An American monarch.

• Author: Wood, Gordon S.
• Position: 'Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush by John Yoo - Book review

John Yoo, Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2010), 544 pp., $29.95.

Article II of the United States Constitution is very vague on the extent of the president's power. All it says is that "the executive power shall be vested" in the president and 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." Since we now have a very powerful modern presidency, it has been the historical experience of the past two centuries that has clarified and filled out the brief words of the article.

John Yoo has set out to explain what has happened to presidential power since its beginnings in 1789. Yoo is a professor of law at Berkeley and the author of some controversial memos as a member of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice in the administration of George W. Bush. Since Yoo's robust view of presidential power is well-known, any history of the presidency written by him might initially seem suspect and agenda driven. He realizes only too well that his book is apt to be read "as a brief for the Bush administration's exercise of executive authority in the war on terrorism." But if it is a brief for an expansive understanding of presidential authority, it is a remarkably persuasive one.

Although Yoo has mastered an extraordinary number of historical and political science studies of the American presidency, his book is not a full-blown account of the presidency from its beginnings to the present, including all its personal and political aspects; that would make for a far bigger and different book. Instead, Yoo's account is a highly focused and nicely compressed constitutional history of the office. Like most scholars, Yoo favors those presidents--such as Washington, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR--who aggressively asserted and expanded their constitutional authority, especially at times of challenge and crisis. These are the presidents whom most historians lump among the greatest. In other words, for Yoo, executive power is not a problem that has to be explained away or denied; instead, it is a fact of history, a fact that has great constitutional legitimacy. "Presidential power," he says, "has grown as the nation's power has grown, both in constitutional law and in prestige and substantive power."

Americans in 1789 had little knowledge of what the office of the presidency might become. Despite being colonial subjects of the British monarchy, they had never really experienced a single national executive. They were familiar with the king's authority largely through his many vicegerents, the several royal governors. Indeed, with independence, they initially rejected any semblance of a single national executive.

Following the break from Great Britain, the thirteen separate states formed a treaty called the Articles of Confederation, something resembling the present-day European Union. Under the Articles, the Continental Congress, in which each state had an equal voice, became the nation's executive. The Congress actually replaced the king in the empire: it possessed most of the former king's prerogative powers, including the right to determine peace and war, maintain armed forces, send and receive ambassadors, settle disputes between states, establish post offices and regulate the value of coins. Precisely because the British king could not tax or regulate trade without the consent of Parliament, the Congress likewise was unable to do so. Congress had a president, but he was not an independent executive, merely the presiding officer.

When the framers, in the Convention of 1787, came to create the executive in the new Constitution, they had little to go on except the model of the British monarch. In April of that year, when George Washington asked James Madison what plans he had for the executive, Madison replied that he had "scarcely ventured as yet to form my own opinion either of the manner in which [the executive] ought to be constituted or of the authorities with which it ought to be cloathed." Through much of the convention, Madison and most delegates assumed that the powers of appointment of ambassadors and judges, and the conduct of war making and...