The Bricker Amendment Controversy: Its Origins and Eisenhower's Role

Abstract

“The Bricker Amendment” Poor Senator Bricker Can haggle and bicker But does not know what to do He fears for the fate Of the Ship of State ’Till commands are approved by the crew. He continues to barter For change in our Charter Although it has done very well; He will not commend it Until we amend it— But how? He's quite unable to tell. In the first edition of his book America, Russia, and the Cold War, Walter LaFeber wrote that in 1954 Senator John Bricker (R-OH) proposed a constitutional amendment stipulating that treaties would not go into force, unless approved by both houses of Congress and all forty-eight states, and requiring congressional action before executive agreements went into effect. According to LaFeber, Bricker introduced the measure to prevent presidents from entering into important agreements with foreign leaders on their own authority, as Franklin D. Roosevelt had done at Yalta. The Constitution was “saved from the most radical overhauling in its history,” LaFeber concluded, “when the Bricker Amendment was defeated in the Senate by just one vote.”2 Other scholars have described the Bricker amendment controversy in similar, if less dramatic, terms. William Manchester asserted that “Yalta was what the Bricker Amendment was all about,” while Alexander DeConde explained that Senator Bricker, “resenting executive agreements such as those made at Yalta, … sponsored an amendment to the Constitution that would have given Congress the power to regulate all executive agreements with foreign countries, in addition to its power over treaties.” Gary Reichard and Charles Alexander have recognized that the issues involved in the Bricker amendment fight were more complex than just Yalta, but they still see the amendment, in Reichard's words, as “aimed primarily at curtailing executive autonomy in the area of foreign relations.”3