by Russell L. Riley Command of Office: How War, Secrecy, and Deception Transformed the Presidency, from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush. By Stephen Graubard. New York: Basic Books, 2004. 722 pp. "Don't judge a book by its cover" remains sage advice for anyone contemplating Stephen Graubard's Command of Office. The book's prominently displayed subtitle, as well as a dust jacket promising a "sharply focused narrative" about "a dangerous transformation of the executive branch in the last one hundred years," ill prepares the reader for what in fact follows. This is not the book it purports to be--although there is some value in what it actually is. Graubard proposes at the outset a timely, if not particularly original, thesis: war has changed the character of the American presidency. Especially intriguing is the related claim that the presidency entered a new age with Theodore Roosevelt. The subsequent century (again according to the jacket language) saw
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three different "presidencies" emerge, each marked by increasing
accumulation of authority: the presidency created by TR, Wilson,
and FDR, continued under Truman and Eisenhower, in which foreign
policy issues played a far greater role in presidential politics;
the period of America's time of troubles that began with Kennedy
and ended with Carter, in which the disastrous Vietnam war spurred
a further tendency to secrecy; and the third presidency, defined
by Reagan and perfected by Clinton and both Bushes, in which the
presidents consciously playact their role for the public.
| This is, to say the least, a creative form of periodicity that ought to pique the interest of any student of American politics. The core problem of the book, however, is the absence of a sustained effort to make the case for these claims. There are occasional assertions throughout of war's impact on the presidency, generally along well-established terrain. Yet the nature of the alleged institutional transformation never gets treated in a concentrated way, and the assertion of three "great divides" (p. xii) in the twentieth century presidency is all but abandoned in the subsequent text. Moreover, although Command of Office does maintain a very loose focus on the subject of foreign affairs, the undisciplined inclusion of unrelated matter impairs the reader's sight lines--and Graubard fails to illuminate a clear trail through the thicket. Two of the earliest chapters, for example, one on vice-presidential accession and the other on the democratization of the presidential selection process, have nothing material to do with the main topic. Thus, the strains of a coherent argument about war and presidential transformation are lost in the volume's over-700 pages. The great bulk of the book comprises eighteen chapters, one devoted to each president from the elder Roosevelt to the younger Bush. This is where Graubard is at his best--and indeed an astute publisher would have recast Command of Office to emphasize the rich, idiosyncratic character of these miniature biographies. The author relies almost exclusively on secondary sources in crafting these chapters, but he brings to his assessments a distinctive, highly opinionated style. These pages depict presidential history through the eyes of a provocative critic. The chapter on Woodrow Wilson is probably the finest, although Graubard's evident favorites are Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Roosevelt was a "gifted and intelligent man, well-read and well-spoken ... [who] showed a command of foreign policy issues ... greater than that of almost anyone who had preceded him in the White House, and that few of his successors were able to rival" (p. 100). Truman's "was the most creative presidency of the post-World War II period," because of the international architecture that he and his lieutenants wrought (p. 282). Graubard seems much more comfortable, however, in the role of scold. Eisenhower is "a five-star general out of his depth in the White House" (p. 320). Kennedy "imagined he understood foreign policy and that those he chose to assist and advise him were exceptionally able" (p. 348). Of Jimmy Carter's hopes that the Iranian hostages might be released on his watch, thereby granting some historical absolution, the author writes, "This was self-deception, innocence, and arrogance by a president who claimed only to be modest and virtuous" (p. 438). And of the two most recent presidents, Clinton and George W. Bush, the tone is almost unremittingly harsh. There is no hint of partisan bias in these critiques--Republicans and Democrats alike are subjected to a sometimes acid pen. Although the book's principal flaw is a lack of fidelity to its proposed theory, it also suffers from more than occasional errors in fact. That Hingham, Massachusetts is not, as Graubard has it, on Cape Cod (p. 77) is a trivial mistake. Less so, California (voting for John Nance Garner in the 1932 Democratic primary) was not then the third largest state in the nation (p. 56), and James A. Baker was never Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff (p. 423). Inexplicably, Graubard's account of the Monica Lewinsky scandal gets the U.S. Supreme Court's crucial decision in Clinton v. Jones exactly wrong--writing that the Court ruled against allowing Paula Jones to proceed with her lawsuit while the president served out his term (p. 527). This is a remarkable error, not just because of the prominence of the holding, but because the entire history of the Clinton presidency would have changed had the Court ruled as Graubard describes. Moreover, it is instructive that in Jones the Court reversed its closest precedent, in which Richard Nixon was allowed by the Burger Court to avoid a civil suit because at that time the commander in chief's responsibilities were deemed too important to permit any distractions. In the relatively peaceful interlude between the flail of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade Center, the Rehnquist Court saw the president's job in a different light. Nuances in this sequence of events suggest that war's influence on the American presidency may be substantially more complex than the claims offered in Command of Office. Russell L. Riley University of Virginia |
Publication Information: Article Title: Command of Office: How War, Secrecy, and Deception Transformed the Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Contributors: Russell L. Riley - author. Journal Title: Presidential Studies Quarterly. Volume: 35. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 2005. Page Number: 613+. COPYRIGHT 2005 Center for the Study of the Presidency; COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
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