The Post-Vietnam Formula under Siege: The Imperial Presidency and Central America

Abstract

The Iran-contra affair made public an abuse of executive authority that began in 1981. The deeper issues raised by the trading of arms for hostages and the diversion of profits to the contras, however, harken back to the Vietnam period. The impact of the Vietnam war on our constitutional democracy, which culminated in the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's resignation, served as a warning of the dangers of an imperial presidency. This article evaluates the lessons learned, the reforms instituted in the aftermath of Vietnam, and indicates what it is necessary to do now. Different people drew different lessons from the Vietnam-Watergate scandals. Some blamed the abuse of executive power on the character flaws of the President and his closest advisers, and saw the solution as their removal from office. Others saw the problem as weak laws and sought legislation to strengthen Congress's power to check executive abuses and to legislate foreign and domestic policy. Reforms that I loosely call the post-Vietnam-Watergate formula were enacted to ensure that presidential abuse of power would be less likely to again endanger constitutional democracy in the United States. Others, like Senator J. William Fulbright, supported legislative action but argued that this was not enough. The problem, they argued, was political, not legal. Congress lacked the will to enforce its constitutional authority in foreign policy. An exercise of that will required a challenge to the direction of foreign policy, and the president, drawing on his often self-