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].”

‘On Freedom’ Found Haiku, Finding Wisdom

Review by Bill Doughty

Timothy Snyder dedicates “On Freedom” (Crown New York, 2024) “to those who wish to be free.” He attempts to define “freedom” –– positive freedom –– as not destruction and absence of things, but creation and presence of values, including the right kind of moral and political values.

“Virtue,” he writes, “is an inseparable part of freedom.”

So, too, is accountability, honesty, humility, and rule of law.

His book begins on a train in Ukraine, one of three trips to the democratic country he writes about after Putin’s Russia invaded its neighbor.

Snyder takes us along as he travels to and through Ukraine and contemplates the birth of the idea of freedom and democracy in ancient Greece. His writing is beautiful, poignant, and painful –– especially in light of the current state of affairs in the United States and the world where storm clouds seem to be gathering.

He condemns the rise of autocracy, oligarchy, inequality, and what he calls “sadopopulism.” And he offers prescriptions for standing up to greed, grift, and the abuse of power.

“As the future crashes in, we can panic and blame others. Those predictable reactions make us part of the mob and the catastrophe. Or we can, as free people, take responsibility, look deep into Earth’s past, and save the world.”

Freedom must be fought for. It is not a birthright, and it is not preordained. “The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone,” he warns.

A recurring theme in “On Freedom” is the need to confront racism in a free country. The military, up till now, has made a concerted effort to increase diversity and reject racism.

World War II was a watershed event: defeating fascism and creating democracies in Japan and Germany while also confronting bigotry, prejudice and discrimination on the home front. Snyder cites examples of veterans of the Second World War who returned to face hate and segregation. He discusses the Freedom Fighters of 1961 and the role of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis in the peaceful fight for freedom, equality, and voting rights. 

We must engage, he asserts, writing on a train ride within Ukraine.

Snyder

And we must reject complacency, supplication to authority, leaders' hypocrisy, and our own lazy thinking, including confirmation bias (treating information as evidence only when it confirms what we already believe).

It is also important to recognize “the false tragedy of choice” presented by social media algorithms — between entrepreneurship and social justice, for example.

“On Freedom” includes an appendix that compares positive and negative freedom. The positive view: Government must be made for freedom; the negative view: Government must be dismantled for freedom. Science is either (positive) how we engage with the world or (negative) “one opinion among others.” Racism is either a historical fact requiring reflection or strictly “personal, irrelevant to freedom.”

Extrapolating from the appendix, security and prosperity are achieved through rule of law and accountability (positive freedom) or strictly imposed through strong-arm policing (negative).

We cannot sacrifice liberty for safety, Snyder advises.

“We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.” A government of, by, and for the people should not be shunned or belittled.

Snyder writes, “We enable freedom not by rejecting government, but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government. Reasoning forward from the right definition of freedom, I believe, will get us to the right sort of government.”

He describes “five forms of freedom” as the “logical, moral, and political links between common action and the formation of free individuals.”

“The five forms are sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”

Sometimes the best way to see oneself is through the eyes of others. That applies to people specifically and nations generally. Snyder says his book is for the United States, but, as a historian, he draws comparisons with western Europe, eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.

Synder relies on other Western historians, philosophers, and critical thinkers: Frantz Fanon, Václav Havel, Leszek Kolakowski, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil. And he calls on more familiar names such as Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury to help illustrate his point.

This vital book answers some of the questions brought up in Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” 

In this follow-up, he shows how to fight oligarchy (reject disinformation) and confront climate change (embrace to search for fusion power).

He champions actual infrastructure initiatives, real freedom of speech, and a commitment to civil rights.

We discover hidden unintentional “found haiku” in Snyder’s writing. Seventeen syllables, 5-7-5, displayed in three lines, that capture and focus an insight or truth like a laser. Here are a few:

Freedom is not just

an absence of evil but

A presence of good

Empathy is a

precondition for certain

knowledge of the world

Overconfidence

makes us vulnerable to

the propaganda (of tyrants)

A free person sees

the world in color, as through

a kaleidoscope

Synder’s prose travels effortlessly through countries, eras, and moods, both light and stormy. One moment he writes of oppression in the former Soviet Union and hope in Cold War-era Czechoslovakia; the next moment he expounds on the roots of rock and roll, the Velvet Underground, Louie Louie, and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. “On Freedom” is a fun, enlightened, but ultimately serious ride on Snyder’s train of thought. 

