Shadow government

Inside the Bush administration's sweeping, often secretive efforts to expand the power of the presidency

October 14, 2007|David Gergen

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
By Charlie Savage
Little, Brown, 400 pp., $25.99

The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration
By Jack Goldsmith
Norton, 256 pp., $25.95

Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches
By John Dean
Viking, 332 pp., $25.95

Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush
By Robert Draper
Free Press, 463 pp., illustrated, $28

In the days of Vietnam, Americans could watch on their television screens what was happening in the jungles overseas, but only with the passage of time did they see that a second, secret war was being waged here at home - an assault upon the constitutional order. In the end, the attacks on the rule of law became as dangerous to the nation as the quagmire on the battlefield. Are we witnessing history repeat itself today? Not exactly. George W. Bush is no Richard Nixon. But there are enough parallels between then and now that unless we pay close attention, we could badly damage our historic system of governance.

That warning emanates loud and clear from a spate of new books on the way the Bush-Cheney administration - largely out of the public eye - has seized upon the war on terror to drive an unprecedented expansion in the powers of the presidency. The best and most comprehensive of the new works is Charlie Savage's "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy." Savage, a graduate of Harvard and the Yale Law School, won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage last year of the administration's efforts to stretch the law. The most illuminating volume is "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration," by Jack Goldsmith. Goldsmith is a conservative legal scholar who was recruited to a key position in the administration, courageously tried to rein in his colleagues, and, after repeated clashes, packed his bags. He is now a professor at the Harvard Law School.

As Savage points out, Nixon inherited a presidency whose powers had already been inflated by the Cold War and the early Vietnam years. The president, Savage notes pointedly, "with a young Cheney watching and learning inside his administration, then pushed the power of the presidency to its breaking point."

Nixon justified a wide array of secret actions, from military strikes overseas to warrantless wiretaps at home, in the name of national security, asserting that in time of war the Constitution gives the president inherent powers to act as he sees fit, without regard to what the laws say. Savage recounts Nixon's 1977 interview with David Frost in which the former president declared, "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal."