Pouring the Fuel
Atlanta, GA
Anything called a “program” is unconstitutional.
– Joe Sobran
We started by reviewing the men who assembled the chassis. Then we considered those who built the engine.
Today we evaluate those who added the fuel. Next we will examine more recent presidents who pushed the pedals, and removed the brakes. Our hope is that we somehow hop off before this jalopy reaches the cliff.
Meanwhile, here in the backseat, we discuss three men from modest means, who climbed the mountain, and reached the pinnacle. By the ends of their terms, they had each fallen from their heights…and lay discarded in the ditch.
To some extent…and to different degrees…each eventually recovered his reputation. A couple of them (as we might expect) have even wormed their way into the good graces of our court historians, tho’ none of them deserve it.
Let’s see why.
Harry S Truman. Like many of the presidents on whom we’ve heaped opprobrium…but to an even greater degree…Truman was despised when he left office.
Harry Truman was born of modest means. He grew up middle class, saw action during the Great War, and opened a haberdashery when he returned…tho’ it failed a few years later, after the deep depression of 1920.
Truman was then drawn into politics, where he had a natural instinct and a powerful drive. He was tough-minded, and developed a knack for being a knee-capper.
He craved power, was decisive, and as President wasn’t particularly interested in working with Congress (“the buck stops here”). Truman once wrote his daughter that if he were wealthy, he would “just as soon spend my money buying votes and offices as yachts and autos.”
In the 1948 campaign, he exploited his down-to-earth, no-nonsense, middle class image on whistle-stop tours, sitting casually on the back of the train, and occasionally bringing Bess…the “real boss”…to the platform to wow the crowd and win re-election.
Like his nefarious peers we’ve catalogued in these notes, Truman viewed himself as the government. He played politics very well, and decided he needed two tools to be effective: dishonesty and deceit. He was adept with both, deftly using clever propaganda and media misdirection that would now be categorized as “spin”.
He was nothing if not bold, which without context could almost sound like a compliment. Thru executive decree, he nationalized coal mines, three oil refineries, an airport, cotton mills, the Chicago cab industry, and a rubber plant.
These were all outlandish violations of his oath, but he justified them as being necessary to ward of a “national emergency” (there’s that phrase again). This recurrent theme bore echoes of FDR, Wilson, and Lincoln…and anticipated the overt power grabs of more recent executives.
After World War II, Truman promised demobilization, but didn’t want to get rid of the wartime programs. Refusing to let the crisis pass, or go to waste, he insisted on implementing FDR’s “second bill of rights”. So he repackaged his predecessor’s wartime acts and postwar plans into new initiatives with different names, and let them continue as peacetime programs.
When the war ended, Truman wanted an extended draft, plus compulsory military service in the national guard. Congress rightfully rejected pressing more people into service, particularly without a war (Truman would soon find one of those).
Undeterred, the president suggested drafting striking steel mill workers into the army so he could force them to work. He took control of the railroads, and off-handedly advised hanging workers who refused to do their jobs. Later, in 1951, he seized American steel mills after workers went on strike.
Of course, the disreputable infractions Truman committed stateside are chicken-feed beside his corruption and carnage overseas.
The Marshall Plan receives plenty of accolades, despite its beneficiary nations growing at slower rates than countries that were deprived US aid. The program pumped billions of dollars into war-torn areas, but thru unilateral executive action, not constitutionally negotiated treaties. But where did it go?
The plan was less a philanthropic endeavor than a back-door boondoggle for American business, and a racket for foreign governments. The motivation was less to foster recovery and sustain growth (tho’ that was certainly desired), than to launder taxpayer dollars thru foreign governments to US corporations.
The Truman Doctrine opened the door to perpetual war, and persistent mobilization. The US military has remained in countless conflicts ever since. The permanent war footing fattens the defense industry, sustains a swarm spooks around the world, and subsidizes domestic surveillance here at home. Most of this came by executive order, some by Congressional authorization, and all in violation of Article II or the 4th Amendment.
Truman launched the Cold War, which acclimated the country to endless conflict, and the need for an ongoing bureaucracy to fight it. He signed NSC 68, which tripled defense spending and lavished loot on the CIA, setting the stage for the misdeeds of Dulles brothers and their secret coups, uprisings, and assassinations.
“It is forbidden to kill”, said Voltaire. “Therefore, murderers are punished – unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” Truman had lots of numbers, tho’ by his time the trumpets played more dirges than marches.
Without Congressional approval or any reasonable rationale, the president put over 300,000 US troops into Korea. To uphold the nebulous “principles of the United Nations”, more than 10% of them lost their lives.
But of all the major indiscretions of Truman’s presidency, the worst was one of the first. From the time the earliest hominids slammed bones on the heads of rival apes, few acts have been more barbaric than those that occurred over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The first explosion was bad enough. The second was particularly senseless and savage.
Dwight Eisenhower, then supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, disagreed with the decision to drop the bombs.
As he later put, “…it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing… I voiced to him [War Secretary Henry Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
William Leahy, the president’s chief of staff, wrote in his diary that “it is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
Even Major General Curtis LeMay, who had incinerated Tokyo six months earlier and never saw anything he didn’t want to bomb, was against it: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
Admiral Chester Nimitz, who had chased the Japanese back to their home islands, also chimed in: “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war… The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”
Abraham Lincoln may have been responsible for more innocent deaths than any American president, but Harry Truman was much more efficient in erasing his two hundred thousand souls. There is no defense for it.
As historian Ralph Raico said, if Harry Truman wasn’t a war criminal, no one ever was.
Lyndon Johnson. Here’s another one who, like Truman, was virtually hounded from office, yet whose reputation in the faculty lounge has somehow ascended with the passage of time.
Born in a Texas farmhouse, Johnson was also of humble origin, even more so than his predecessor from Missouri. He became a schoolteacher (can you imagine?) and a congressional aide before joining the US House.
In 1948 he was elected to the US Senate under circumstances I leave Robert Caro to describe, particularly the duplicitous maneuvering and blatant vote-stealing that won the election for “Landslide Lyndon”.
I was first introduced to LBJ by my grandfather, who referred to him…with variation in the order of insult…as that “no good, goddam, bastard son of a bitch”. Johnson probably would’ve taken that as a compliment.
He was without question one of the more unsavory characters ever to occupy the Oval Office. At one point, he had his mistress living in his house…along with his wife.
Since 1933, and certainly by Johnson’s time, the Executive branch had become the antithesis of what the founders designed. Lyndon Johnson was the epitome, if not the apotheosis, of that inversion.
Johnson perpetuated the progressive policies of his predecessors. In many ways he made them worse, by adding to them, or weaving the threads of detrimental government programs more deeply into the cultural fabric of American life.
And they would not be torn away. Entitlements, like insults, are easy to throw out, but hard to take back. The Great Society was in some sense a full realization and expansion of the “second Bill of Rights.”
Continuing the tired, yet regrettably effective, metaphor that had become so successful over the prior half century, Johnson declared “unconstitutional war” on poverty. He had a blank check to wage that war after the Kennedy assassination, and he made sure to cash it.
This was the same “war” analogy FDR used in 1933, and with it LBJ would justify building on his predecessor’s unconstitutional policies. He pushed for greater unemployment compensation, “fair” housing, agricultural subsidies and food stamps, and more federal funding for purely local concerns such as education, mass transit, libraries, and hospitals.
These programs would, according to Johnson, alleviate or eliminate poverty in America. As anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear knows, this didn’t happen. Anyone using the material behind the eyes and between the ears would’ve known that it wouldn’t.
Of course, Johnson did it anyway. But if anything, the “war on poverty” arrested widespread economic gains that had long been underway. But even had these programs “worked”, Johnson was not permitted to launch them. His presidential oath precluded him from using the government to address poverty.
Under the Great Society, Social Security was expanded. With the revised 1965 act, the US government intensified its intrusion into the medical sphere, with the advent of Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.
This was a seed that had been planted in 1912 by Theodore Roosevelt, when he included sickness insurance in his Progressive Party platform. It finally sprouted half a century later. As to be expected, introducing “cost controls” or broadening third-party payments increased prices and reduced service, not just for those who had struggled with medical payments, but for everyone.
The inefficiencies and distortions that now cover modern medical care like kudzu over Georgia had their roots in these programs. For all intents and purposes, we’ve lived under an expanding realm of government “health care” ever since. Not that anyone any longer cared (or cares), but neither the president nor anyone else in the US government had license to engage in these extra-constitutional enormities.
Similar prohibitions didn’t stop Johnson from throwing the same sand into scholastic gears. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Acts opened a federal cash drip into the US schools. It soon became a flood, and the students would drown.
The Constitution also does not allow for Federal Student loans or Pell Grants, but that hasn’t stopped them from further disfiguring the economics of education by raising prices, crippling recipients with debt, and lining the pockets of the Education complex. The results speak for themselves. Costs rose, quality fell. This eminently predictable outcome should’ve surprised no one.
While the Great Society greased the palms of the purveyors of butter, the Pentagon fired up the merchants of guns. Johnson inherited the Vietnam mess from Eisenhower and Kennedy, but quickly compounded the bequest.
The Gulf of Tonkin was his Havana Harbor…though in Cuba there was at least confirmation that the Maine had been sunk. After an initial skirmish causing minor US ship damage and no American casualties, no proof ever validated reports of a second incident in the gulf. It didn’t matter. For Johnson, this was the “weapons of mass destruction” moment, and he seized it.
Instead of declaring war as they were required to do, Congress…in a process that has by now become de rigueur…delegated its authority to the president. US troops poured into southeast Asia as military contractors swarmed northern Virginia. Government expenses doubled, and the budget broke. It couldn’t pay its creditors on a hard money standard, which led to severance of dollar from gold.
Johnson left office in justifiable disgrace, leaving his military and economic mess to…
Richard Nixon. We finally reach a villain who will likely provoke little argument from any side, although some of my criticism may inadvertently make a case for Nixon in the eyes of many who are inclined to detest him.
Nixon was born poor in Whittier, California, made his way thru Duke Law School, joined the government, served in the war, and was elected to the House of Representatives. There, by exposing Alger Hiss, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and created a faulty impression that he was a principled conservative.
It also put him on Eisenhower’s radar. He was placed on Ike’s ticket, used his dog Checkers to remain there, and served eight years as Vice President. Nixon had developed a pedigree that seemed suited to the presidency. He probably won election to that office in 1960, only to have Chicago shenanigans divert victory to John Kennedy.
Nixon is given considerable credit…revived in the last couple months…for not having contested the dubious results of that crooked contest. His motivation was no doubt partly patriotic, but it was also practical.
Richard Nixon had excellent political instincts. He was young in 1960, and would have another chance at the prize. But not if he burned down the podium. He bided his time, built his alliances, and was elected president in 1968.
Once in office, Nixon probably did more to advance the Great Society than Lyndon Johnson did. Watergate ultimately brought him down but…as with so many of his predecessors…he should’ve been impeached for a long list of executive encroachments.
Masquerading as a conservative…and simultaneously undermining that depiction…he created a broad domestic program, which he dubbed the “New Federalism”. This was a rhetorical feint and procedural crumb to the states.
Rather than not expropriate money from states in the first place, the central government sent them “block grants.” States could ostensibly use these funds as they saw fit, but in actuality they came with more strings than a puppet show. And the Federal government, with no constitutional jurisdiction, remained the marionette.
Richard Nixon, like most modern presidents, was a big fan of Theodore Roosevelt. He even titled his autobiography In the Arena, in honor of Teddy’s famous quote. Roosevelt believed that if the president does something, it is legal simply by virtue of the president doing it. Nixon adopted the same philosophy, and even used it in his own defense as Watergate unraveled.
But, like all his contemporaries, Nixon applied the logic to most everything he did in office. And why not? When was the last time (even in Nixon’s era) anyone questioned a presidential program on the basis of its constitutionality? It doesn’t even cross people’s minds. And if it does, whoever expresses the concern is dismissed as a naive crank (or so I’ve heard).
For decades, as innovation progressed and technology improved, pollution declined as prosperity grew. By the 1960s, as it did in so many areas, the government hopped on the trend and then took credit for the results. US environmental policies and restrictions sprouted under Johnson, but grew like weeds under Nixon.
The National Environmental Policy Act required an Environmental Impact study for almost any hole you want to dig or branch you want to trim. Any puddle into which a migratory bird might dip its beak could convert your privately-held property into a publicly-protected “wetland.” Obviously, the government has no constitutional basis for such infringements on property.
Then, by (what else?) executive order came one of the most powerful agencies in the government. The unilateral creation of the Environment Protection Agency is itself an impeachable offense, albeit tenuously justified by yet another grotesquely loose interpretation of the commerce clause.
Workplace safety, like the condition of the environment, had been improving for years, without the teams of inspectors that began to capriciously harass businesses under the auspices of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. OSHA, like the FTC and countless other agencies before and since, unconstitutionally arrogated to itself the prerogatives of all three branches of government.
With spending out of control and prices on the rise, the administration reacted with the “Nixon Shock”. Congress gave Nixon power to do whatever he had to do to “save the economy”. He used it to launch his New Economic Policy. By executive decree, wages were frozen, prices were capped, a tariff was imposed, and the gold window slammed shut.
The US government, as it had under FDR, engaged in blatant theft and defaulted on its debt. From then on, the dollar would “float”, while productivity, purchasing power, and real wages would sink. There is a direct line from the Nixon Shock to the twin deficits, cyclical asset bubbles, chronic wealth distortion, and economic dysfunction we suffer today. As Nixon himself put, “we’re all Keynesians now.”
But for all the damage he did, Nixon didn’t really care about domestic policy. He left that to his aide John Ehrlichman, probably with instructions to do as much of what the Left wanted…just to prove to them he wasn’t such a bad guy, so they’d stop criticizing him in the press. What he really cared about was foreign policy. Getting the president to focus on that was, as his speechwriter Pat Buchanan put it, like pushing on an open door.
Someone probably should’ve put a latch on that too.
Nixon deserves credit for the opening to China, and did fulfill a campaign promise to get the US out of Vietnam…albeit in much the way Gorbachev got the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
But before winding down operations and bringing troops home, Nixon ratcheted up the attacks and sent soldiers further afield. The incursion into Cambodia and the Christmas bombings are further stains on what was already a very dirty, unconstitutional war.
Watergate was the crowning scandal of the Nixon years, and revived the myth of “execution privilege”. The White House tried to hide beneath it. Nixon also sought refuge in Roosevelt’s notion that the president can’t do anything illegal. But Sam Ervin shined a light, and forced the cockroaches to come scurrying from under the West Wing rugs.
Nixon didn’t make it thru his term, but executive privilege still survives.
JD