Oath Of Office Research Articles

Bowers v. Hardwick: Precedent by Personal Predilection

Conservative legal critics of Earl Warren's Supreme Court, both of its major decisions and of its general direction, are now especially powerful and vocal. Their ranks include the current attorney general of the United States and the new chief justice of the Court. The critics are not of one voice, but they often express one grievance with particular vehemence: that in rendering decisions, the Warren Court was concerned less with adherence to legal principles than with vindication of the personal views of the particular justices then sitting on the bench. This characterization is unfair. The justices with whom the Warren Court is most closely identified-Black, Douglas, Goldberg, Brennan, Marshall, and Chief Justice Warren himself-disdained neither legal principles nor legal reasoning. Rather, they subscribed to the concept that the principles of the Constitution should not be frozen in time, but should grow in meaning as the country itself evolves. Their boldest decisions reflected that philosophy more than they expressed the personal opinions of the dominant justices. Nevertheless, the critics of the Warren Court have helped bring to light a significant concern that liberals too often dismiss: judges do abuse their oath of office when they depart from the rules in order to achieve a result they believe to be desirable on other grounds. Courts should decide cases by reference to precedent and logic, and they should take procedure seriously. There are instances in which the Supreme Court has done violence to this idea, but-curiously-the most flagrant example comes not from the Warren Court of the 1960s, but from the Bur-

LUNCHEON ADDRESS

Naval Engineers JournalVolume 98, Issue 4 p. 52-56 LUNCHEON ADDRESS JOHN F. LEHMAN, JOHN F. LEHMAN SECRETARY OF THE NAVY THE SPEAKEROn 23 January 1981, President Reagan announced the selection of John F. Lehman to be Secretary of the Navy. He was confirmed by the Senate on 29 January and took the oath of office on 5 February becoming the 65th Secretary of the Navy. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Lehman was president of Abington Corporation. He began his career in defense and foreign affairs as a staff member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1967 to 1969 at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1969 to 1974, he served as special counsel and senior staff member to Dr. Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council, and from 1974 to 1975 was a delegate to the Mutual Balanced Force Reduction Negotiations in Vienna. He became deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1975, holding that position until 1977. Upon graduating from the La Salle College High School, Lehman enrolled in St. Joseph's College, where he earned a B.S. in international relations in 1964. After four years in Air Force ROTC, Lehman served three years in the Air Force Reserve while continuing his education at Cambridge University in England. He graduated from Cambridge in 1967, receiving a B.A. with honours in law and an M.A. in international law and diplomacy. He left the Air Force Reserve and accepted a direct appointment to the rank of ensign in the Naval Reserve in January 1968. Subsequently, he was designated a naval flight officer (bombardier-navigator) and then pilot, and he has been promoted successively to his current rank of commander. He is assigned to Medium Attack Wing One, Naval Air Station, Oceana, Virginia. In 1974 he earned his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Chubb Fellow at Yale.Search for more papers by this author JOHN F. LEHMAN, JOHN F. LEHMAN SECRETARY OF THE NAVY THE SPEAKEROn 23 January 1981, President Reagan announced the selection of John F. Lehman to be Secretary of the Navy. He was confirmed by the Senate on 29 January and took the oath of office on 5 February becoming the 65th Secretary of the Navy. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Lehman was president of Abington Corporation. He began his career in defense and foreign affairs as a staff member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1967 to 1969 at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1969 to 1974, he served as special counsel and senior staff member to Dr. Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council, and from 1974 to 1975 was a delegate to the Mutual Balanced Force Reduction Negotiations in Vienna. He became deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1975, holding that position until 1977. Upon graduating from the La Salle College High School, Lehman enrolled in St. Joseph's College, where he earned a B.S. in international relations in 1964. After four years in Air Force ROTC, Lehman served three years in the Air Force Reserve while continuing his education at Cambridge University in England. He graduated from Cambridge in 1967, receiving a B.A. with honours in law and an M.A. in international law and diplomacy. He left the Air Force Reserve and accepted a direct appointment to the rank of ensign in the Naval Reserve in January 1968. Subsequently, he was designated a naval flight officer (bombardier-navigator) and then pilot, and he has been promoted successively to his current rank of commander. He is assigned to Medium Attack Wing One, Naval Air Station, Oceana, Virginia. In 1974 he earned his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Chubb Fellow at Yale.Search for more papers by this author First published: July 1986 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-3584.1986.tb03449.x AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume98, Issue4July 1986Pages 52-56 RelatedInformation

