







By Roger D. HodgeA year and more has passed, yet
we have not been delivered. Somebelieved that Barack Obama had
come to restore the Republic, to return
our nation to the righteous
path. A new, glorious era in American
politics was at hand.
If only that were true. We all can
taste the bitterness now.
Obama promised to end the war
in Iraq, end torture, close Guantánamo,
restore the constitution, heal our
wounds, wash our feet. None of these
things has come to pass. As president,
with few exceptions, Obama either
has embraced the unconstitutional
war powers claimed by his
predecessor or has left the door open
for their quiet adoption at some later
date. Leon Panetta, director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, has declared
that the kidnapping and rendition
of foreigners will continue,
and the Bush Administration’s expansive
doctrine of state secrets continues
to be used in court against
those wrongfully detained and tortured
by our security forces and allies.
Obama has adopted military
commissions, once an unpardonableoffense against our best traditions, to
prosecute terrorism cases in which
legitimate convictions cannot be obtained;
when even such mock trials
provide too much justice, he will
make do with indefinite detention.
If, by some slim chance, a defendant
were to be found not guilty, we have
been assured that the president’s
“post-acquittal” detention powers
would then come into play.
The principle of habeas corpus, sacred
to candidate Obama as “the essence
of who we are,” no longer seems
so essential, and reports continue to
surface of secret prisons hidden from
due process and the Red Cross. Waterboarding
has been banned, but
other “soft” forms of torture, such as
sleep deprivation and force-feeding,
continue—as do the practices, which
once seemed so terribly important to
opponents of the Bush regime, of
presidential signing statements and
warrantless surveillance. In at least
one respect, the Obama Justice Department
has produced an innovation:
a claim of “sovereign immunity” in
response to a lawsuit seeking damages
for illegal spying. Not even the minions
of George W. Bush, with their
fanciful notions of the unitary executive,
made use of this constitutionally
suspect doctrine, derived from the
ancient common-law assumption that
“the King can do no wrong,” to defend
their clear violations of the federal
surveillance statute.
As the attorney Glenn Greenwald
has argued, in his writings for Salon
and elsewhere, the rule of law has not
been restored but perverted; what had
been outlawed but committed, the law
now simply permits. Obama’s lawyers,
benefiting from Bush-era litigation,
can claim conformity with law, but the
disgraceful policies continue largely
unchanged. Better, smarter legal arguments
obtain for policies that should
give any decent man nightmares. Our
torturers and war criminals and illegal
spies and usurpers remain at liberty,
unpunished. The wars of choice continue
and threaten to spread; 30,000
additional soldiers prepare to “finish
the job” in Afghanistan’s graveyard of
empires while our flying robots bomb
villagers in the mountains of Waziristan.
This, we are told, is progress.
Admirers of the president now embrace
actions they once denounced as
criminal, or rationalize and evade such
questions, or attempt to explain away
what cannot be excused. That Obama
is in most respects better than George
W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin,
or Joseph Stalin is beyond dispute and
completely beside the point. Obama is
judged not as a man but as a fable, a
tale of moral uplift that redeems the
sins of America’s shameful past. Even
as many casual supporters begin to
show their inevitable displeasure with
his “job performance,” and his poll
numbers decline, the character and
motivations of the president remain
above question. He is a good man. I
trust him to do the right thing.
It is not surprising that unsophisticated
children, naive Europeans,
and Democratic partisans continue
to revere the heroic former candidate,
despite everything he has done
and left undone. Nor is it surprising
that the broken remnants of the old
White Supremacy coalition hate and
fear the man and will oppose him
without quarter (excepting, of course,
his war policies). Puzzling, however,
is the fact that Obama, until fairly
recently an obscure striver in the
Chicago Democratic machine, continues
to inspire perfervid devotion
among intellectual liberals who
know their history. Even they say: Be
patient. Give him time. It’s hard to
change the government. Or, more cynically:
He’s the best we can do. Thus,
his most sophisticated admirers as-
sume the burden of Obama’s sins,
bite their tongues, and indulge the
temptation to frame his shortcomings
as our own. Obama is not to
blame; we are to blame. Obama has
not failed us; America has
failed him. Perhaps I am wrong to expect a
fl ood of thoughtful apologetics on or
around the first anniversary of
Obama’s rule. It may be that the bizarre
spectacle of a putatively antiwar
president standing in imperial glory
before an audience of young West
Point cadets, declaring that War is
Peace even as he promises to send
many of them to the grave, will jar
the liberal intelligentsia from its affectionate
slumber. But, as I write,
the rationalizations and hagiographies
have already begun to pour in,
although they are not always packaged
as such.