(Top photo of Ukraine's Carpathian Mountains courtesy of Pixabay)

A Not-Burned Book Helped Create USA

Review by Bill Doughty––

Thomas Jefferson –– America’s first scientist/philosopher president –– reached for a book to hone his thinking about “the pursuit of happiness” in drafting the Declaration of Independence. The book was Titus Lucretius Carus’s “De rerum natura,” “On the Nature of Things” (c 60 BCE).

On his bookshelf Jefferson had five copies of Lucretius’s homage to Epicureanism, a philosophy promoting freedom from fear, including fear from death. The book focuses on enjoyment of life, especially based in reason and critical thinking.

It’s remarkable that copies of “On the Nature of Things” made it through the purge of book burnings in Europe during the Inquisition and Dark Ages and then made its way into Jefferson’s hands centuries later. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stephen Greenblatt tells how the book, as well as its powerful messages, survived in “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

This is a book about courage. The courage to face fears to find –– and accept –– truth.

In that sense, it meets the criteria laid out by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. M. M. Gilday on the Navy’s Professional Reading Program website, “Read Well to Lead Well.” In order “to outthink our competitors, we must study and apply lessons we’ve learned from our past, Gilday says. It is critically important for our Navy to be a learning organization. And one of the very best ways to do that is to foster an environment where every Sailor deepens their level of understanding and learning.”

Deeper understanding comes, in part, through studying history. While “Swerve” will likely never be part of a CNO’s NPRP list, it certainly dovetails with some of the titles endorsed by Navy and Marine Corps leaders like Mullen, Mattis, Stavridis, and Richardson to enhance critical thinking. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley encourages reading books about history and philosophy and learning the perspectives of others.

In “Swerve,” Greenblatt explores the earliest Western seeds of critical thinking from Ancient Greece, how those seeds took root in the Roman Empire, and what it took to reap a harvest of knowledge centuries ago, eventually informing humanists like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. Epicurus was one of the seed planters.

Jefferson statue at U.S. State Department (Sgt. Amber I. Smith)

Jefferson considered Greek philosopher Epicurus his muse: “I am,” he wrote, “an Epicurean.” Roman Lucretius reached back to Epicurus and another philosopher, Democritus, for his inspiration too.

Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” amazingly explores concepts of atoms, chaos theory, and natural selection –– all modern accepted theories of life, science, and laws of the universe. Epicurus and Democritus conceived that all matter was made of invisible, indestructible, and infinite particles. Those ancient Greek thinkers called the tiny particles “atoms.”

While the power of atoms can cause fear, understanding of atoms can be a joy, not just to nuclear engineers, but to anyone who wants the intellectual freedom of knowledge and wisdom. From Greenblatt’s “Swerve”:

“In constant motion, atoms collide with each other, Epicurus reasoned, and in certain circumstances, they form larger and larger bodies. The largest observable bodies –– the sun and the moon –– are made of atoms, just as are human beings and water-flies and grains of sand. There are no supercategories of matter; no hierarchy of elements. Heavenly bodies are not divine beings who shape our destiny for good or ill, nor do they move through the void under the guidance of gods: they are simply part of the natural order, enormous structures of atoms subject to the same principles of creation and destruction that govern everything that exists. And if the natural order is unimaginably vast and complex, it is nonetheless possible to understand something of its basic constitutive elements and its universal laws. Indeed, such understanding is one of human life’s deepest pleasures.

This pleasure is perhaps the key to comprehending the powerful impact of Epicurus’s philosophy: it was as if he unlocked for his followers an inexhaustible source of gratification hidden within Democritus’s atoms … And the enlightenment he offered did not require sustained scientific inquiry. You did not need a detailed grasp of the actual laws of the physical universe; you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence –– atoms and void and nothing else –– your life will change. You will no longer fear Jove’s wrath, whenever you hear a peal of thunder, or suspect that someone has offended Apollo, whenever there is an outbreak of influenza. And you will be freed from a terrible affliction –– what Hamlet, many centuries later, described as ‘the dread of something after death,/The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns.’”

Lucretius

Lucretius wrote “On the Nature of Things” in Latin hexameters. His poetry is rich with “verbal textures,” “subtle rhythms,” and “cunning precision and poignancy of its imagery,” according to Greenblatt, who takes us back not only to Greece and Rome, but also 15th century Germany and England. We meet characters like reformer priest Jan Hus, theologian Jerome of Prague, and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno. All three were burned at the stake for heresy against the Church.

