Abstract
When the Watergate dam broke, the ensuing flood of revelations about White House activities swept away a fundamental and cherished tenet of the contemporary liberal credo: the faith in the beneficence of the American presidency. Already suspect after John Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco and Lyndon Johnson's Indochina policy, the dogma that “the cure for democracy is leadership,” strong, forceful presidential leadership, sank beneath the waves of Watergate. The lesson seems clear that it is naive to assume that an innate goodness characterizes the presidency. Rather it seems safer to accept the proposition that executive power, unchecked or only loosely restrained, can be used for whatever purposes a particular president seeks to promote.
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