To the Editor:

What is most remarkable about Paul Weaver’s discussion of liberal attitudes toward the “strong Presidency” [“Liberals and the Presidency,” October 1975] is that he should be taking them so seriously. Having explained “their extraordinary about-face” quite accurately in terms of a strategic “purpose of mobilizing opposition to the particular presidential policies responsible” for Vietnam and Watergate, he dismisses such an explanation as inadequate, since “the attitude has long acquired a life of its own.” Of course it has! Those liberal thinkers Mr. Weaver has in mind wouldn’t want us to think of them as mere partisans, would they? Thus they speak in generalizations of institutions rather than the men who occupy them and the immediate political consequences of their incumbency.

Much of Mr. Weaver’s problem can be explained by the determination of writers he is criticizing to take their own arguments seriously. Indeed, many liberals were quite willing to support Roosevelt’s attempt to emasculate the Supreme Court in the 1930’s in the name of lofty political theory. But with the liberal advocacy of judicial activism during the era of the Warren Court, is there any longer a doubt that arguments on behalf of a strong Court are related to calculations of how five or more justices are likely to behave? Or, for that matter, that cries for congressional reform represent little more than attempts to get the right people into positions of influence? In short, their sometimes inspiring rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, liberal theoreticians are essentially pragmatists: when they see their interests given short shrift at some point in the system, they are likely to take their business elsewhere.

What Mr. Weaver fails to appreciate is the extent to which even members of this “new class” realize that the biggest prize the system can offer is still the Presidency. Although it may have looked like it at times, the McGovern campaign was not always intentionally suicidal. And, as Mr. Weaver’s own about-face in his final paragraph suggests, liberals are hardly wedded to either the congressional or executive bureaucracy. Ultimately, the “liberal Presidency” is certain to reemerge the next time a liberal President takes the oath of office.

David E. Lowe
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland

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To the Editor:

The emphasis of Paul Weaver’s article is misplaced. The question he might have considered is whether the American people—not just liberals—want an “imperial President.”

Mr. Weaver’s failure to view “the new liberal anti-presidentialism” as a phenomenon emerging from the crucible of the Nixon Presidency indicates a susceptibility to liberal rhetoric. . . . Mr. Weaver fails to take into account the deep fear held by liberals of a Richard Nixon elected with more than 60 per cent of the vote. . . .

The second Nixon term got under way with the liberals in Congress, the bureaucracy, and the press arrayed against the President. Even before the second term, Daniel P. Moynihan had pointed out in the March 1971 issue of COMMENTARY:

A third circumstance working to upset the old balance of power between the Presidency and the press is the fact that Washington reporters depend heavily on more or less clandestine information from federal bureaucracies which are, frequently, and in some cases routinely, antagonistic to presidential interests.

And indeed, with the second term, influential newspapers and bureaucrats become routinely antagonistic to President Nixon, and worked in close alliance to undermine his position, one blatant example being the disclosure of Nixon’s tax returns. Considering the solidarity of the forces arrayed against him, it is not surprising that Nixon was forced from office and, indeed, the very fact of his resignation belies the assertion that he was an “imperial President.” . . .

The test of liberal attitudes toward “imperial Presidents”—such is our political vocabulary that “imperial Presidents” are not so described by their supporters—is met by asking liberals how they view the concentration of power in the hands of one man—one man, that is, like FDR, or HST, or JFK. Liberals are not as distrustful of power when it resides in such hands. . . .

But the question remains: do the American people want a President to have vast power even if he has liberal support? . . . That is, has Watergate suggested to the American people that all Presidents are worthy of their distrust and, rhetoric aside, may like the idea of power for its own sake, whether the President is Roosevelt, or Truman, or Eisenhower, or Kennedy, or Johnson, or Nixon, or even Gerald R. Ford? Have the American people finally come to realize, this bicentennial year, that the person they elect is merely the nation’s chief executive officer—not a monarch, not even an emperor—and one of their peers?

David R. Zukerman
Bronx, New York

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Paul Weaver writes:

What my correspondents seem to be arguing is that there is no such thing as liberal doctrine—only a liberal hunger for power that clothes itself in disingenuous rationalizations that shift with every shift in the political situation. No doubt this is true of many liberals (and others) today. To some extent, it may also be true of American liberalism down through the years; I don’t know, and I wish somebody would study the question. But my article didn’t address itself to this question and doesn’t stand or fall on the answer.

What it does depend on is the proposition that liberal ideas, whatever their origin or quality, have consequences and must be taken seriously. My correspondents dispute this proposition, but of course they are wrong. Ideas always have consequences, are indeed the heart of political experience itself. What’s more, the particular ideas I discussed have had—are still having—large and observable effects, from the congressional assault on Turkey to campaign-finance “reform” and the rise of the public-interest-law movement. In the circumstances, my correspondents’ blithe dismissal of the new liberal anti-presidentialism is hard to fathom. It is rather as if they were saying that only good ideas merit examination, and that bad or disingenuous ones never matter—which is nonsense.

Finally, to David R. Zukerman, I would say that while it is true that the President is neither “monarch” nor “emperor,” he has never been “merely the nation’s chief executive officer,” nor should he be. The Constitution makes him a central participant in the policy-making process, too. Once upon a time, our extra-constitutional institutions gave him the power to make good on his constitutional responsibilities. They no longer do so, and the capacity of government to govern, whether in behalf of liberal or conservative ends, is thereby diminished. That is why, unlike Mr. Zukerman, I would hope in this bicentennial year for renewed recognition of our need for a strong Presidency and renewed support for the persons, ideas, and institutions under whose aegis it would be restored.

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