Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
INTERVIEWER & NARRATOR:
Sanford Gottlieb, Senior Producer
MARKETING & OPERATIONS:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Matthew Hansen
Nick Moore
Daniel Sagalyn
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
David Isenberg
PROGRAM PRODUCER:
Daniel Sagalyn
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER/MARKETING:
Lori McRea
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
537
INITIAL BROADCAST:
31 May 1992
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1992, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
RICHARD BARNET
Institute for Policy Studies co-founder, Author
ROBERT HUNTER
Center for Strategic and International Studies
STANLEY KOBER
Cato Institute; Author, How Democracies Flourish
Senator JOHN McCAIN, (R-AZ)
Senate Armed Services Committee
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, Jr.
Historian; Author, The Imperial Presidency
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, Jr.: This notion that the commander-in-chief clause enlarges the inherent powers of the presidency is a rather novel and recent notion.
NARRATOR: People are confused about who has the power to send American troops into combat. They don't know whether it's the Congress' or the president's responsibility. This power has been the subject of continuing struggle.
MAN-IN-THE-STREET: I believe the president of the United States has a right to declare war under his powers enumerated under the US Constitution and that he has the sole directive to determine foreign policy.
WOMAN-IN-THE-STREET: I believe, under the Constitution, the Congress has the right to declare war.
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
Clearly, our founding fathers, in the Constitution, gave the president of the United States the authority to be the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Over the years, this presidential power has grown tremendously and there are many now who feel that the accretion of power by the president to employ our forces overseas, as well as to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces has become excessive. Our program is about that today and I think you'll find it interesting.
NARRATOR: When the nation's founders were drafting the Constitution in 1787, they envisioned a limited role for the president. Yet over the years, the president's powers have steadily expanded. And during the cold war, they increased enormously. Now that the cold war is over, there is both an opportunity and an obligation to examine critically just how much power the president should have.
President GEORGE BUSH: "...One of the most important deployments of allied military power since the Second World War."
NARRATOR: The 1980s saw numerous instances of presidential deployment and use of US military forces without a declaration of war by Congress. We saw...The attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, which resulted in the death of eight American troops.
...The sending of military advisors to Honduras and El Salvador...The sending of Marines to Lebanon as part of a multi-national force which led to the death of 239 US military personnel in a 1983 car bomb attack.
...The 1983 invasion of Grenada.
...Bombing strikes against Libya, which resulted in the death of two American pilots in 1986.
...The sending of troops to Bolivia in 1986 to assist in anti-drug operations.
...Naval escort operations in the Persian Gulf in 1987 and '88.
...The shoot-down of Libyan fighter planes in 1989.
...And the 1989 invasion of Panama.
...And in the early 1990s, we saw the war against Iraq and deployment of troops to Somalia.
These are just the latest actions in a very long list of the use of US armed forces abroad. Most of these decisions were ordered by the president alone.
Despite the perception that he already has the power, deployment of military forces in areas of conflict solely on the president's assumed authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces is a fairly recent development.
This is not the way it was supposed to work. The issue of control over and deployment of US military forces once seemed fairly simply.
The drafters of the Constitution had just gone through the experience of the war with Great Britain, a war brought about by the decision of one man, King George III, the British monarch. With the war fresh in their minds, they were determined that no one person should have the authority to decide on war. They believed that the country would best be served by a division of powers, not a centralization of authority. To that end, the Constitution in Article 1, Section 8 gave Congress the power to declare war.
Stanley Kober is an insightful scholar at the Cato Institute and author of the forthcoming book How Democracies Flourish.
STANLEY KOBER: The power to declare war is clearly with the Congress. In fact, it is not merely to declare war, but to authorize any sort of military action with certain very limited restrictions.
NARRATOR: This constitutional power does not merely apply to major wars.
Mr. KOBER: Congress has the total power of war. It can declare total war, it can declare partial war, but it has the total power of war.
NARRATOR: The nation's founders, however, also realized that Congress was too large to direct military operations, especially in wartime. Thus, Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that "the President shall be Commander In Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States and of the Militia of the several States when called into actual service of the United States."
Senator JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ): I think the Constitution clearly gives the president the authority to send troops.
NARRATOR: Republican Senator John McCain was a career naval officer. Today, he is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. As a former Vietnam prisoner-of-war who spent nearly six years in North Vietnamese prison camps, he brings firsthand knowledge of the impact of the president's war powers.
The tension between the constitutional clauses, between Congress' power to declare war, on the one hand, and the president's role as commander-in-chief, on the other, has long generated conflict between the two branches of government.
ROBERT HUNTER: The Constitution says that he will be the commander-in-chief, but it does not further define what he may do.
NARRATOR: Robert Hunter is now the U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. When we last spoke to him he was a prominent polocu analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. HUNTER: Congress, in fact, had what the founders felt was going to be the larger role; namely, the right to raise the army, provide for a navy, and to declare war. Now ever since the Constitution, in its ambiguity, was written, as Professor Corwin said, "This was an invitation to struggle," and struggle we have seen, certainly through the end of the cold war.
NARRATOR: That struggle, however, according to eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., author of the prize-winning book The Imperial Presidency, has had some negative consequences.
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, Jr.: Since Pearl Harbor, we've now been through half a century of sustained international crisis. There-fore the power that flows to the presidency under international crisis has now flowed back.
NARRATOR: He recalls one past misuse of that accumulated power.
Dr. SCHLESINGER: The most gross abuse of that power came, of course, in the Nixon administration, when he took the powers that the presidency had acquired to meet international crisis and tried to turn them against his political opponents at home.
President BUSH: "And all the service secretaries and service chiefs and the commanders-in-chief of the unified and specified commands..."
NARRATOR: One effect of the expansion of the president's war-making powers is that he now devotes far more of his energies and attention to military affairs, an interest the Pentagon is eager to encourage.
The Military Airlift Command has a squadron of aircraft devoted solely to the use of the president and other executive branch officials. It's now considered commonplace, indeed almost obligatory for presidents to visit military contractors and make speeches at military bases and service academies. Such actions are more typical of an advocate rather than an overseer.
RICHARD BARNET: During the cold war, the president spent much more time with the military and the national security establishment than with any other branch of government.
NARRATOR: Richard Barnet is a co-founder and senior fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank. He's the perceptive author of numerous books on alternatives to US foreign and national security policy. He notes there's a great temptation for the president to act as a full-time commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
Mr. BARNET: When he's standing on the bridge of an aircraft carrier or when he's looking over the Berlin Wall in the cold war days, he looks presidential in a way that he doesn't when he's talking to teachers in the Rose Garden.
Defense Secretary DICK CHENEY (from AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR's "Future Wars"): "My experience has been, both during the Bush administration and previously, that whenever there's a crisis, the first thing that happens is the president wants to know where the aircraft carriers are."
NARRATOR: Giving-in to such temptation, however, carries a price.
Mr. BARNET: That probably is one of the great consequences and I would say costs of the cold war that presidential time, presidential energy, perhaps as much as 90 percent over the years, was devoted to military, paramilitary, national security questions and the problems of the economy, the problems of our society, which were dividing the country and weakening us economically were not given the attention that they should.
NARRATOR: Presidents started to undertake military actions without congressional approval soon after the American Revolution. Between 1798 and 1989, there were approximately 215 times in which the United States used its military forces overseas in combat or potential conflict situations. That's about once every nine months.
The one common characteristic linking most of them is that they were undeclared. Only five of them were declared wars: The War of 1812, the Mexican War of 1846, the Spanish-American War of 1898, World War I and World War II. However, the major expansion in presidential powers clearly occurred during the cold war.
Even an action which has the backing of Congress does not guarantee its success. Senator McCain recalls the 1982 deployment of Marines to Lebanon, which he opposed.
Senator McCAIN: The president I think was clearly within his constitutional power to do so, but we ended up losing 200-and-some young Americans' lives because they were placed in harm's way.
NARRATOR: Stanley Kober sees a big constitutional problem with undeclared wars.
Mr. KOBER: If the Congress is supposed to authorize the use of military action and the president instead is able to do these sorts of things on his own, then it represents a threat to our constitutional system, and one wonders how far along that might lead.
NARRATOR: Prior to the recent war against Iraq, the White House repeatedly asserted that the president had the authority to commit US forces to combat, whether or not it had congressional approval. Congress did authorize the president to use force to carry out a UN Security Council resolution to force Iraq out of Kuwait.
Senator McCain thinks that was wrong.
Senator McCAIN: I didn't agree. I did not agree and I felt at the time that the president should have come over, frankly, for a declaration of war, if we were going to engage in what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
NARRATOR: Robert Hunter believes that the public generally supported unilateral action by the president during the cold war.
Mr. HUNTER: Well, I think the climate was conditioned by the nuclear age and the timing question, plus the vast new responsibilities that the United States assumed after World War II, during the cold war, and a willingness of the American people to see delegated to the president a greater authority than the Congress could check and balance. The average American countenanced this expansion of the presidential role.
NARRATOR: The president, however, could bypass Congress in cases of sudden attack well before the development of nuclear weapons.
Mr. KOBER: The president's authority to use the armed forces is to repel sudden attack -- for example, the soldiers and sailors at Pearl Harbor didn't need a congressional declaration of war before they could shoot back, obviously -- and also, to rescue American citizens who might be in jeopardy.
NARRATOR: Richard Barnet feels the argument that the threat of nuclear attack justifies unilateral presidential action under-mines the foundations of our democracy.