That Ground Called Quiddism: John Randolph's War with the Jefferson Administration

When Thomas Jefferson said in his 1801 Inaugural Address, “We are all republicans: we are all federalists,” he was attempting to reconcile the differences between the two political parties and make a bid for Federalist support. He could not have realized then that one of the greatest threats to political achievement in his second administration would not come from friction between the established parties, but from one individual who styled himself and his small circle of followers as a “third something” between Republicans and Federalists. During Jefferson's first term certain issues arose which caused a growing dissatisfaction with administration policies among a few party members. Chief among that small, disaffected faction (commonly called the “Tertium Quids” because they claimed to be “third something”) was John Randolph of Roanoke – one of the most capable and consistent representatives who ever took the oath of office. Although Randolph's announcement of his willingness to meet men on that ground called quiddism came in 1806 during debates on non-importation of goods from Great Britain, his personal war with Jefferson had already evolved through a series of issues which emphasized their emerging differences on how political theory, purity and principle should be put into practice. By early 1806 Randolph's break with the administration was inevitable and reconciliation impossible.

Presidential Power: Restoring The Balance

In a single office, the presidency, the great powers of the American people have been invested, making it the most powerful office in the world. Its power is great precisely because it is truly the people's power, in the form of consent regularly granted. But there is great uncertainty about the terms of the social contract. We can know that virtually all power, limited only by the Bill of Rights, has been granted. And we can know that when presidents take the oath of office they accept the power and the conditions for its use: the promise of performance must be met. But we cannot know what is adequate performance. No entrepreneur would ever sign a contract that leaves the conditions of fulfillment to the subjective judgment of the other party. This is precisely what has happened in the new social contract underlying the modern government of the United States. The system of large positive national government in the United States was a deliberate construction, arising out of the 1930s. The urgency of the times and the poverty of government experience meant that the building was done exuberantly but improvisationally, without much concern for constitutional values or history. The modern presidency is the centerpiece of that construction. Considered by many a triumph of democracy, the modern American presidency is also its victim. The gains from presidential government were immediate. Presidential government energized the executive; it gave the national government direction; it en-

Brazil's Fragile Democracy

The events surrounding the tragic illness and death of President-elect Tancredo Neves have led some observers to ascribe a new political maturity to Brazil. Nevis, the grandfatherly figure who was to become the first civilian president most Brazilians had ever known, never took the oath of office. Instead, it fell to an unlikely and unpredictable politician named José Sarney to break the string of generals who have ruled the country since a bloodless military coup in 1964. During the five weeks of Neves's lingering intestinal ailment, Sarney ruled as acting president with the collaboration of the country's entire political and civilian leadership. Now, without a figure of national unity to rely upon, Sarney—a former head of the military governments's party, who only last summer became a convert to the democratic opposition—holds in his hands the fate of the government that Brazilians have labeled hopefully the New Republic.

Felix Frankfurter and Reinhold Niebuhr: 1940-1964

By the time the correspondence between Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was underway, both men were well established in their respective careers. Frankfurter, coming from a prestigious post at the Harvard Law School, took the oath of office as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on January 30, 1939. Niebuhr, occupying the Chair of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, had recently returned from Edinburgh where he had delivered the highly regarded Gifford Lectures soon to be published in two significant volumes, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941-1943). During the period of their correspondence Frankfurter emerged as a major voice in American jurisprudence and came to fulfill the prognostication of Harold Ickes who once told Franklin Roosevelt; “If you appoint Frankfurter, his ability and learning are such that he will dominate the Supreme Court for fifteen or twenty years to come.” Niebuhr, meanwhile, experienced a meteoric rise to prominence in both theological and political circles and stood as one of the towering figures in American life. His contributions to American intellectual history were vast and varied, making him both the most important theologian in the American tradition since Jonathan Edwards, and, in the words of Hans Morgenthau, “the greatest living political philosopher of America, perhaps the only creative political philosopher since Calhoun.”

The dutchness of the Roosevelts

T of the most notable of American Presidents in the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, took intense pride in their Dutch ancestry. It was the first topic that Theodore Roosevelt wrote about in the opening pages of his Autobiography. Franklin sketched the family line in a paper he wrote as a student at Harvard University, and at the beginning of each of his unprecedented four terms as President took his oath of office on the old Dutch family Bible. Yet both Roosevelts were Dutch more in name and in tradition than in origins. Theodore, a fifth cousin of Franklin, was less than a quarter Dutch; Franklin had only a trifling percentage of Dutch ancestry. Both Roosevelts, despite their name, were predominantly English in origin. There were sound reasons, both political and social, for their pride in their Dutch name. Socially there was no more prestigious pedigree in New York than to be a member of one of the old Knickerbocker families, tracing descent from the founders of New Amsterdam. The Roosevelts enjoyed a secure position in New York society. The political worth of a Dutch name was rather less tangible but nevertheless seemed consequential to both the Roosevelts. It was well to give the impression that one was somehow not an unadulterated blue blood of English colonial aristocracy, but rather a product of the American melting pot. Both Roosevelts had a tendency to claim as varied an ancestry as possible depending upon the ethnic origins of the group whose votes they were soliciting at a given moment. Both were prone to some exaggeration. There were those who joked that TR would have alleged any ancestry that would pull him a few additional votes, and that through citing it he sought to identify himself with almost any ethnic group he addressed. He could express his pride over not only his Holland but also his French Huguenot and English

The Papers of Andrew Johnson

Is there life after the presidency? That is the question with which Andrew Johnson wrestled after his return to Tennessee in March 1869 until his death in the summer of 1875. He answered that question with a resounding yes and revitalized his political ambitions. For his six post-presidential years, Johnson relentlessly pursued a vindication of earlier setbacks and embarrassments. He had hardly arrived back in Greenville before he began mapping his strategy to recapture public acclaim. Johnson eschewed the opportunity to compete for the governor s chair and opted instead to set his sights on the prospects of going back to the nation s capital, preferably as a U. S. senator. Johnson engaged in three separate campaigns, one in 1869, one in 1872, and the final one is 1874-75. In the first, he sought election to the U. S. Senate. At the very last minute the tide went against him in the legislature, and Johnson thereby lost a wonderful opportunity to return to Washington only a few months after the end of his presidency. In 1872, Tennessee stipulated that its new congressional seat would be an at-large one. This suited Johnson, who favored a statewide, rather than a district, race. When he could not secure the formal nomination of the state s Democratic part, he boldly declared himself an independent candidate. Although he knew full well that his actual chances of election over either a Republican or a Democratic rival were slim, Johnson stayed in the fray. Confederates exerted one the Democratic party, and he succeeded. The Republican contender emerged victorious, much as Johnson had calculated, and therefore in a somewhat perverse this strengthened Johnson s political clout for another day. The day came in 1874, when he launched his campaign for the U.S. Senate. Johnson labored mightily throughout the state in this cause: by the time the legislature convened, he was the major contender for the post. But Democratic party successes in the gubernatorial and legislative elections had encouraged a number of other hopefuls. Eventually, the legislature staged fifty-five ballots before Johnson carried the day in late January 1875. As fate would have it, President Grant summoned a special session if the U. S. Senate to meet in March, enabling Johnson to claim his seat well ahead of the normal schedule. The ex-president strode confidently into the Senate chamber, the scene of his impeachment embarrassment in 1868, and took the oath of office. Many well-wishers, as well as old foes, greeted the battle-scarred political veteran whose vindication had been achieved at last. After lingering in Washington after the close of the Senate session, Johnson returned to Tennessee, where he lived out the short remainder of his days. With the exception of serious financial reverses and a nearly fatal battle with cholera in 1873, Johnson s sole focus had been his political rehabilitation. Considering his return to the Senate, albeit brief, the argument could be made that he succeeded. But, considering the verdict of most historians, it remains debatable whether he achieved his aims. The Editor: Paul H. Bergeron is professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Malaysia and Singapore, 1975

