POWERS OF PRESIDENCY CONSIDERED

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32295, 13 May 1970, Page 17

POWERS OF PRESIDENCY CONSIDERED

(By FRANK OLIVER, special correspondent N Z.P.A.) WASHINGTON. The national spotlight is fiercely and implacably on the White House and its occupant as the nation simmers in a crisis created by events both at home and abroad. People everywhere are considering both the great institution, the Presidency, and the man who is now wielding the enormous powers of that office.

What the country has on hand has been described as a constitutional crisis and that does not seem extravagant language. There is discussion and argument about whether too much power resides in the Presidency these days. This argument has been going on for a long time, certainly since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, ironically, it has almost always been the Democrats in favour of great executive powers in the White House and Republicans wanting less power there and more in the state capitals. Now it is a Republican President who has been exercising those great

powers (in defiance of the Constitution say his critics, and in the national interest, say his political friends). Whichever it be, his decisions have created a very serious political crisis at home and troubled doubt abroad. He is under attack from all quarters with the exception of the most “hawkish’,’ areas. These attacks are on his policies, his alleged failure to be the President of all the people with dividing the country as it has not been divided in living memory, as well as for his alleged wresting from Congress of its sole power to make war. It is interesting that, during this period of crisis, a book has been published called “The Twilight of the Presidency,” by George Reedy, Washington journalist of long standing, an assistant to Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, his press secretary in the White House and later his policy aide. Reedy left the White House somewhat short of being awestruck by what he saw of the Presidency as an institution and considerably worried about its future. The major problem of the Presidency, he writes, “is the increasing tendency of the office to isolate its occupant from reality.” The official family tends to become a group of sycophantic courtiers, opponents mute their voices, nobody talks back and

in the end, he says, a President, any President, is left with no way of judging the intensity of his opposition. The truth of this has been borne out lately for, as James Reston and others have pointed out, the violent opposition in Congress and the universities to the invasion of Cambodia genuinely surprised the President. He was warned by some of his own people, says the press, but was astonished when the warnings came true. As has been said before, this great but isolated office, with its vast amount of information not available to the public, tends to develop in a man a “father-knows-best” mentality which in turn develops into irritability towards those who do not always think he necessarily does know best. More than one commentator said of his press conference last Friday night that he spoke like a father reproving rebellious children. The office does isolate him in a way that no Prime Minister, being part and parcel of a legislature, can be isolated from what law-makers and the general public are thinking. During his campaign Mr Nixon said that no President could isolate himself from the great intellectual ferments of his time but must consciously and deliberately place him-

self at their centre. Now, 18 months later, the press is saying “Nixon is sadly out of touch with the people.” The promised coming together of all people has not been achieved. It has, almost everyone agrees, been a divisive administration and Mr Spiro Agnew, now muzzled, may yet go down in political history as the great divider. Both President and Vice-Pre-sident have been irritated by dissent, so confident have they been that they were doing just the right thing. Now there is dissent within the! official family. The secretary: of the Interior, Mr Walter Hickel, who-has six sons and knows what he’s talking about,' has told the President that his administration appears to lack appropriate concern for the attitude of a great mass of Americans, the young people. This must have been as startling to the White House as was the reaction to the Cambodian venture. But at least the White House now knows more about public opinion than it ever has in this Administration and the President, a pragmatical I man, has been instant in his first reactions to what seem to be the political needs of a stormy political period. He has been getting metaphorical brickbats-from all angles and most places. The “Washington Post” says

it hopes and prays the Ad-, ministration has not mis-h judged the situation in South-1; East Asia “as disastrously as:’ it has misjudged the situa-H tion at home.” It reminds the] 1 President that he said last;( autumn he did not intend ’ to heed the protesters’ message and says Mr ( Nixon and Mr Agnew misjudge about everything that matters where war critics andi ] especially the young are con-L cerned. A columnist in the “New;. ;York Times” calls the Presi-|j ident obtuse and heartless for!, (his comments about the dead|j students at Kent and he adds . that Mr Agnew’s sustained < and inflammatory assault on i some young Americans can i have had no other purpose than to set generation against i generation and class against s class for “the calculated poli- < tical purposes of the Nixon ' Administration.” He calls the i Cambodian adventure a monu- 1 mental blunder. The “Wall Street Journal” 1 says that Cabinet members ‘ and lesser officials feel insu- ' lated from the President by a j screen of elite aides and that]J an inaccessible Mr Nixon stirs L anger and despair within the | ( Administration. !. In Miami, one Knight chain (1 newspaper, saying it admires ii Mr Nixon, but hopes he will;! heed Mr Hickel for, it says, I when there is a temporary!'

vacuum in leadership, schemers and self-servers move into it as “Mr Agnew has done so adroitly and dangerously.” The President, it adds, must be willing to re-examine policies “pursued without recourse to the people’s representatives and (which are) increasingly divisive of the nation itself." The constitutional crisis has been long in the making, says the “New York Times” editorially, and adds that if the President persists in his arbitrary escalations of the Indo-China conflict without regard to the strong misgivings of large numbers of Americans it is the right and duty of Congress to exercise its Constitutional powers of restraint. A number of lawmakers are still seething, especially senators, over the usurpation of their war-making powers. The first likely retaliation may well be turning off the financial tap which supplies the money with which to make war. Other things may come later, but at the moment most people in and out of Congress are watching the Chief Executive under the national spotlight to see what that renowned politician will do now that he has become aware of the strength of pub lie opinion about the war and its escalation, and has seen that young dissenters have been able to close 136 universities.