Seeking fresh historical perspective
on yet another president with an obscure
plan to somehow win an unwinnable
war he did not start, I picked up
a new book by Garry Wills with a
provocative title: Bomb Power: The
Modern Presidency and the National
Security State. The walls of my library
are lined with books advertising similar
themes, the works of trenchant
historians who seek to explain what
went wrong with America, how the
noble republic of Jefferson and Madison
devolved into a globe-gobbling
empire. I came to Bomb Power with
high expectations and was surprised
by what I found.
Wills traces the roots of the American
empire to the invention and deployment
of nuclear weaponry by the
Manhattan Project, the vast and secret
apparatus authorized by Franklin
Roosevelt and created by General
Leslie Richard “Dick” Groves. An
enormous covert bureaucracy, hidden
from congressional oversight and beholden
to one man, created the most
fearsomely destructive weapon in
history, and thus set the paradigm for
the national security state that arose
immediately after World War II.
Wills tracks its development, sketching
the scientific and political intrigues
at Los Alamos, and briefly
outlines the development of America’s
Cold War posture and its culmination
in the National Security Act
of 1947, the epochal raft of legislation
that reorganized the armed services
and created the Central Intelligence
Agency and the National
Security Council. Anti-communism
and the perceived Soviet threat provided
a ready justifi cation for paranoia,
secrecy, and the consolidation
of presidential power, but nothing
contributed more to that process, according
to Wills, than the sheer fact
of the atomic bomb. That “bomb
power,” as Wills calls it, was so enormous,
so seductive and awe-inspiring,
that it swamped the Constitution.
Lodging “the fate of the world” in
one man, with no constitutional
check on his actions, caused a violent
break in our whole governmental system.
. . . The nature of the presidency
was irrevocably altered by this grant
of a unique power. The President’s
permanent alert meant our permanent
submission. He became, mainly, the
Commander in Chief, since he could
loose the whole military force of the
nation at any moment. Elections became
fateful because we were choosing
a Commander in Chief, a custodian
of the football, a person whose
hand was on the button.
When the North Korean army
crossed the 38th Parallel, Wills writes,
the new bomb power was put to the
test. President Truman, devoted to the
idea of his “great office” and determined
to avoid costly congressional
entanglements, successfully fought off
constitutional pedants such as Senator
Robert Taft and launched what Wills
considers the fi rst presidential war. This
was followed, as we know, by a long
succession of interventions, coups
d’état, and police actions, culminating
in the catastrophe of Vietnam and now
the “Long War” that comprises our
misadventures in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Bomb Power, a vigorous, lawyerly
indictment of the imperial presidency,
provides a useful summary of America’s
shameful and violent Cold War history,
and demonstrates that the crimes of
the Bush regime differed from those of
previous administrations largely in degree
rather than in kind.
Oddly, however, Wills’s emphasis on
the peculiar aura of presidential bomb
power, so compellingly expressed in
his opening chapters, begins to lose its
persuasive force as the narrative unfolds,
as the wars drag on and the list
of interventions and coups grows longer.
What historian William Appleman
Williams called the impotence of
nuclear supremacy begins to make itself
felt, and it is this impotence that
lurks behind the belligerence of a
monster like Dick Cheney, whose
statement of the “bomb power” theory
of presidential power is unrivaled in
its clarity: “The president of the United
States,” he told a television audience,
“could launch the kind of devastating
attack the world has never
seen. He doesn’t have to check with
anybody, he doesn’t have to call the
Congress, he doesn’t have to check
with the courts.”
