Imperial Presidency, Episode II: Attack of the Nixon Clones

This is from the late Arthur M. Schelsinger, Jr.'s 1973 classic, The Imperial Presidency:

The theory, so dominant and persuasive in the years after the Second World War, that a foreign policy must be trusted to the executive, went down in flames in Vietnam. Who could say, for example, that the National Security Council had been all that much wiser in this melancholy period than the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? One after another the traditional arguments in favor of presidential supremacy--unity, secrecy, superior expertise, superior resources of information, decision, dispatch--turned out to be immensely overrated. Vietnam discredited executive control of foreign relations as profoundly as Versailles and mandatory neutrality had discredited congressional control.

Unity? This had been a strong argument in the 1790s when the State Department consisted of Thomas Jefferson and half a dozen clerks. But unity was an illusion in the vast and refractory executive branch of the 1970s . . . . The best way to frustrate a rival agency was often through a well-placed leak. Expertise? The test of expertise was in the judgments it produced; and no episode in American history had been more accompanied by misjudgment, misconception, and miscalculation than the war in Vietnam. Information? The newspapers and magazines proided far more accurate information about the progress of the war . . . than Top Secret cables from Saigon. . . .

What remained was the mystical assumption that the Presidency was more likely to be right than the Congress. But no one could argue this with much conviction after Vietnam. Presidential supremacy in foreign affairs had worked well enough when the electoral process sent men of intelligence, restraint and constitutional sensitiity to the White House. But, as Americans understood in the 1970s more vividly than ever before . . . the electoral process was not infallible. And . . . when a President got the bit between his teeth, it was impossible for a foreign-policy bureaucracy, however expert, to stop him and improbable that Congress, given its disabilities, would choose to do so.

Emphases mine. If you want your mind blown, insert the word Iraq for Vietnam, Baghdad for Saigon, and 2000s for 1970s. And I agree with Harry Reid (I think it was Harry) who recently said that Iraq was an even greater foreign policy blunder than Vietnam. So say it with me: "Expertise?" Say it mockingly. "No episode" indeed--not until Episode Two, attack of the Nixon Clones.

And remember, one of Darth Cheney's goals was to restore executive power to its Nixonian levels. To undo the post-Vietnam backlash. Ironically, his actions may trigger an even bigger backlash (I hope). As Princess Leia once said to Grand Moff Tarkin, "the more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers."