An Imperial Presidency’s ‘Prerogative’

Review by Bill Doughty

Some of America’s greatest presidents have assumed emergency powers during crises. Jefferson took the law into his own hands when he ordered the arrest of Aaron Burr for treason. Lincoln blockaded ships of the Confederacy and employed exceptional powers in the Civil War. FDR assumed extraordinary powers as Commander in Chief Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt

They acted on “presidential prerogative,” a right to act temporarily outside of the Constitution as justified in times of emergency or extraordinary imminent threat to the nation.

But, like George Washington before them, they worked with Congress and followed constraints of the courts. In his farewell address, Washington rejected “change by usurpation; for through this, in one instance, may the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.” Washington famously turned down calls to serve as president beyond his two terms.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. examines the history of the tension between the executive and the other co-equal branches of government in “The Imperial Presidency” (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973). Despite being written more than half a century ago, this remarkable book is relevant in 2026 in the era of “No Kings” protests. In fact, as we show, Schlesinger predicted what the United States is now experiencing –– 50 years after his book was published.

President John F. Kennedy and historian/advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Schlesinger, an advisor to JFK, was an advocate for a strong forward-thinking executive as essential to a healthy democracy. But in The Imperial Presidency –– published near the end of the Vietnam War, the Nixon presidency, and Watergate scandal –– he warns of the expansion of presidential power leading to dangerous abuse of the office.

His book and conclusions especially resonate in a topsy-turvy week –– as the current president and his administration go after a former FBI director for posting a picture of seashells, attack a comedian for telling a joke, justify tearing down part of the White House to build a ballroom, and try to manage a war of choice that is causing massive damage to the world's economy..

Years later Schlesinger also criticized George Bush’s ill-conceived “needless war” in Iraq, calling Bush an “imperial president.”

Marines marching prisoners in Iraq in 2003.

Commitment to the Constitution

Key to the success of American democracy, Schlesinger contends, is respect for and commitment to separation of powers as outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

“The American Constitution was established, for better or worse, on an idea new to the world in the eighteenth century and still uncommon in the twentieth century –– the idea of the separation of powers. This forbidding phrase represented a distinctive American contribution to the art of government. There had been no such doctrine in medieval times. Before the eighteenth century, everyone assumed that government required the unification of authority. But the Founding Fathers, who saw conflict as the guarantee of freedom, grandly defied the inherited wisdom. Instead of concentrating authority in a single institution, they chose to disperse authority among three independent branches of government, equipping the leaders of each, in the words of the 51st Federalist Paper, with the ‘necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.’ These branches, as every schoolchild used to know, were the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. The Constitution thus institutionalized conflict in the very heart of the American polity.

The question has always remained –– and has provided a central theme of American political history –– how a government based on the separation of powers could be made to work.”

Using events in American history, Schlesinger examines how a balance of power without checks on that power can create “inertia” that allows a president to become a corrupt autocrat. He shows how the executive branch can then manipulate fear, hate, religion, and emergencies such as war to breach the Constitution.

Schlesinger writes this:

“This book consequently devotes special attention to the history of the war-making power. The assumption of that power by the Presidency was gradual and usually under the demand or pretext of emergency. It was as much a matter of congressional abdication as of presidential usurpation. As it took place, there dwindled away checks, both written and unwritten, that had long held the Presidency under control. The written checks were in the Constitution. The unwritten checks were in the forces and institutions a President once had to take into practical account before he made decisions of war and peace –– the cabinet and the executive branch itself, the Congress, the judiciary, the press, public opinion at home and the opinion of the world. By the early 1970s the American President had become on issues of war and peace the most absolute monarch (with the possible exception of Mao Tse-tung of China) among the great powers of the world.

The Indochina War placed this problem high on the national consciousness. But the end of American military involvement in Southeast Asia would not extinguish the problem. The assertions of sweeping and unilateral presidential authority remained official doctrine in foreign affairs. And, if the President were conceded these life-and-death decisions abroad, how could he be restrained from gathering unto himself the less fateful powers of the national polity? For the claims of unilateral authority in foreign policy soon began to pervade and embolden the domestic Presidency. ‘Perhaps it is a universal truth,’ Madison had written Jefferson, ‘that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.’ The all-purpose invocation of 'national security,' the insistence on executive secrecy, the withholding of information from Congress, the refusal to spend funds appropriated by congress, the attempted intimidation of the press, the use of the White House itself as a base for espionage and sabotage directed against the political opposition –– all signified the extension of the imperial Presidency from foreign to domestic affairs. Underneath such developments there could be discerned a revolutionary challenge to the separation of powers itself.”

Schlesinger continues:

“This book is written out of a double concern. The first concern is that the pivotal institution of the American government, the Presidency, has got out of control and badly needs new definition and restraint. The second concern is that revulsion against inordinate theories of presidential power may produce an inordinate swing against the Presidency and thereby do essential damage to our national capacity to handle the problems of the future. The answer to the runaway Presidency is not the messenger-boy Presidency. The American democracy must discover a middle ground between making the President a czar and making him a puppet. The problem is to devise means of reconciling a strong and purposeful Presidency with equally strong and purposeful forms of democratic control. Or, to put it succinctly, we need a strong Presidency — but a strong Presidency within the Constitution.”

The solution is to find a balance between a strong executive and strong guardrails of, by, and for the people. Schlesinger examines the yin-yang relationship between the executive and legislative branches within the context of the War Powers Act and how the military is used or abused.

[Of note, England’s King Charles spoke to a joint session of Congress yesterday in this “No Kings” era and 250th commemoration of the birth of the United States. Charles praised the prowess of the American military. And he gently rebuked those who are against NATO, who oppose support for Ukraine, who only look "inward," who refuse to recognize climate change, and who want an imbalance of power without checks and balances. He did not mention directly the hundreds of women who were victims of Epstein, Maxwell and friends (including Charles’s brother Andrew).]

Corruption and Tyranny

Near the end of The Imperial Presidency, Schlesinger makes the provocative statement that “Watergate was potentially the best thing to have happened to the Presidency in a long time.”

Facing certain impeachment, Nixon was forced to resign the presidency. His associates were jailed and humiliated. But accountability and lessons-learned sometimes do not last forever.

Here’s Schlesinger's astounding prediction from 50 years ago:

“We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.

A constitutional Presidency, as the great Presidents had shown, could be a very strong Presidency indeed. But what kept a strong President constitutional, in addition to checks and balances incorporated within his own breast, was the vigilance of the nation. Neither impeachment nor repentance would make much difference if the people themselves had come to an unconscious acceptance of the imperial Presidency. The Constitution could not hold the nation to ideals it was determined to betray. The reinvigoration of the written checks in the American Constitution depended on the reinvigoration of the unwritten checks in American society. The great institutions — Congress, the courts, the executive establishment, the press, the universities, public opinion — had to reclaim their own dignity and meet their own responsibilities. As Madison said long ago, the country could not trust to "parchment barriers" to halt the encroaching spirit of power. In the end, the Constitution would live only if it embodied the spirit of the American people.”

The presidency has some prerogatives in times of crisis. But in the American democracy, Congress has the prerogative to impeach the president, fund the government, and declare war. Under the Constitution, the media (and comedians) have the prerogative and right to free expression. And the people have the ultimate prerogative through their voice and vote –– as long as voting is not corrupted by an imperial presidency.

“Unless the American democracy figures out how to control the Presidency in war and peace without enfeebling the Presidency across the board, then our system of government will face grave troubles,” Schlesinger warns.

The Imperial Presidency concludes with a quote from Walt Whitman:

“"There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves, –– and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance –– Tyranny may always enter –– there is no charm, no bar against it –– the only bar against it is a large resolute breed of men [and women].”

Three Navy-blue Green Presidents

Review by Bill Doughty––

Six United States presidents in my lifetime were Navy veterans: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush. Each in his own way and to varying degrees was an optimistic champion of the environment.

Efforts of the first three –– JFK, LBJ and RMN –– led to the first Earth Day in 1970, now Earth Month in April.

The environmental movement is sometimes overshadowed by the other tectonic shifts during that era: The Cold War, Civil Rights, and the Vietnam War. But Douglas Brinkley takes the history of the green movement out of the shadows by centering on the three presidents of the era, as well as highlighting the life and work of ecologist-writer Rachel Carson, in “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening” (HarperCollins, 2022).

Sailor JFK

The Navy had a large part in shaping the vision of the presidents who defended pristine wilderness, clean air and water, and preservation of the environment.

For Kennedy of Massachusetts, it began with a deep love of the sea and shoreline, according to Brinkley, who opens the book with this:

“Beguiled by the way sea and sky played together, almost always unpredictably, John F. Kennedy was enthralled by the complexity of the Atlantic Ocean: the moody sky, the invisible might of the tides, shifting clouds, and the yaw and pitch of movement. To be on the water in a sailboat, even in a cruel wind, provided him with a profound connection with nature.”

Kennedy saw, in his own words, the human “biological fact that all of us have, in our veins, the same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean,” he said.

Johnson of Texas, was saddled with fighting the Vietnam War, poverty, segregation, and voter suppression. Environmentalism took somewhat of a back seat to other priorities. Brinkley writes:

“On the conservation front, Johnson probably should have been aware of of the importance of intelligent land stewardship. His favorite novel –– John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (1939) –– was based on a man-made ecological catastrophe during the Great Depression that destroyed ranches and farms in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. It was soil depletion that led to the Dust Bowl. Johnson, however, was left wanting to help the rural poor, without setting an equal priority on nurturing the natural world around them. Johnson liked Bureau of Reclamation dams, because he knew first-hand how electricity lit up forgotten regions, literally and figuratively.”

LBJ’s penchant for dam-building, both at home and abroad, as well as his escalation of the Vietnam war, caused consternation for environmentalists.

LBJ

Yet, in 1968, Johnson signed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. “Rivers, Johnson believed, from the far-flung waterways of Alaska, Idaho, and Wyoming to those coursing through the rural countryside of Vermont and Maine were the lifeblood of America,” Brinkley observes.

Johnson “forged ahead on conservation legislation to protect wild places because it was part of America’s frontier heritage.” LBJ is responsible for bringing about the Wilderness Act, Highway Beautification Act, and a commitment to “a green legacy for tomorrow.” According to Brinkley, Johnson should be given more credit for his advocacy to conservation, particularly of America’s rivers (just as President Eisenhower is recognized for the national highway system). As regards LBJ, “His Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was a visionary law passed purely on behalf of the aesthetics of rivers.”

Nixon of California, was captivated by the Pacific Ocean, as a child in Orange County. In 1969 he would make his home, as Kennedy did, next to the ocean. In Nixon’s case, it was in San Clemente, where he enjoyed whale watching. Though facing his own corruption issues that would eventually lead to his expulsion from office, Nixon still managed to achieve positive global initiatives such as rapprochement with China and arms control talks with Russia. And he not only supported the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Policy Act, but he also created the Environmental Protection Agency.

“If Nixon’s signing of NEPA and his Everglades protection were the first big time indications of the administration’s serious commitment to environmental protection, the State of the Union address on January 22, with its plea that ‘Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions,’ was seen by surprised Democrats as the Great Reconfirmation that Nixon indeed harbored a genuine TR streak … When Nixon delivered a Special Message to the Congress on Environmental Quality on February 10 (1970), he listed fourteen executive orders and twenty-three legislative proposals to combat pollution and provide parkland. ‘The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done,’ he told Congress.”

Brinkley notes several times that Nixon was “suspicious” of liberal traps, so he did not appear on TV for the first Earth Day. He even asked FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, to spy on high-profile Earth Day events on college campuses, fearful of their ties with the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Yet, Nixon’s support of conservation, preservation, and a clean environment persisted.

Nixon

In 1970 he created the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and he signed the Clean Air Act.

On October 21, 1972, Nixon signed the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972, an achievement to the legacy of Rachel Carson. He signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

And he signed the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act (limiting nationwide speed limits to 55) and the Federal Energy Administration Act in 1974 (the same year he was forced to resign because of Watergate).

Brinkley briefly shows how the Navy stopped pumping sewage into San Francisco Bay while in port. He also discusses how, during the Nixon administration, Marines at Camp Pendleton helped protect endangered wildlife. In coordination with the Department of Interior and NASA, the Navy sponsored the first all-women team of aquanauts in Tektite II to study the ecosystem at the bottom of the sea.

All three Navy-veteran presidents –– two Democrats and one Republican –– were following the lead of conservationist Republican President Theodore Roosevelt of another generation, and who had his own strong ties to the Navy and who championed nature and national parks. 

In two appendices Brinkley lists scores of national wildlife refuges and national parks created or authorized by Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

One of President Nixon’s many environmental preservation initiatives included establishing a federally designated Wilderness area, the Cumberland Island National Seashore. “Because Cumberland National Seashore encompassed twenty-three different ecological communities, Nixon agreed that only three hundred tourists at a time be allowed on Cumberland Island. Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, a moderate Democrat, played a major conservation role regarding the saving of Cumberland…"

Rachel Carson talks about "Silent Spring" in April 1963

This massive book (857 pages!) includes dozens of evocative photos, memorable stories, and captivating personalities of the people who created the environmental enlightenment and “awakening” in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s.

Rachel Carson provided much of the inspiration for the environmental movement leading up to the first Earth Day and the public’s demand for clean water, air, and land. She wisely connected the long-lasting danger of atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons with the hazards related to DDT, a pernicious pesticide that altered ecosystems. We have referenced or featured Carson’s works several times here on Navy Reads.

Carson’s “Silent Spring” and her Sea Trilogy inspired John F. Kennedy. Family matriarch Rose Kennedy gave a copy of “Under the Sea-Wind,” published in 1941, to JFK in the mid-1950s.

“Although ‘Under the Sea-Wind’ sold in low numbers, perhaps because Pearl Harbor occurred right after it debuted, it became celebrated by marine biologists and other lovers of the animal kingdom,” Brinkley writes.

Carson was, in turn, inspired by Albert Schweitzer. And it seems everyone was inspired by Henry David Thoreau. 

Brinkley also follows the influence and positive impact of artists, writers, scientists, and politicians: Ansel Adams, John Muir, Carl Sandburg, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, William O. Douglas, Linus Pauling, Harold Ickes, Wallace Stegner, Robert Frost, Ted Sorensen, Robert F. Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Jacques Cousteau, Sylvia Earle, Barry Commoner, David Brower, Lady Bird Johnson, Howard Zahniser, Ralph Nader, Robert Boyle, John Saylor, Katherine Ordway, Chief Luther Standing Bear, Laurance Rockefeller, Russell Train, Stewart Udall, Ronald Dellums, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Frank Church, Philip Hart, Gaylord Nelson, Edmund Muskie, William Ruckelshaus, Walter Hickel, Al Gore, and John Ehrlichman.

In the book’s preface, Brinkley praises those “serving a cause bigger than oneself” and warns against the ostrich syndrome of ignoring ongoing threats to the environment, including climate chaos. 

He writes: “The poisonous climate cocktail of ravaging wildfires, mega floods, and monstrous blizzards costs American taxpayers billions of dollars every year (soon to climb to trillions), disrupts lives, causes vast displacement, ruins communities, and kills countless citizens.”

Brinkley says, “In some small way, I hope this book illuminates how an engaged citizenry can bring America’s natural beauty back from the brink.” He writes, “Optimism must remain in our oxygen.”

