The Cult of the Presidency.

• Author: McMaken, Ryan W.
• Position: Book review

* The Cult of the Presidency

By Gene Healy

Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2008.

Pp. viii, 367. $22.95 cloth.

Gene Healy's The Cult of the Presidency presents the reader with a concise historical analysis of how the presidency has undergone enormous changes since its creation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Views of the president's role in American government and society have changed so drastically since the early nineteenth century that the office would likely be unrecognizable to an American of even the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson was being accused of demagoguery and presidential imperialism.

Looking at the presidency from Washington's inaugural to the final days of the George W. Bush administration, Healy draws an overall historical are for the presidency in which the public's faith in the president's ability to solve all societal, economic, and political problems peaks during the mid-twentieth century and then declines after the disaster (for the presidency) of Watergate.

During the nineteenth century, presidential power was extremely limited. The view among both the public and the elites was that presidents were mere chief executives who carried out the legislature's wishes. Healy notes a number of examples of nineteenth-century views of the presidency, and his analysis makes clear that the path to national political prominence in nineteenth-century America was through the U.S. Senate, decidedly not through the presidency.

Abraham Lincoln would seem to be a watershed president, signaling the end of this period, although Healy treats him more as an aberration than as a trendsetter. Andrew Johnson's 1868 impeachment at the hands of a resurgent Congress would seem to indicate that post-Lincoln presidents did not exactly pick up where Lincoln left off, but Lincoln's imprisonment of thousands of his critics, the Emancipation Proclamation, and his military occupation of the South did truly set a wide array of new precedents for the presidency.

Yet few nineteenth-century presidents after Lincoln are remembered for robust presidential activism. According to Healy, Theodore Roosevelt provides the true starting point in a trend of accelerating presidential power that would finally be challenged only by the Watergate scandal seventy years later.

Prior to Roosevelt, the president's attitude toward Congress was generally one of deference, although there were certainly exceptions. For Roosevelt, however, Congress was only a troublesome...