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Executive Energy. Harry Truman said three years ago that "the presidency is exactly as powerful as it was under George Washington. The powers are in the Constitution, and the President can't go any further than that." Strictly speaking, Truman was right. Thanks largely to Hamilton's eloquent plea in The Federalist papers for "energy in the Executive," the office was invested with broad authority but it was also artfully hedged. Every strong President has exploited his mandate to the fullest, always testing the Congress and the judiciary to see where the parameters of power may lie. Just where they ought to lie is an argument that has raged for 180 years. More than a century ago, when Chief Justice John Marshall scolded Andrew Jackson in Worcester v. Georgia for failing to honor a treaty guaranteeing the rights of the Cherokee Indians, Jackson is said to have retorted with impunity: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." By contrast, when F.D.R. tried to pack the Supreme Court, he was rebuffed by Congress and later by the voters, who re-elected all but one of the recalcitrant, anti-New Deal Congressmen he tried to purge.
The Latitudinarians. At one end of the presidential spectrum are the men whom New York University Political Scientist Louis Koenig calls the "literalists": those who, like Madison and Taft, interpreted their powers narrowly and subscribed to the Whig theory of the President as an errand boy for Congress. At the other end are what Yale Historian John Morton Blum calls the "latitudinarians": those who, like Lincoln and Wilson, gave wide scope to the Constitution's vague charter.
From the first, the powers have been there for a strong President to use. When the Swiss examined the U.S. Constitution as a possible model for their own 1848 charter, they rejected it on the grounds that the presidency is a "matrix for dictatorship." Nonetheless, even the most activist Presidents have run into brick walls. "Lincoln was a sad man," F.D.R. once said, "because he couldn't get it all at once. And nobody can." At the end of one of his poorer days, Truman growled over a bourbon and water: "They talk about the power of the President, how I can just push a button to get things done. Why, I spend most of my time kissing somebody's ass." And Johnson roared recently: "Power? The only power I've got is nuclear and I can't use that."
Johnson has had less to say about the job than many of his predecessors. But once, in the early days of his presidency, when his aides warned him against risking his prestige by fighting for a civil rights bill because the odds were 3 to 2 against its passage, he asked quietly: "What's the presidency for?" That brief remark spoke volumes about his desire to use the office not simply as a springboard for self-aggrandizement but for the nation's progress.