MALAYSIA ACHIEVED WORLDWIDE publicity during 1975 through two happenings that are beyond the scope of this contribution: the Ali-Bugner fight in June (which, however, had political aspects, mentioned later) and the August activities of the Japanese Red Army, which took over a building in Kuala Lumpur and held more than fifty hostages for several days. Less dramatically, the Sultan of Kelantan took the oath of office as Malaysia's sixth Yang Dipertuan Agung (King) on September 21. His deputy is the Sultan of Pahang. An important cabinet change took place in early August when the Prime Minister, Tun Razak, handed over the Foreign Affairs Portfolio to Tengku Rithauddeen, who had previously assisted him in this sphere. Tengku Rithauddeen's Information Ministry was given to Datuk Haji Taib bin Mahmud, who retained his Ministry of General Planning and Socio-Economic Research. Later it was announced that, effective January 1, 1976, Encik Mokhtar Hashim would move from being Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development to become Deputy Defence Minister, a post vacated by Datuk Dzulkifli when he became Sabah's Minister of Finance. The Barisan Nasional (National Front), carefully built up by Tun Razak, continued to dominate politics. Its confidence was shaken early in the year at the Merbok (Kedah) by-election, where a 1974 majority of nearly five thousand dwvindled to one of 136. Factionalism in the Kedah UMNINO was partly to blame, and the decline in the Barisan's strength was seen to be probably only local when its performance at the June by-election in Selayang (Selangor) gave it a majority comparable to 1974. The wvinning candidate, the i'1anita MCA national chairman, became the first woman to represent the MCA in the Dewan Rakyat (Parliament's lower house). Inside the Barisan the pre-eminence of UMNO was even more pronounced than in its predecessor, the Alli-

PEARL HARBOR: Why, How, Fleet Salvage, Final Appraisal

PEARL HARBOR: Why, How, Fleet Salvage, Final Appraisal

William McKinley as a Political Leader

On the cold, clear morning of March 4, 1897, William McKinley took the oath of office as president of the United States. The very air seemed to promise better times. The newspapers called it “McKinley weather,” and all Americans hoped “The Advance Agent of Prosperity” would fulfill his title and restore political peace and economic prosperity to a nation that had passed through years of depression, social strife, and party turmoil.

Seward and the School Question Reconsidered

VYTHEN William Henry Seward, nominally an Episcopalian, took oath of office as governor of New York in 1839, he was not yet forty. Young as politicians go, eager, ambitious, brimful of energy, and determined to play a stellar role as head of Empire State, his inaugural message outlined an ambitious program of development and reform in state affairs. The subjects dealt with included internal improvements, prison and legal reforms, alterations in monetary system, collection of historical documents relating to New York as a colony, and a number of projects for betterment of state's educational facilities. Education, which Seward declared was the chief of our responsibilities,' received special attention in message. It was a favorite topic with governor, one which he had made subject of a speech delivered in western part of state in 1837. Free schools, he believed, should be made accessible to children of most humble, for educational advance and economic progress were reciprocal influences that would bring ever-increasing improvements to American society and, through America, to world at large.2 The educational improvements that governor now proposed included one specifically for German and Irish immigrants who were settling in large numbers in New York City. There should be, he said, schools in which their children shall enjoy advantages of education equal to our own, with free toleration of their peculiar creeds and instructions.3 The New York situation to which governor referred was partly due to rapid increase of foreign population, especially German immigrants whose children spoke only their native language. It was also due

Change and Persistence in an Isolated Navajo Community*

THE Navajo Indians of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, with a membership of over 90,000, are the largest Indian tribe in the United States, and their reservation, comprising some 16,000,000 acres, is the largest in area. It is a country of contrasts-forests and deserts; lakes and sand dunes; mountains and canyons. Collectively the Navajos are among the richest American Indians; individually they are among the poorest. With respect to culture contact and integration into the ways of the surrounding White society, there is wide variation from place to place. The ca'pital city, Window Rock, boasts handsome russet-colored sandstone administration buildings and Tribal Council Chambers where a newly elected Tribal Chairman recently walked down a red carpet to take his oath of office. There, too, is a modern Civic Center which presents an annual concert series which has included Fred Waring, Mahalia Jackson, Jose Iturbi, and other artists; local residents are offered FHAfinanced homes in a modern housing tract. Transitional communities such as Shiprock, Navajo, Fort Defiance, and Tuba City are variously supported by oil extraction, mining, lumbering, other wage-work interests, and irrigated farming. Also found on the reservation are geographically isolated communities where herding and marginal agriculture offer the only way of making a living and traditional ways are the mode; one such community is the subject of this study. In 1938, Malcolm Collier made a study of functional groups on Rainbow Plateau, a section of Navajo Mountain, in which she provided specific data on population, residence, clans, and kinship in this isolated, traditional area (Collier 1951). Through her generosity in sharing unpublished genealogies and information with the authors, we were able to make a diachronic study through specific comparisons between her data and the information we collected there during the summers of 1960, 1961, and 1962. The reader who is interested in synchronic studies of Navajo communities is referred to recent works by Adams (1963), Barnett (1952), Bosch (1961), Levy J. (1962), Moore (1962), Ross (1955), Richards (1963), and Sasaki (1960).