It’s easy to see why the president’s
bomb power appeals to Cheney, and
although Wills is surely right to observe
that the president’s arrogation of
nuclear command represented an important
victory for the executive in its
long struggle with the other two
branches of government, one suspects
that the total mobilization required by
World War II would have had much
the same effect even without the
atomic bomb. The threat of the Soviet
Union, together with the horrifi c
realities of air power and conventional
bombing—which claimed far more
victims than did Little Boy and Fat
Man—would have remained. Presidents
have rarely been frustrated when
contemplating violence, and Caesar
required only the power of
the sword. Like many who revere the idea
of the lost American Republic, Wills
wishes to isolate a singular efficient
cause for our imperial declension,
when the more likely, and more complex,
explanation is an inherent tendency
or immanent manifestation,
which is why the term “manifest destiny”
is so perfectly apt. Continental
expansion, the Indian Wars, decades
of Open Door diplomacy and economic
imperialism, not to mention a
150-year tradition of extra constitutional
military intervention, executive
misbehavior, and secrecy, all culminated
in the Cold War ideology of
national security, which provided the
template for our present-day terror
dreams. The American empire was
10 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2010
always present, in both idea and reality,
along with the more noble republican
rhetoric, as in the following bit
of prophetic doggerel, printed by the
Virginia Gazette in 1774:
Some fi tter day shall crown us the
Masters of the Main,
In giving laws and freedom to subject
France and Spain,
And all the isles o’er Ocean shall
tremble and obey
The Lords, the Lords, the Lords of
North America.
Wills, a learned historian and the
author of more than one presidential
biography, can see the problem, and
he spends a few paragraphs on Abraham
Lincoln, whose wartime assumption
of dictatorial powers troubles
his thesis, and Woodrow
Wilson, that accomplished theorist
of executive power, according to
whom “the President is at liberty,
both in law and conscience, to be as
big a man as he can.” Yet he does
not ponder Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase,
which doubled the size of the
country by executive fi at, or Madison’s
failed dream of conquering
Canada, or Polk’s successful conquest
of northern Mexico. It was
Madison, principal author of the
Constitution, who did more than
anyone to refute Montesquieu’s maxim
that republican liberty requires a
small state, the political consensus
of the day. “Extend the sphere,” he
argued, and displace internal confl
icts outward. Hamilton agreed, urging
his countrymen to “dictate the
terms of the connection between
the old and the new world!” Americans
did precisely that, and in the
long years of American expansion,
both territorial and economic, military
power was the decisive wedge
that permitted executive usurpation.
The dangers inherent in our constitutional
design were recognized from
the beginning. Here is John Taylor of
Caroline taking stock in 1814:
Both the English king and our president
are the exclusive managers of negotiation;
and secrecy is their common
maxim. By negotiation, foreign governments
may be provoked; by secrecy,
a government may delude and knead a
people into a rage for war; and war is a
powerful instrument for expelling the
element of self-government, and introducing
that of force. . . . By negotiation,
secrecy and war, traitors convert
a national detestation of tyranny into
a tool for making tyrants.
“Dazzled by the prospect of permanent
union,” Taylor continues,
“the sponsors for liberty, were forgotten
in the general joy; and a president
of the United States was invested
with far greater powers than
suffi ced to Caesar for enslaving his
country. Patronage, negotiation, a
negative upon laws, and a paper system,
render some of those talents
which Caesar possessed, unnecessary
to enable a president to perform
what Caesar effected.” America’s liberal
empire and executive monarchism
were nurtured together in the
womb of the Republic.
Wills, however, prefers a tale of diabolical
“bomb power” and thus a
Christian allegory of the Fall, in which
America, after tasting the fruit of the
Tree of Atomic Knowledge, is surprised
by sin and stumbles into hegemony.
The dismaying subtext of Wills’s
book becomes fully manifest only in
his afterword: he seems to have written
his book, as if in parody of Milton,
to justify the ways of Obama
to men. The awesome seductiveness of
bomb power, Wills suggests, is something
with which mere mortals cannot
contend. A new president, ambushed
by his sudden potency, has
no choice but to give in. “Bomb power,”
as Wills conjures it, is both more
sinister and more palliative than the
comparatively tame thesis, submitted
by generations of critical historians,
that the United States of America
never did follow a path of republican
virtue, and that the presidency has
steadily devolved into an office of
elected emperor. But such knowledge
offers little in the way of consolation
when applied to the shortcomings of
a beloved leader. “Perhaps it should
come as no surprise,” Wills writes,
refl ecting on Obama’s record, “that
turning around the huge secret empire
built by the National Security
State is a hard, perhaps impossible
task. . . . A president is greatly pressured
to keep all the empire’s secrets.
. . . He becomes a prisoner of his own
power. As President Truman could
not not use the Bomb, a modern
President cannot not use his huge
power base. It has all been given him
as the legacy of Bomb Power, the
thing that makes him not only Commander
in Chief but Leader of the
Free World. He is a self-entangling
giant.” Thus a president’s shabby
compromises and betrayals assume
the high pathos of tragedy.