Mr. BARNET: If it's the case that nuclear weapons require us essentially to make a major sacrifice of our democracy, a major compromise with the best government system that anyone has been able to devise so far, then I think we ought to think seriously about whether nuclear weapons ought to go rather than the Constitution.
NARRATOR: In addition to the fear of future nuclear war, there was the reality of conventional wars that allowed presidents to increase their power.
Dr. SCHLESINGER: The Korean War probably was a great water-shed. When President Truman declined Senator Taft's offer of a joint congressional resolution to authorize the commitment of forces to combat in Korea, that has created a precedent which has been followed ever since, more or less, that said that the president had the inherent power to send troops into combat.
NARRATOR: In fact, the huge expansion started in peacetime at the start of the cold war. The National Security Act of 1947 created the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the main decision making body, the National Security Council. The president directs and names the members of the National Security Council.
Admiral JOHN POINDEXTER (Iran-contra hearings): "...to provide some future deniability..."
NARRATOR: Two of President Reagan's appointees to the council, Admiral John Poindexter and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, were major participants in the Iran-contra scandal.
The 1947 act officially introduced the catchall abstraction "national security" without defining it. The newly established Joint Chiefs of Staff were happy to define the phrase in almost exclusively military terms and they used it to justify an enormous expansion of the power and influence of the military.
Presidents have appointed numerous retired military officials to civilian agencies, such as the Department of State or the CIA, or the Department of Energy and the Federal Aviation.
Richard Barnet notes that once American troops have been deployed to an area of conflict, a president can always make a powerful emotional appeal to support our troops.
Mr. BARNET: Are you going to send bullets and guns to American boys under fire or are you not? And it's an almost impossible situation for a congressman once the die has been cast. That's why the unilateral presidential action to commit Americans to war is so dangerous.
NARRATOR: Robert Hunter, on the other hand, thinks the dangers may be ill-defined.
Mr. HUNTER: But clearly, in the murky areas, if the American people want an invasion of Panama or of Grenada, even though the president may not do everything according to the letter of, let's say the War Powers Resolution, well, I think that probably fulfills the basic requirement.
NARRATOR: Richard Barnet, however, notes that public support for wars is fickle.
Mr. BARNET: You get the benefit of the doubt if you're president when it begins, but if the war bogs down and if, particularly in the age of television, you begin to see things on television that do not square with the way the war is being presented, or the reasons that are given, or the moral values that supposedly inform the American policy, then people begin to raise questions, and that's the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome."
NARRATOR: While the people may support the president in times of crisis, they would be disturbed to learn the full extent of the president's powers.
It is not well-known that a number of statutes confer special powers on the president both in times of war and declaration of national emergencies. These range from the esoteric to the breathtaking.
They include prohibiting the export of any commodity. Arming private planes and ships. Extending regular enlistments in the armed forces in times of war until six months after the end of the war. Ordering units of the Ready Reserve to active duty for up to 24 months. Taking possession of property needed for military purposes immediately upon the filing of a petition condemning it. Ordering necessary products to be manufactured on a priority basis at private plants and taking over such plants upon their refusal to comply with such orders. Taking possession of and control of any transportation system to transport troops, war materiel and equipment. And suspending or changing the rules governing radio and television transmissions.
Another disturbing consequence of increasing presidential powers has been the growth in government secrecy.
Mr. KOBER: Oh, I think there's no question about that, that there is a considerable amount of secrecy involved in it, and that's one of the problems, as well. Obviously, there is some need to protect secrets. This was recognized by the founders and this is perfectly obvious. But as Madison himself said, you know, the people must be armed with the power that knowledge gives in a democracy.
NARRATOR: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. served as a special assistant to President John Kennedy.
Dr. SCHLESINGER: Having worked in a White House for some time, I can assure you that most of the stuff that is classified is flagrantly over-classified and a good deal of the secrecy system is a means not of hiding things from the enemy, but of covering-up mistakes, errors and criminality and concealing them from Congress and the American people.
NARRATOR: The preference of the executive branch for secrecy goes well beyond matters of military operations. Stanley Kober notes the tendency to use secrecy in diplomatic missions.
Mr. KOBER: One thing that bothered me recently was in the aftermath of Tiananmen, in which the president said that he was cutting off contacts with the Chinese, and then we subsequently learned that these delegations had been sent over there. That bothers me in the sense that, if we're going to send these delegations, people should know about it.
NARRATOR: A recent General Accounting Office report found that most of the presidential directives written since 1961 remain classified and details about them are largely unavailable for congressional or public scrutiny. One thing that both supporters and critics of presidential war powers agree on is that he current status quo is not good for the country.
As a result of Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which was supposed to impose some limits on the president's ability to send troops off to war. How effective has it been?
Mr. KOBER: The War Powers Act granted the president the right to send forces overseas for 30 days, 60 days without any sort of congressional authorization. So, it has given the impression that the president has this unlimited right to send forces into hostile situations at his own discretion without any kind of prior congressional authorization.
