established opinion has long held that in the present century the executive branch has had increasingly a preponderant role in decision-making by the national government. The thesis is that a combination of external factors and our own internal development has created an environment within which the President can gain a dominance over Congress. Customarily, reference is made to the postCivil War Presidents, who maintained a Whig conception of the office, meaning that they deferred to the legislature as the lawmaker and did not favor an activist role for themselves.2 The burden of this paper is to suggest that at the highest level of generalization the accumulated evidence does not sustain a proposition that an executive-legislative imbalance has taken place. Decades ago an early political scientist, Woodrow Wilson, expressed concern about the way in which Senate and House committee chairmen, building little empires all their own, retained a disproportionately large influence in the making of decisions for the government as a whole. Later, at a time when the first Roosevelt was taking a positive view of the presidency, the Princeton academician altered his premises. For he had begun to realize that the educative function of the President could be employed to give him a national stage in order to present the general viewpoint on controverted issues. Changes in foreign policy attitudes and toward the relationship of government to business were even then modifying the relative power displacement of the President and Congress.5 It is surprising that Wilson should have considered legislative dominance in the earlier period to have been unique or unusual. And, indeed, it is more surprising that the ideas outlined in his Congressional Government should have been given the professional plaudits that they were.6 Throughout our history the legislative branch, representing the pluralistic, esoteric interests in society, has exerted a greater degree of influence on policymaking in post-crisis years. How different was it, generally speaking, between 1945 and 1963? Did the trend in executive-legislative relations during these years warrant our concluding that any of the incumbent Presidents Truman, Eisenhower or Kennedy were able to follow in the activist tradition of a Wilson or an FDR? How many new pieces of major domestic legislation emerged from the entire period? Did presidential powers exceed those of Congress? Did the influence of the national