Indeed, Wills writes in a recent issue
of The New York Review of Books,
were Obama to end the war in Afghanistan—
as reason, morality, history,
and all canons of prudence most
urgently recommend—he would pay
the ultimate sacrifi ce: he would forfeit
his reelection. “It is unlikely that we
will soon have another president with
the moral and rhetorical force to talk
us out of a foolish commitment that
cannot be sustained without shame
and defeat. If it costs him his presidency,
what other achievement can
match it? During his presidential campaign,
Barack Obama said he would
rather be a one-term president than
give up on his goals. Here is a goal no
other president we can imagine would
have a possibility of reaching.” Wills,
like many of Obama’s supporters, apparently
did not believe his candidate
when during the campaign he repeatedly
vowed to escalate the Afghan
war—nor did he seem to notice when
the president deployed 21,000 new
troops there upon taking offi ce. As it
happens, Obama’s Nixonian performance
at West Point caused the scales
to fall from Wills’s eyes (he promised
in a short, strange essay never to give
Obama “another penny”), but other
thoughtful liberals, such as Hendrik
Hertzberg (“a sombre appeal to reason”)
and Frank Rich (“the sincere
product of serious deliberations, an
earnest attempt to apply his formidable
intelligence to one of the most
daunting Rubik’s Cubes of foreign
policy America has ever known”),
have not wavered in their
adjectival devotion. Let us grant that Barack
Obama is as intelligent as his admirers
insist. What evidence do we possess
that he is also a moral virtuoso?
What evidence do we possess that
he is a good, wise, or even a decent
man? Yes, he can be eloquent, yet
eloquence is no guarantee of wisdom
or of virtue. Yes, he has a nice
family, but that evinces a private
morality. Public morality requires
public action, and all available public
evidence points to a man with
the character of a common politician,
whose singular ambition in life
was to attain power; nothing in
Barack Obama’s political career suggests
that he would ever willingly
commit to a course of action that
would cost him an election. His preposterously
two-faced approach to
Afghanistan, wherein he simultaneously
escalates the war while promising
to begin “the transition to Afghan
responsibility” just a year later,
is a perfect illustration of his compulsion
to split the difference on
any given political question. (One
could also point to the health-care
boondoggle, or to his utter capitulation
to Wall Street in economic
matters.) He dilly-dallies, draws out
both friends and opponents, dangles
promises in front of everyone, gives
a dramatic speech, and then pulls
back to gauge the reaction. Since
the policy itself is incoherent—and,
as usual with Obama, salted with
stipulations and provisos—he can
always trim and readjust as necessary.
Deadlines and definitions of
“combat forces” are infinitely malleable.
Since Obama is an intelligent
man, surely he understands the
meaning of the word mendacity.
Having embraced and professionalized
the powers of force and fraud
previously associated with the likes
of John Yoo and Dick Cheney,
Obama has embarked on a course of
war that will certainly invite further
abuses of power. His political survival
now depends on martial success in a
land that has defeated some of history’s
most brutal strategies of conquest.
Obama has set a trap for himself,
but because he is such a clever
politician, the spring is just as likely
to fall on us instead. Such insidious
governance demands serious, sustained
opposition, not respectful disagreement
or fanciful historical apologies
or mournful lamentations
about the tragedy of his presidency.
Principles can be sacrificed to hopes
as well as to fears.
The Mendacity of Hope. I like that. Nicely done. A touch of the Greek tragedy, a hint of Euripedes’ Medea.
“Manifold are thy shapings, Providence!
Many a hopeless matter gods arrange.”
Keep the faith baby. Don’t knuckle under to all this post-post modernist crap that is passing for new thinking these days. The marriage of cold feet and mendacity.
Kev
Obama is NOT the fool that Hodge writes about. Hodge is self flagellating here in his book for being so wrong about his hero. Yes, Hodge loves this “great president, a good man”. Hodge is shilling for Obama and so preferentially attracted to Obama it’s really pitiful. It’s a good read, but having read it, I find that Hodge alternately praises then buries Caesar. Overall, the book is highly flawed, if only by it’s whiplash side to side movement. When liberals like Hodge write books about Obama, it is always predictable to see the author vacillating uncontrollably. Too bad, the book had potential.