Senator McCAIN: The War Powers Act has been totally ineffective, it's been largely ignored. And frankly, that has been something of a violation of the Constitution because we failed to observe a law that was passed by Congress.
NARRATOR: Robert Hunter thinks the act has had some modest usefulness.
Mr. HUNTER: I do think it has had an effect upon presidents in that they have to think twice. They know the resolution is out there. They know that they are going to be technically in violation of the law. And so, I think they do spend a little bit extra time deciding whether to introduce military force into particular areas. I think that's useful.
NARRATOR: Arthur Schlesinger, however, believes the effort was doomed to failure.
Dr. SCHLESINGER: The War Powers Act was a predictable exercise in futility. I never thought it would work at the time. It hasn't worked. Presidents have ignored it. Congress has not been able to figure out a way to make it work. It sort of was a sap to the congressional conscience.
NARRATOR: Given the unresolved tensions between the executive and legislative branches on the war powers question, you would think that the Supreme Court would give an opinion. But in recent times, the court has shied away from the issue. Stanley Kober thinks the court's reluctance to take a position is bad news for the nation.
Mr. KOBER: I think it is important to have some sort of ruling on these issues because, otherwise, it does put, to my mind, members of the armed forces in an extremely difficult position if you're not clear on what the law is. On the one hand, you know, you have those Supreme Court rulings, you're not supposed to obey an illegal order. But, on the other hand, if you can't really be sure what is an illegal order or not, you're -- the presumption is to obey.
NARRATOR: Senator McCain is troubled by the current murky status quo.
Senator McCAIN: We need to prevent what might have occurred during the Persian Gulf crisis, and that is a constitutional crisis. If the Senate or the House of Representatives had voted against giving the president the authority to use force in the Persian Gulf, I believe that the president would have gone ahead anyway and used it, and that would have caused a constitutional crisis of enormous proportions, perhaps the greatest crisis in the over 200-year history of this nation.
NARRATOR: Arthur Schlesinger is critical of what he calls an "imperial tendency" of American presidents.
Dr. SCHLESINGER: I think the impression has arisen that foreign policy is the private property of the president of the United States and that no one -- Congress, and the press, and the judiciary have no role, they're kibitzers and they shouldn't be allowed to meddle with the president when he's trying to navigate the tricky currents of international politics. This is not what the Constitution intended, nor is it the way it should be done in a democracy, nor is it good for the presidency itself.
NARRATOR: Robert Hunter thinks it's time to drop our cold war preoccupations.
Mr. HUNTER: And the way I look at it is after four decades of cold war, it's like a hairy dog coming out of a rainstorm; it sits there and it shudders all that water away and then goes about its business. That's what we have to do with all these cold war preoccupations that we had that significantly transformed, if not distorted American society.
NARRATOR: Although the threat of a US-Soviet nuclear war that hung over us during most of the cold war is now rapidly receding, the president continues to act as if he is a wartime commander. The president needs to start obeying the Constitution, the what-we-say-goes sentiment expressed by President Bush during the Iraqi war is inappropriate. It is not necessarily true that presidents know best.
Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, clearly the issue of who is to command our armed forces and what authority the commander has is a very interesting subject. The founding fathers made it very clear that the declaration of war rests with the people; that is, the Congress of the United States. They also made it clear that the president, as one of his duties, would be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Our president today as commander-in-chief of the armed forces commands the most powerful military force ever assembled and we also know that our presidents in the past, in the role of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, have shown a certain penchant for using our armed forces whenever they thought it was best.
Now the question we have to decide as a democracy: Have we allowed too much power to rest in the hand of the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces to decide when, where and how to fight a war? I think all of us ought to get involved in that issue, learn more about it and note again that the president of the United States is only the commander-in-chief of the armed forces; he is not authorized in the Constitution to exceed that, to declare war.
Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.
[Over credits]
STANLEY KOBER: One can argue in terms of the lessons of the Gulf war, can one seriously imagine that, if there had been an independently elected legislature in Iraq with control over the war power, would we have had a Gulf war? Would these sorts of aggressions take place in these sorts of situations? And this is a message of the United States to the rest of the world, what our founders intended. We talk about a new world order. It's important that if you look at the Great Seal of the United States on the back of your dollar bill, you will see "novus ordo seclorum," a "new order for the ages" on the Great Seal of the United States.
The United States was intended to be a model for the rest of the world. As Thomas Jefferson
wrote, to James Monroe, I believe, in describing the countries of Europe at that time, he said
"they are countries of eternal war." We were supposed to be something different. And as I said,
Madison stressed that the legislative control over the war power was the most important
provision of the Constitution. And this was supposed to be one of our examples to the rest of the
world to lead it to a more peaceful era.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1992, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
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