Challenges to Presidential Power

What began as a lovesome confidence in the military capabilities and superiorities of American forces vis-a-vis containment of Asiatic communism became a divisive issue on the internal scene, diverting resources from Johnson's domestic agenda and polarizing Johnson's own broad-based New necessitate constituency, finally disempowering him so much that he withdrew from presidential semipolitical relation altogether.

Nixon's imperial governing body appears to have been enabled partly by the disempowerment of Johnson, but partly because of evidence uncovered in the wake of Watergate that Nixon and troupe made a project of wielding executive power on a variety of issue fronts. Nixon came into office on a promise of Vietnamization of the war--the opposite of what had happened with LBJ (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 338ff). In concert with Henry Kissinger, Nixon loose "back channels" of negotiation with the Soviet Union, leading toward a series of foreign-policy coups from dTtente to the opening with the PRC (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 353-5). On the other hand, Nixon in any case oversaw the invasion of Cambodia and Laos in 1970 as a strategy of engage North Vietnamese military u

If Nixon's presidency emerged in the wake of the disempowerment of LBJ, so it essentially disempowered the presidency of Gerald Ford. As Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger note, Ford "lacked both a base of best-selling(predicate) support and a clearly articulated vision of how to renovate public confidence" (441). Ford's pardon of Nixon, possibly an act of internal healing, was at once the prime example of his presidential activism and a major factor of his vulnerability to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 419). But Carter--who came into office on a wave of optimism, change, and the customary touch--did not obtain the prerogatives associated with presidential activism.

Watergate appears to have fostered a widespread cynicism toward the vast majority of elected officials, whether reformist or incumbent, that has persisted from 1976 to the present.

As Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger explain, Reagan presided over a decade of increase rather than decrement in political and economic polarization in the mise en scene of either challenge or reversal of "many of the progressive programs and values that had dominated national politics since the New chew" (444). Despite Reagan's limited command of facts or issues of governance, American history, the political process, or the English language (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 453), he was perceived as having personality charisma and was described as "the Great Communicator" (452-3). This was the mannequin of presidential power and prestige in the 1980s. Combined with the reelection slogan "It's morning in America" in 1984, it seems to have contributed to his continue popularity with the electorate. Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger cite second-term problems that tarnished Reagan's "luster" (455)--e.g., the "sleaze factor" of administration operatives, Iran-Contra, the Contras, Edwin Meese's myriad back-room deals, and the 1987 Wall Street crash. Indeed, Iran-Contra and the Contras in Nicaragua, like the invasi
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