OCR Text |
Show Presidents, Foreign Policy and the Only Law of History Editor's Note: This is the thirteenth In a series of 18 articles exploring issues of the American Issues Forum. This series has been written especially espec-ially for the second segment of (he Bicentennial program of Courses bv Newspaper. COURSES BY NfcWSPAP. ER was developed by the University of California Extension, Exten-sion, San Diego, and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Humani-ties. Copyright c 1976 by the Regents of the University of California. Bv Walter LaFeber In foreign affairs we expect our President to be strong, courageous and decisive. As the previous article indicated, the American people approved his attempts to control revolutionary revolu-tionary outbreaks abroad, even if he dispatches military force. On the other hand. Presidents Presi-dents have discovered that trying to be god-like in exercising domestic power can create a wave of political atheism. A President who does not posses the power to raise the price of postage stamps, one journalist has noted, still clings to the illusion he can manage the world. And we encourage him to fool himself. In the 1960s and 1970s we nearly became the victims. We believed that Presidents such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon could dominate the nation's foreign policies while we continued debating domestic issues as usual. Instead, they tried, and nearly succeeded, in using the immense powers of their office to silence political oppostion at home-. For too long the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Apartments was covered up for reasons of supposed "national security." The Central Intelligence Agency, required by law to stay out of domestic affairs, was used by Nixon againsl his opponents within the United Stales. Both Johnson and Nixon followed the earlier examples of Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy in attempting to use the FBI for similar domestic political intelligence work. Nor did Johnson and Nixon shy away from well-publicized "Conspiracy" trials as a vehicle for quashing domestic dissent against their foreign policy. Containing Power Throughout the post-World War II years we have tried to separate the use of presidential presiden-tial power abroad from the constraints on that power at home. We thus neglected a lesson that the Founding Fathers considered most important, im-portant, namely that power must be checked wherever it is located. For power, like gangrene, does not contain itself. It must be contained. The Founders understood that foreign and domestic realms could not be separated; power acquired in one realm could quickly spread to the other. In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson first stated general principles ("All men. . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"), then devoted two-thirds of the document to a blistering indictment of King George 111 for trying to establish "an absolute tyranny over these Slates." Unchecked executive power. Jefferson alleged, caused the revolution. His argument was overly simple, but useful. Not all the abuses of the British Empire could be blamed on its often befuddled King. But the Founders had learned a lesson, and when they created an Executive branch of government gov-ernment ai the Constitutional Convention, they carefully divided powers-as Professor Doris Kearns noted in an earlier article-among co-equal executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The Convention took special care in defining powers in foreign affairs. As James Madison warned the dele-gales, dele-gales, "The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to government." They carefully assigned to Congress the power to declare war. The Executive, declared George Mason of Virginia, "was not to be trusted with it." The President was named "Commander "Com-mander in Chief of the Army and Navy," but the Convention Conven-tion believed Congress could check this power through its control of the purse. Provoking War Except for the Civil War years, most Presidents were held within these limits during the next century. A notable exception was James K. Polk in 1846. Polk's treatment of Mexico strikingly anticipated Lyndon Johnson's maneuvering maneuver-ing in Vietnam more than a century later. Both were Democrats who believed that Congress was unfit to shape foreign policy. Both manufactured manufact-ured an incident. Polk provoked provok-ed a Mexican attack in disputed territory and then claimed that, without provocation, provoca-tion, Mexican troops had "shed American blood upon American soil." Johnson set American ships into the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 to accompany accom-pany South Vietnamese commando com-mando raids against North Vietnam. When the ships were ' attacked. Johnson insisted that the attack was unpro. voked. Polk used the border skir- S mish to manipulate Congress into declaring war aginst S I Mexico. Similarly, Johnson exploited the Tonkin Gulf incident to obtain a resolution j from Congress that gave his a virtual blank check to wage war against North Vietnam. Each President led the nation v into the most unpopular war of the century. There the analogy stops. Polk won his war and annexed the present American Southwest. Johnson lost his and the Vietnamese War left Continued on A6 |