Abstract
The crisis of Watergate was both spawned and worsened by America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. Many of the early illegal actions by the Nixon administration rose from fear that opposition to the war would undermine Nixon’s efforts to build a new “grand design” in foreign affairs, and once the Watergate crisis became a national scandal, the backlash from the war further deteriorated Nixon’s then fragile political position. Further, opposition to the war led to a clash between the president and Congress over the war powers, eventually leading to the passage of the War Powers Act in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto. While initially it appeared that Nixon’s bold claims of plenary presidential war-powers was discredited, it was not long before Nixon’s sweeping assertions of presidential power in foreign affairs and war would be revived, leading to a reemergence of an imperial presidency.1
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Notes
Andrew Rudalevige, The New Imperial Presidency (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002).
George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: Wiley, 1979), 217–251.
Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1978), 150.
Nixon, RN: the Memoirs (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 382.
Les Evans and Allen Myers, Watergate and the Myth of American Democracy (New York: Pathfinder, 1974).
Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).
Nguyen Thien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter, The Palace File (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).
Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 2001).
David Gray Adler, “Court, Constitution and Foreign Affairs,” in Adler and Larry N. George, eds., The Constitution and the Conduct of American Foreign Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 19–56.
See also, Michael A. Genovese, The Supreme Court, the Constitution, and Presidential Power (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1980).
For discussion of the War Powers Resolution, its origins and flaws, see Louis Fisher and David Gray Adler, “The War Powers Resolution: Time to Say Goodbye,” Political Science Quarterly, 113 (Spring 1998): 1–20.
See: Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 158–159.
Adler, “Clinton, the Constitution and the War Power” in David Gray Adler and Michael Genovese, The Presidency and the Law: The Clinton Legacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 19–57
Ryan C. Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars The Constitution, Congress and War Power (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002).
See Fisher, Presidential War Power, Chapter 9; David Gray Adler, “The Law: George Bush as Commander in Chief: Toward the Nether World of American Constitutionalism,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36 (September, 2006): 525–40; and James P. Pfiffner, Power Play: The Bush Presidency and the Constitution (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1973)
David Gray Adler, “The President as King: The Usurpation of War and Foreign Affairs Powers in the Modern Age” in Michael A. Genovese and Lori Cox Han, eds., The Presidency and the Challenge of Democracy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 159–189
Michael A. Genovese, Presidential Prerogative: Imperial Power in an Age of Terrorism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
John Yoo, War By Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006).
For discussion, see David Gray Adler, “Bush as Commander in Chief,” 525, and “George Bush and the Abuse of History: The Constitution and Presidential Power in Foreign Affairs,” UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs, 12 (Spring 2007): 75–144.
See: Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Pfiffner, Power Play; and Fisher, Presidential War Power.
A large and impressive literature has examined the constitutional governance of war making, including the assertions of presidential power to initiate military hostilities on behalf of the American people. See, for example, the seminal work of Francis D. Wormuth, “The Nixon Theory of the War Power: A Critique,” California Law Review, 60 (May 1972): 623–703
Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin Firmage, To Chain the Dogs of War: The War Power in History and Law (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1986).
See also: Louis Fisher’s influential studies, Presidential War Power and Military Tribunals and Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005)
David Gray Adler, “The Constitution and Presidential Warmaking: The Enduring Debate,” Political Science Quarterly, 103 (Spring 1988): 1–36. On March 19, 2011, President Obama ordered air strikes against Libya to prevent the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from killing dissidents and rebels who sought his removal from power. Obama invoked a variety of legal rationales, including authority as Commander in Chief.
David D. Kirkpatrick, Steven Erlanger, and Elisabeth Bumiller, “U.S. Missiles Strike Libyan Air Defense Targets,” New York Times, March 19, 2011, A-l.
Leonard Meeker, “The Legality of United States Participation in the Defense of Vietnam,” 54 State Department Bulletin 474 (1966). Francis Wormuth examined and, it should be added, decimated this list of episodes, pointing out that most of the incidents which involved use of force by the United States had been ordered, not by presidents, but by various military officials. When presidents did authorize military hostilities, they did so by purporting to find authorization in statutes or treaties, but not constitutional provisions. See Wormuth, “The Nixon Theory of the War Power,” 652–664; and The Vietnam War: The President versus the Constitution, (Santa Barbara CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1968). See, too, my discussion of the use of precedents in Adler, “Clinton, the Constitution and the War Power”.
Jonathan Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Washington, DC: J. Elliot, 1836), 2:528.
James Kent, Commentaries on American Law, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1896), 1:55.
Quoted in Louis Fisher, Congressional Abdication on War and Spending (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 119.
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© 2012 Michael A. Genovese and Iwan W. Morgan
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Adler, D.G., Genovese, M.A. (2012). Vietnam, Watergate, and the War Power: Presidential Aggrandizement and Congressional Abdication. In: Genovese, M.A., Morgan, I.W. (eds) Watergate Remembered. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011985_5
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