Volume 20, Number 20 · December 13, 1973
No Thank You, Mr. President
By Alfred Kazin
The Imperial Presidency
by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Houghton Mifflin, 505 pp., $10.00
Jackson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy have been the main reasons for what Arthur Schlesinger here admits has been his own past contribution to the 'presidential mystique,' his notable infatuation with 'strong' Presidents. Anyway, Nixon has chilled the affair but not killed it. To anyone well acquainted with Schlesinger's fascinatingly partisan, tendentious, highly literary biographies of his favorite administrations, the texture of this new book, a book of course motivated by Nixon, will nevertheless come as a surprise. Schlesinger has read carefully in the literature about the separation of powers. His attack on Nixon comes wrapped in a more theoretical and seemingly even-handed consideration of presidential authority—by which we in Nixonland mean the excess of that authority—than I would have expected from that politically scrappy but, as a historian, old-fashioned hagiographer, whose many books and polemics on the Presidency will likely some day be read as a guide not so much to Jackson, Roosevelt, Kennedy as to the last-ditch liberalism of my generation.
Review, 1602 words
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