A Critical Introduction

Abstract

Anniversaries, being arbitrary markings on a calendar, fall randomly into the lives of ongoing institutions. Consequently, we cannot expect that bicentennial reflections on the health of the presidency will necessarily produce some special wisdom, the distilled product of a long two-hundred year view, when there are a few more proximate scores still left to settle. At the end of its first century the United States faced a similar problem, and somehow survived that celebration. In 1876 the President was elected under the most questionable circumstances ever. And on the two-hundredth birthday of independence, a President unelected in another sense sat in the White House. Alert tuners-in to the news media are aware that behind this interesting fact lies far juicier fare for the connoisseur of birthday blues. Indeed, Vietnam and Watergate have apparently accomplished what no amount of rational argument could have done: They have persuaded at least a few of the noisier advocates of presidential government that the checks and balances the founding fathers wrote into the Constitution may not have been such a bad idea after all.1 The question now arises whether in their newly-minted enthusiasm for curbing a rampant, villainous presidency these same observers can be convinced that they must show common sense and moderation as well as ingenuity. In short, now that they believe that the founding fathers did well to put checks and balances into the Constitution can they be persuaded that the checks and balances the founders put in are enough? It is, of course, something of a fiction to believe that contemporary Americans can choose the sort of presidency they want, without reference to all that has gone before. Yet, over the long haul, it is no doubt true that the presidency-as well as our other political institutions-does evolve in part out of the climate of opinions, demands, and expectations that are created by learned analysis.