The Failure of Executive Power

Abstract

Vaughn Davis Bornet. The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983.415 + xvi pp. Robert H. Ferrell, ed. The Diary of James C. Hagerty: Eisenhower in Mid-Course, 1954-1955. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. 269 + xvi pp. Burton I. Kaufman. Trade and Aid: Eisenhower's Foreign Economic Policy 1953-1961. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 279 + xi pp. Richard L. Schott and Dagmar S. Hamilton. People, Positions, and Power: The Political Appointments of Lyndon Johnson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.245 + x pp. James E. Underwood and William J. Daniels. Governor Rockefeller in New York: The Apex of Pragmatic Liberalism in the United States. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 335 + xvi pp. All five of these books are about American political leaders, their power, their policies, their behavior, their followers. All celebrate the power of men in executive office who were determined to rule in a nation with a tradition of representative democracy and some (perhaps vestigial) democratic institutions. They focus on the long presidencies of the 1950s and 1960s— Eisenhower's and Johnson's—and on Nelson Rockefeller's fifteen-year governorship of New York (1959-74). By their published existence as a few out of hundreds of volumes on the same subjects, they are monuments to the power of the "cult of personality" and the imperial executive in modern American life. Even the single volume of the five which is focused on policy, Trade and Aid, is concerned, as its subtitle assures us, with Eisenhower s foreign economic policy, not with America's or Congress' or the government's. Government in America, as these books clearly indicate, has become the exercise of legislative, administrative and policy-making power by executive leaders and the people surrounding them.