Constitutional Law in 1956–1957

Two changes in the personnel of the United States Supreme Court occurred during the 1956 Term. Justice Sherman Minton, appointed by President Truman in 1949, retired on October 15, 1956, at the age of sixty-five, for reasons of health. Prior to his appointment to the Court, Justice Minton had served as U. S. Senator from Indiana and had spent eight years on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. To take his place President Eisenhower gave a recess appointment to William Joseph Brennan, Jr., who took the oath of office on October 16, at the age of fifty. A native of Newark and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and of the Harvard Law School, he had served by appointment in 1949 on the New Jersey Superior Court, was advanced to the Appellate Division in 1950, and was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 1952. Justice Brennan was a Democrat, a Catholic, (the first since Justice Frank Murphy, who died in 1949), and the son of an Irish immigrant; and his appointment was announced just three weeks before the presidential election of 1956.

Lincoln's Difficult Decisions

Bruce Cotton began as a reporter for the Cleoeland News, and after working on other papers, became the Washington correspondent for the N.E.A. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1954, and he is at present occupied in further study of the Civil War and as Editor of American Heritage. Lincoln's Difficult Decisions * BRUCE CATTON t? stand in new Salem and talk about the great decisions which Abraham Lincoln made, which have affected the life of the entire country ever since, is to run into one of the strange and dramatic chapters of the American story. One hundred and twenty-five years ago Lincoln came to this town as a young man of twenty-two. He was long, lanky, uneducated, uncultivated and uninspired. There was nothing whatever to show that this uncouth frontiersman had the American future in his keeping. To all outward appearances he was simply one more back woodsman coming to a little town to make his way in the world. But American life works in strange ways, and one of the inspiring things about the Lincoln story is the simple fact that it was to be given to this untaught countryman to grow and develop and finally to lead a great nation down the path to the future. What Lincoln did, when he got into the White House, grew directly out of what he was here in New Salem. Through him, middle America spoke, with all the vision and the overpowering strength which had been developed on the frontier in the formative days of the republic. As President, Lincoln had some tremendous decisions to make. He had nothing to guide him as he made them except his own sense of what America was all about and his own willingness to meet a crisis according to the best light which his own conscience could give him. The first decision was thrust upon him within six weeks of the day when he took the oath of office. In the shadowy marshland around Fort * This address was delivered at a special convocation of Lincoln College, celebrating the 125th anniversary of Lincoln's arrival at New Salem. This special Lincoln College 125th anniversary convocation was held in Petersburg, Illinois, April 22, 1956. 6 BRUCE CATTON Sumter southern guns opened fire, and it was up to Lincoln to determine what this challenge meant and how it should be coped with. In his reaction to this sudden stroke of violence Lincoln went far to determine the scope and the meaning of the war which the bombardment brought on. Without hesitation, Lincoln accepted the war as a revolutionary situation . None of the guide lines laid down by the founding fathers were of any use to him here. He had to decide for himself what the war meant and how it should be fought. Accepting it as a revolution, he unhesitatingly adopted revolutionary means to fight it—and by so doing, he set the key for everything that was to happen in the next four years. He concluded , above everything else, that he would not be bound by legalistic considerations. Secession as he saw it was nothing less than an attempt at revolution, and in a revolution any means that lie to one's hands must be used and used quickly. On April 19, the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry undertook to march across Baltimore on its way to Washington and got into a street fight with a secessionist mob. Lincoln's reaction was swift and ruthless. The Mayor of Baltimore and nineteen members of the state legislature were promptly thrown in jail. When the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court issued a writ of habeas corpus, Lincoln blandly ignored it. He marched troops into Baltimore, entrusting their command to the hard-boiled General Ben Butler; he put Federal troops in eastern Maryland to curb secessionist sentiment there. He made it, as a matter of fact, quite impossible for southern sympathizers in Maryland to exert any influence on the way Maryland would react to the crisis of civil war. Doing all this, Lincoln stretched the Constitution past the breaking point and without question acted in an extremely highhanded manner. What Maryland...