I remember the feeling of optimism, hope, and activism of the first Earth Day in 1970, the first recognition that something needed to be done to confront pollution, overpopulation, and other ecological threats.

Among more than a dozen books, Brinkley is the author of “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America” (2009) and “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House” (1998).

Power of a Woman in Power

Review by Bill Doughty––

She was born March 26, 1940, nine months before Imperial Japan attacked Oahu and Pearl Harbor. The Second World War had already been waging for years in Europe and Asia. Like millions of Americans, she came from a family with deep roots in Europe.

Nancy D’Alesandro’s father was U.S. Representative Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., of Baltimore, Maryland., a second-generation American whose own father had immigrated to the United States from Italy. He was a vocal activist on behalf of Jews in Europe who were targeted by the Nazis, and his advocacy had a profound influence on his daughter, the future Nancy Pelosi.

Susan Page writes in “Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power –– a Biography” (Hachette Book Group, 2021) about Pelosi’s father’s strong defense of European jews, including in a speech on the House floor in 1943:

“‘Daily, hourly, the greatest crime of all time is being committed.’ D’Alesandro had declared. ‘A defenseless and innocent people is being slaughtered in a wholesale massacre of millions.’

Years later, Nancy Pelosi would cite the influence that her father’s support of the Bergson Group had on her. It was a factor when she decided to break with another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, on the issue of China and human rights. She was Clinton’s ally on most issues but a thorn in his side on this one. She had been a little girl when World War II ended, but she remembered with pride the example her father had set. ‘His enthusiasm came from doing what he believed was right,’ she said.”

Page’s biography of Pelosi is a fully satisfying examination of her beliefs, ethics, strategies, and embrace of power. “Madam Speaker” covers Pelosi’s early years growing up in Baltimore’s Little Italy, her ties to politics from an early age, her devout Catholic faith, and her legacy as the first woman Speaker of the House.

One of the many great and unexpected photos in this book is one from 1957 of 16-year-old Nancy with then-Senator from Massachusetts John F. Kennedy, Navy hero of WWII, whose “Profiles in Courage” had recently been published.

Pelosi came of age during the Cold War and in the Civil Rights era. She would meet JFK again in 1961 when then-President Kennedy appointed her father as a member of the Renegotiation Board.

Though she was always close to politics, her first priority was to her own immediate family in San Francisco. She and Paul Pelosi have five children. In her autobiography (which could serve as an inspiration for military servicewomen and spouses), “Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters” (Doubleday 2008), Pelosi writes, “Raising a family is challenging. I want women to know that the skills I acquired as a mother and homemaker have been invaluable to me. These same skills –– so often undervalued –– are transferable to many other arenas in life, including the United States Congress.”

Pelosi says her leadership skills were forged by her children, even more than by her parents. She had five kids in six years, which forced her to develop her modus operandi: “efficiency, teamwork, and organization.”

Among her favorite axioms are:

• “Let’s have some cooperation.”
• “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.”
• “Seize the moment when you can; play the long game when you can’t.”
• “Our diversity is our strength; our unity is our power.”
• “Be ready to seize power.”
• And, of course, “Know your power.”

With five young children, she says she had good practice dealing with temper tantrums, a skill that helped her deal with some members of Congress and with other senior elected leaders.

Pelosi, who arrived in the U.S. House of Representatives at the age of 47, credits mentors –– women and men –– for contributing to her success and ability to gain power and influence. Susan Page writes about one of those mentors:

“Representative John Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was a general in the Old Guard. The blunt-spoken former Marine, the recipient of two Purple Hearts and the first Vietnam veteran elected to Congress, had been serving in the House for a quarter of a century. He was a powerhouse on the Appropriations Committee, especially on military issues. In more ways than one, his district in south-central Pennsylvania, dependent on steel and coal, was as distant from San Francisco as it could be.

Yet Murtha and Pelosi somehow hit it off.”

