinton's successes, for example, came when he gave clear direction and appointed a powerful envoy -- George Mitchell for Northern Ireland and, eventually, Richard Holbrooke for Bosnia. President George W. Bush called himself the "decider," but Mr. Rodman argues that many of his foreign-policy failures -- including the incoherence of his approach to North Korea or the absence of a workable plan for postwar Iraq -- came in part from "a systematic failure to manage conflicts among his advisors."
We don't know what Mr. Rodman would think of Mr. Obama's incoming national-security team. He didn't know that Hillary Clinton would be heading the State Department when he wrote that the "pivotal" figure is a "strong and loyal Secretary of State." And he wasn't writing about Mr. Obama when he warned: "The risk involved in the future is that a president who is not a master in foreign affairs may have a difficult time keeping an energetic secretary under control."
Much has been made of Mr. Obama's Lincolnesque "team of rivals" approach to assembling his cabinet. Mr. Rodman's history lesson suggests that installing strong people to challenge the president can be a good thing -- if leadership ultimately comes from the top. Mr. Rodman offers the apocryphal story of Abraham Lincoln asking his cabinet to vote on whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. After all his cabinet secretaries voted "no," the story goes, Lincoln declared: "The ayes have it!"
Mr. Karl is the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11
* BOOKS
* JANUARY 12, 2009
Bookshelf
Team of One
How a president must manage his 'rivals' at the Pentagon and State Department.
By JONATHAN KARL
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