Constitutional Law in 1954–1955

On October 9, a week after the 1954 Term began, Justice Robert H. Jackson died, and for his place the President nominated Judge John Marshall Harlan, on November 8, 1954. Judge Harlan had been appointed in March, 1953, to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The Senate did not act on the Harlan nomination until March 16, 1955, when it was confirmed by a vote of 71–11, and the new Justice took the oath of office on March 28. Accordingly, the Court was handicapped during much of the Term by not having a full bench, and apparently the argument of important cases was delayed until the vacancy was filled. Former Justice Owen J. Roberts, who had taken his seat on appointment by President Hoover on June 2, 1930, and resigned July 31, 1945, died on May 17, 1955.At the end of the Term, Chief Justice Warren announced that henceforth the Court will not hear oral arguments or hold open sessions on Friday, which will be reserved for the conferences of the Justices. Thus the ancient practice of holding the “recitation periods” on Saturday has, at least for the present, come to an end.

The Eighty-Third Congress: First Session

T HE EIGHTY-THIRD Congress, First Session, met in the face of a situation heretofore untried, which resulted from the adoption of the Twentieth Amendment. The session was convened on January 3, but President Eisenhower did not take his oath of office until January 20, 1953.1 Hence, Congress received two State of the Union messages, a budget message and then revised budget estimates. President Truman sent his State of the Union message to Congress on January 7,2 followed by his budget message on January 9; President Eisenhower delivered his State of the Union message to Congress in joint session on February 2,3 and he authorized the agencies to request revised estimates of the Appropriations Committees.4 These documents and special messages served as a basis for the Congress to determine its legislative program.

Statement by Vice Admiral Joel T. Boone Upon the Occasion of Taking the Oath of Office as Chief Medical Director of the Veterans Administration

Statement by Vice Admiral Joel T. Boone Upon the Occasion of Taking the Oath of Office as Chief Medical Director of the Veterans Administration The Military Surgeon, Volume 108, Issue 4, April 1951, Page 339, https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/108.4.339 Published: 01 April 1951

Unification of the Armed Forces—The First Year

Somewhat more than a year has passed since James Forrestal took the oath of office as first Secretary of Defense on September 17, 1947. While it is still too early to pass final judgment on the effectiveness of the National Security Organization, sufficient time has elapsed to take some measure of the vast scope of problems it faces, and of the soundness of the foundations upon which it rests.The National Security Act of 1947, under which the new organization was created, was one of the most thoroughly studied pieces of legislation to come out of the war. In that act, Congress indicated its purpose as being “to provide a comprehensive program of the future security of the United States.” The act did not merge the Army and Navy into a single Department of Defense as many had hoped, but it did provide administrative machinery for establishing integrated policies and procedures for those agencies of the federal government primarily concerned with the national security.The most important single fact about the National Security Act was that it did much more than merely reorganize the Armed Forces. Indeed this was the essential difference between the two reorganization plans sponsored during 1945–47 by the Army and the Navy. The Army's plan, drafted by Lt. General J. Lawton Collins and his staff, and frequently referred to as the “Collins Plan,” proposed a single “Department of the Armed Forces” with a Secretary at its head. The Navy's proposal went much farther. A brief description of the two plans may not be amiss, since they explain some of the problems that the National Security Organization has encountered during its first year of operation.

Constitutional Law in 1931–32: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1931

In its decision in United States v. Smith, the Supreme Court has given final victory to President Hoover in his bitter fight with the Senate in January, 1931, over his appointments to the Federal Power Commission. On December 3, 1930, the President sent to the Senate Smith's nomination to the Federal Power Commission. On Saturday, December 20, 1930, the Senate advised and consented to the appointment and ordered the resolution of confirmation sent to the President. The Senate thereupon adjourned to Monday, January 5, 1931. On Monday, December 22, 1930, the President received the notification that the appointment had been confirmed and on the same day issued Smith's commission. Smith immediately took the oath of office and entered upon his duties. While the record of the Court does not disclose this fact, it will be recalled that one of the very first “duties” entered upon by Smith and his colleagues was the summary dismissal of two subordinates of the Commission generally admitted to have been active in the protection of the public against the aggressions of the so-called power interests. Accordingly, when the Senate convened on January 5, 1931, a majority of its members very much wished to recall the confirmation of Smith's appointment.