Pelosi had opposed the Vietnam War. And, while she supported the war in Afghanistan, she became a powerful voice against Bush’s war in Iraq, calling it “one of the biggest mistakes in American history.” Page writes, “They were at war over the war in Iraq.”

Reps. Jack Murtha and Nancy Pelosi

At first, Pelosi’s position was also at odds with that of Rep. Murtha, “a leading voice on defense policy” who had voted to go to war after being contacted by then-Vice President Dick Cheney. But eventually Murtha came around to Pelosi’s position and regretted his vote. “He called the war ‘a flawed policy wrapped in illusion,’” Page writes. (Murtha was a recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2006.)

Pelosi stepped up her campaign against the war after Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” landing on USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003, suggesting to Bush that he change course, reach out to the Islamic world, and work with Allies instead of deploying a preemptive “go-it-alone foreign policy.” Page writes, “Pelosi said he impatiently dismissed the idea.”

Throughout her two terms as Speaker, Pelosi championed Veterans issues, especially those related to health care. Six months ago (a year after publication of Page’s book), Pelosi oversaw House passage of the PACT act, to help Veterans exposed to toxic substances during military service. She made many visits to military bases over the years, both in Asia and Europe. She visited Camp Leatherneck on Mother's Day in 2012 (top photo by Spc. Chelsea Russell).

(PO1 Jonathan Carmichael)

Murtha retired in 2008, two years before he passed away at 77. He wrote in notes for an intended memoir that Pelosi had as “good a political mind as anyone I have ever seen,” and once remarked that she was “one of the premier leaders in America today.” Other leaders, including U.S. presidents, world leaders, and colleagues have had similar praise for her skills and achievements. According to Page:

“Through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Nancy Pelosi would stand at center stage during an era of domestic and global disruption.

She was the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks that started the century, in 2001. She was the senior member of Congress to oppose the Iraq War from its beginning. She was the most persistent congressional critic of China on human rights, challenging both Democratic and Republican presidents on the issue. She was the irresistible force pushing through controversial pieces of major legislation, most notably the Wall Street bailout and the Affordable Care Act. She was the top fund-raiser and strategist who twice led Democrats to wrest back control of the House, in 2006 and 2018. She took the lead in negotiating massive relief packages in response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.”

Pelosi initiated several congressional efforts to hold ex-President Trump accountable for his actions while in office –– including two impeachments and creation of the bipartisan House select committee inquiry into the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Since publication of Page’s “Madam Secretary,” Pelosi led House efforts to pass landmark bills such as the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and the Respect for Marriage Act. She moved gun safety legislation successfully through the House, but was blocked by the Senate. She made a trip to Taiwan and Ukraine to demonstrate support for those democracies. Pelosi has been a steadfast champion of military defense aid and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine in the wake of Putin’s invasion and Russia’s war.

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, addresses the audience during the Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony held to honor Merchant Mariners of WWII at the U.S. Capital, May 18, 2022. During WWII Merchant Mariners put their lives on the line for their country, braving German and Japanese submarines, in their Liberty Ships, as they delivered critical supplies for service members serving in the European and Pacific theaters. (U.S. Navy photo by Bill Mesta)

“Not everyone sees her legacy in a positive light, of course,” Page observes. “Republicans have demonized her as a rigid ideologue and deployed her as a weapon to raise funds.”

Speaker Pelosi steps down officially from House leadership when the 118th Congress begins its term this week. She has already handed the reins of her caucus’s power to a new generation, led by her successor, incoming Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, whom Pelosi mentored. She stands out in history for her courage, conviction, and conscientious use of her power.

Both “Madam Secretary” and “Know Your Power” are inspirational reads for women and men in the 21st century.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi meets with military service members during her visit to Yokota Air Base, Japan, Aug. 5, 2022. During her visit to Japan, Speaker Pelosi met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to discuss strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance and a free and open Indo-Pacific. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Hannah Bean)