CONGRESSIONAL leaders knew something was afoot last Monday but they did not know what. With all the rumors buzzing of impending presidential action in Viet Nam, Senate Democrats asked at noon for a meeting with the President, but their request went unanswered. Not until late in the afternoon were congressional leaders given notice of an 8 p.m. briefing at the White House. When they arrived, the President gave them a crisp 15 minutes, then left abruptly to get ready for his announcement to the nation of a near-blockade of North Viet Nam Cabinet members and Pentagon brass stayed behind to answer questions fired at them by the irritated, frustrated Congressmen "There's no change in the pattern," grumbled Leslie Arends, House Republican whip since 1943. "I've yet to sit in on one of these conferences and hear the President say: What do you think we ought to do?' " A presidential aide remarked: "Well what the hell, I think they're used to it by now."
In many ways they are. They have suffered presidential control of foreign policy so long that they just about take it for granted. Now the President had mounted still another dangerous escalation of the Viet Nam War without so much as asking their opinion. It was the culminating humiliation of years of presidential neglect and indifference. The danger was that Congress had acquiesced in its inferior status. "There are members of Congress who are called 'the President's men,' " says Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. "In their view, everything a President recommends is right. Everything a President does is right. Any time the Congress, a coequal branch of Government, seeks to exercise the equality granted to us under the Constitution, we are accused of engaging in adversary proceedings."
This imbalance of powers is not the result of a deliberate plot conducted by power-happy Presidents. It more or less just happened helped along by circumstance. Named the Commander in Chief of the armed forces by the Constitution, partly to ensure civilian control of the military, the President has always had the power to act quickly when he needed to. Congress, a deliberative body, moves more slowly and cautiously. From Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase to Johnson's dispatch of troops to Viet Nam, with rare exceptions the President has taken the lead in foreign and military policy while Congress has tagged along often grumbling. When an earlier activist President, James K. Polk sent troops into Mexico and then demanded that Congress approve his action, Senator John C. Calhoun declared that the deed "stripped Congress of the power of making war, and what was more and worse, it gave that power to every officer nay, to every subaltern commanding a corporal s guard. As before and since, the President got away with it.