Historical regression: why Bush makes even Arthur Schlesinger sound like Michael Moore.

• Author: North, Jessica
• Position: On Political Books - War and the American Presidency - Book Review

War and the American Presidency By Arthur M. Schlesinger W.W.Norton & Company, $23.95

There is something about George W. Bush that makes liberals come unhinged. To some extent, Democrats have put their rage to good use, parlaying it into political activism and fundraising not seen on the left in many years. But fury isn't always the most useful state from which to write a book, and recently the stores have been filled with angry anti-Bush books by prominent liberals--many of which have sold quite well, but few of which offered anything new or interesting.

The same phenomenon may be at work in Arthur M. Schlesinger's most recent book. This iconic scholar has perhaps done more to contribute to our understanding of the American presidency than any other living historian. In War and the American Presidency, Schlesinger tries to answer some big questions about the presidency and war powers. But he never gets very far--he is just too steamed to get much beyond venting.

That is not to say that War and the American Presidency is a dull read. With his trademark elegance, the dean of American historians blasts the Bush administration for its embrace of preventive war and its zeal in consolidating power within the executive branch. The White House, he writes, has gone well beyond historical precedent, and overstepped even constitutional bounds. "Since we arrogate to ourselves the exclusive right to wage preventive war, we ignore the dark warning of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams against going abroad 'in search of monsters to destroy,'" he warns. "When we initiate war unilaterally, we set the republic up as the world's judge, jury, and executioner. The direct consequence is that never before in American history has the United States been so feared and hated by the rest of the world."

Nor has Schlesinger lost his "knack for finding a historical nugget that informs the contemporary situation. He notes, for instance, that presidents Truman and Eisenhower rejected preventive war out of hand. (Truman scoffed that "You don't prevent anything by war except peace.") And he points out that while there are famous cases of American presidents undertaking constitutionally dubious measures during times of conflict--Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas cot pus during the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 decision to launch an undeclared war in the North Atlantic--there was an equally long-standing tradition among these presidents that such measures were...