Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty.

• Author: Eland, Ivan
• Position: Book review

* Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty

By Andrew P. Napolitano

New York: Nelson Books, 2014.

Pp. xxxii, 444. $26.99 hardcover.

Andrew P. Napolitano has written a thorough and well-written history of presidential trampling of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties throughout U.S. history, especially during wars and times of international tension. Napolitano starts with the early republic, including John Adams's suppression of free speech to mute his political opponents by using the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 during the Quasi-War with France. He then explores Abraham Lincoln's virtual dictatorship during the Civil War, including Lincoln's usurpation of power from Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (leading to indefinite detention without trial and other legal due process) and his unconstitutional use of military commissions when civilian courts were still open and functioning.

Moving on to the World War I era, Napolitano analyzes Woodrow Wilson's use of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 to jail people for opposition to the war and his disregard of Americans' economic rights by increasing dramatically government intrusion into the economy to convert it from peacetime to wartime production. Among other topics surrounding World War II, Napolitano explores the Smith Act of 1940, which was really a rehash of the Alien and Sedition Acts--once again criminalizing constitutionally protected political behavior and expediting the deportation of alien "thought criminals." He also explores the readoption of the World War I model for a command economy during World War II. Napolitano then talks about Franklin D. Roosevelt's reinstatement of Lincoln's unconstitutional military commissions to try suspected German saboteurs and his incarceration of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in prison camps despite no cases of bad wartime behavior on their part.

As for the long Cold War, Napolitano finds plenty of executive encroachment on civil liberties. During the Korean War, Harry Truman, to sell his new policy of global interventionism to an American public that had been traditionally inclined to stay out of other nations' business, started the Red Scare, which Joseph McCarthy and others exploited (pp. 144-65). Truman also unsuccessfully attempted to become commander in chief of the country rather than just of the armed forces by trying to nationalize American steel companies for war production; in the Youngstown Steel case, the Supreme Court rejected Truman's ploy. The author then examines government...