Word: fulbright
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MANY of the foreign policy problems that Fulbright discusses have been covered in other books by other writers. What is surprisingly new is his call for a drastic movement toward a parliamentary system in the United States. The senator devotes his second chapter largely to the question of how the U.S. political and constitutional systems are incompatible with an effective foreign policy...
According to Fulbright, every four or eight years, the key foreign policy players in the executive branch are replaced, often by people with little or no experience in the field. The result is what Fulbright calls a "government of amateurs." In contrast, a parliamentary system, where the heads of the various executive departments come from the legislature, has the advantages of consistency and continuity of both policies and actors...
...make his point, the former senator tells of the time he was considered for the post of Secretary of State under President John F. Kennedy '40. If he were to head the State Department, Fulbright would have had to resign his Senate seat. After his four or eight years in office were up, he would be out the federal government. After considering the situation, Fulbright went to a presidential advisor and said that he would prefer not to be appointed...
While the parliamentary system Fulbright recommends has certain advantages, it also has many problems. If Congress were to elect the president/prime minister (as, Fulbright notes, James Madison suggested in the first draft of the Constitution), there would be none of the checks and balances that keep our system free from tyranny. A parliamentary system also might become a tool to keep the power in the hands of a small, self-perpetuating body removed from the people...
...Fulbright does not adequately address these difficulties in the text, but he correctly points out that there is not a proper dialogue about the Constitution's effectiveness, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. The primary reason for this is that most Americans have accepted the Constitution as holy writ, free from error and blasphemous to criticize...