Nominal presidents

am listening now to an interview that Charlie Rose is conducting with the historian Garry Wills.

The interviewee is reviewing the history of executive secrecy that developed in the States after WWII that came out of the invention and use of the atomic bomb. With that secrecy, came huge potential for presidential power. In fact, after armistice in the middle 1940's, Congress never again exercised its constitution right to declare war (or to deny the President’s request to wage one); since then it has always been a personal, presidential decision.

The United States are very close to having a consecutive succession of temporarily elected monarchs. Remember that old TV program “Queen for a day”? Well there are now nominal, four-year kings.

Mr. Wills remembers how Congress didn’t even know that the States was bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict. Present-day members of Congress deny knowing about the Bush-era “extraordinary renditions” and the astonishing violation of human rights that happened in Guantanamo.

But the President’s power is, as mentioned, largely nominal, sort of like that Queen Elizabeth II. He is a front-man for a huge and controlling apparatus of hidden decision-makers. The President may come to power with a reform agenda, as in fact Obama did. But once in his four year term he has to face unelected career-men like military and intelligence personnel who are very hard to contradict. Presidents come and go; the generals and agency heads often stay on for the next term.

So election promises fade away and the professionals keep a tight hold on the ship of state. As Mr. Wills commented in his interview, if Obama pulls the soldiers of fortune out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and if he puts limits on agencies like the CIA, they might start to open closets where they keep their skeletons. And since the States depends on them now, what if he needs them later, before he can reassemble a proper citizen army? (And imagine the uproar if he would ask more Americans to die in these undeclared wars for just a soldier’s wages!)Not even the Roman emperors dared to do that.

References:
Ornate letters: http://retrokat.com/medieval/leil.htm