Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War
... Much has been written on whether the Surge was successful or not (cf. McCain and Lieberman, 2008;Crider, 2009;Dyson, 2010;Feaver, 2011;Polsky, 2012). Opinion was, and still is, divided on how successful the Surge actually was in reducing the death toll and the attacks, and a number of writers have reached different conclusions (cf. ...
Co-edited by Elnakhala, this book provides a unified repository of information on jihadist terrorism. Offering an integrated treatment of terrorist and insurgent groups, zones of armed conflict and counter-terrorism responses from liberal democratic states, it presents fresh empirical perspectives on the origins and progression of conflict, and contemporary global measures to combat terrorist activity.
... While most democratic systems have mechanisms in place to concentrate decision-making power in the hands of leaders, research also shows that such powers are usually exercised within a shared-power context. The US Congress can and often does play a strong role during crises (Kriner 2010;Polsky 2012). Decisions during crisis are not solely made by single individuals such as presidents or prime ministers. ...
... While most democratic systems have mechanisms in place to concentrate decision-making power in the hands of leaders, research also shows that such powers are usually exercised within a shared-power context. The US Congress can and often does play a strong role during crises (Kriner 2010;Polsky 2012). Decisions during crisis are not solely made by single individuals such as presidents or prime ministers. ...
... Those interested in a philosophical deconstruction of power and its related work ethic will find this an interesting, stimulating, and very readable book. Author's Comment:In 2001In , 2012James Franklin published a nearly 500-page book entitled The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). As far as I can tell, my Probability and Opinion is nowhere mentioned in this tome. ...
This book is a personal account by one man who left the priesthood and transitioned into a successful career as an academic. It is no fairy tale, however, as it details the problems he encountered first in the religious and then in the secular world as he grew to become a lover and a parent. Enhancing the story are a collection of poems by the author and other writings by him or about his work.
... As a president inheriting an ongoing conflict that has reached a stalemate, he would have greater latitude than his predecessor but only for a short period of time. He would still be expected to bring the war to a conclusion (Polsky 2012a). Although some in the military believed victory might still be won, Eisenhower quickly grasped that the cost would be prohibitive and the risks enormous. ...
The opportunity structure framework has become a cornerstone of presidency research over the past generation. Yet the way scholars have construed opportunity structure has been too narrow. Where they have stressed the partisan regime context in which a president is situated, other contextual elements often weigh more heavily on a president's calculation of what he can and cannot do. Further, the regime context is relatively static within any administration, but the opportunity structure a president faces will change rapidly. These choices are often the consequence of a president's earlier actions. His choices will set in motion new forces to which he will later have to respond. The presidency of Dwight Eisenhower serves to illustrate the value of a broadened and more dynamic conception of the opportunity structure approach.
How powerful are national security bureaucrats? In the United States, they seem to be more than mere administrators, while remaining subordinate to elected politicians. However, despite a rich literature in American political development on bureaucratic autonomy across a variety of policy areas, national security remains undertheorized. Although the origins and evolution of the national security bureaucracy have received substantial scholarly attention, the individuals within this bureaucracy have not. In this article, I examine a case study of how one of these individuals bluntly ran up against the limits of his power. After the Second World War, J. Edgar Hoover's plans for a “World-Wide Intelligence Service” were swiftly shot down by the Truman administration, which adopted a sharp distinction between domestic and global intelligence instead. I pin this abject defeat on three interrelated factors: the resistance of President Truman, the array of bureaucratic competitors emerging from the Second World War, and deep aversion among key decision makers to the prospect of an “American gestapo.” While tracing this historical narrative, I also challenge accounts of Hoover as a near-omnipotent Washington operator, question the extent to which war empowers national security bureaucrats, and foreground the role of analogies in shaping the national security state.
This article examines the dynamic between the wartime presidency and domestic policy advocacy. The Truman administration developed a strategy to rhetorically link themes and programs of social welfare and national defense, particularly as concerns about the latter emerged on the national agenda. I find that this practice of rhetorical linkage often involved framing Fair Deal objectives as critical to America's national strength. My conclusion is supported by archival evidence from the Truman Library. Rather than merely a rhetorical posture, it is evident that many Fair Deal advocates maintained the idea that a broad social welfare agenda was necessary to uphold American national security objectives.
Following Richard Neustadt, scholarship on the presidency tends to focus on presidents as single-minded seekers of political power. But, precisely because of the grandness of their political stage, presidents may, in fact, have constitutional ambitions concerning not how much power they will have but how they will wield their constitutional powers. James Madison's presidency provides an important case study of a president's constitutional ambitions. Entering office with constitutional concerns about the power of the presidency relative to the other branches, Madison used his own presidency and especially the War of 1812 to model a new type of constitutional office that he thought would fit better in the system of the separation of powers.
The recent outpouring of work on executive power during emergencies, inspired by the post-9/11 era, has significantly enhanced our legal and theoretical understanding of this crucial subject. A key flaw in this literature, however, is that it is historically un-rooted, either dismissing or ignoring important analytical and empirical insights from presidential research and from APD and historical-institutionalist perspectives. In this article, I argue that we can better explain patterns and variations in the use of presidential emergency power by paying careful attention to shifting historical set points for executive choice and action during security crises. In particular, the findings here underscore the episodic growth of new precedents, resources, and expectations for the White House in perilous contexts. The development of presidential emergency power reflects the potential for early executive choices to be repeated and legitimated over time, laying dormant as a “loaded weapon” to be used by future executives in similarly urgent circumstances.
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