Yet, despite people- and book-burnings, Lucretius’s enlightened work survived destruction. That was thanks to people like calligrapher Poggio Bracciolini, the fascinating hero of this story, who worked for a disgraced flamboyant pope who was eventually imprisoned. Poggio’s rescue of “On the Nature of Things” is fraught with intrigue in a time of great superstition, persecution, torture, and death to nonbelievers. That the book survived “is something one could be tempted to call a miracle.”

Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," inspired by Lucretius: "For you the ocean levels laugh, the sky is calmed and glows with diffused radiance."

“On the Nature of Things” and Lucretian love of beauty and pleasure inspired other great thinkers: Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Einstein, among hundreds of artists during the Renaissance, including Botticelli.

Freedom in art and through reason became an antidote to a “toxic form of superstition, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear.”

Lucretius embraced science and cold reality of the laws of nature. He envisioned unexpected, unpredictable movement of atoms and codes within matter –– the “swerve.” We see in his philosophy, a garden of ideas about relativity, chaos theory, DNA, natural selection, and the punctuated equilibrium mechanism for evolution. His science wasn’t perfect, but it was perfectly forward-thinking for his time.

While the book and philosophies it describes are deeply rooted in Western thought, there are stunning similarities to Eastern thinking in Epicureanism and its contemporaneous philosophy Stoicism. According to Professor Richard Jenkyns, Epicureanism, “often caricatured as a religion of sensuous self-indulgence, is in reality rather austere.” Jenkyns wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics “The Nature of Things” by Lucretius (translated by A.E. Stallings, 2007), “If you were looking for an analogy in modern spirituality, you might turn to Buddhism.”

Epicurus

At points in Western history, before and even after Epicurus and Lucretius, people generally believed the sun revolved around the earth, that the earth and sun would last forever, and that humans were given “dominion” over the earth and therefore had a right to plunder the planet and damage the environment.

“In a universe so constituted, Lucretius argued, there is no reason to think that the earth or its inhabitants occupy a central place, no reason to set humans apart from all other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature, no escape from the constant making and unmaking and remaking of forms. On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world.”

In the current era of conspiracies, insurgencies, hubris, and questioning of norms and rules, there is great relevancy in the ancient insights of Epicurus and Lucretius: happiness over anger, pleasure over pain, love over hate.

Today “Epicurean” has come to identify a love of beauty and sensual pleasure in living and especially in food. U.S. Navy chefs and cooks have competed in Epicurean culinary competitions, for example.

Naval Hospital Bremerton's Culinary Specialist 2nd Class Anh Vu and Culinary Specialist 3rd Class Timothy Mitchell participate in the Battling Chef challenge in the Armed Forces Culinary Arts Competition, May 4, 2019, an epicurean event with culinary specialists from varied service branches showcasing their skills in such categories as desserts, garnish displays, chili, gumbo, wings, ribs, gourmet burgers, and a Battling Chef challenge to a panel of judges. (Douglas H Stutz)

Epicurus and Lucretius set the table, so to speak, for a harvest of new ideas that would lead to a Declaration of Independence and the phrase, “pursuit of happiness” as a right later to be guaranteed in the Constitution.

Jefferson, a dedicated botanist, saw the wisdom of Epicurean insights planted in Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things” and how those liberating ideas could grow a living democracy –– a united republic –– and a government of “We the People.”

The Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon marches in front of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial , April 12, 2014. (Sgt. Bryan Nygaard)

Of interest to SECNAVs and CNOs: Jefferson also imagined a global maritime strategy for the new nation. He envisioned the development of submarines. And he deployed the first American naval expeditionary force with both Sailors and Marines to fight terrorism overseas.

Jefferson’s ideas of nature –– one of his favorite words, and a word he frequently capitalized as Nature –– led eventually to emancipation and the expansion of civil rights. According to scholar Charles A. Miller in “Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), “The natural rights doctrines of the antislavery movement sprang directly from the Declaration of Independence.”

Although Jefferson had his own personal ethics issues, especially about equality and slavery, he can be seen as a citizen of his time, where ideas of freedom often outran the realities of culture and society. Yet he helped create a country where Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms could grow; autocracy, authoritarianism and book-burning could be rejected; beauty can be appreciated and the “pursuit of happiness” could flourish.

(A post about "On the Nature of Things" –– "De rerum natura" –– follows this blogpost.