Word: trumaning
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Advocates of presidential authority note a similarity between the present situation and one in 1950, when Harry Truman committed U.S. forces to the defense of South Korea in compliance with a United Nations Security Council resolution. But Columbia Law School's Louis Henkin notes that "Congress immediately ratified and acquiesced in the action." Moreover, he says, "we have no case where the President went to war when Congress told...
...involved in Southeast Asia 20 years before American soldiers began to die there in large numbers. From Truman to Nixon, U.S. Presidents propped up undemocratic and unpopular South Vietnamese regimes and lied about the extent of American participation in the war. In the 1960s these immoral policies, justified only by anticommunist rhetoric and concerns about U.S. prestige and hegemony, composed the framework of anti-war protest...
Spurred by John Sununu, his combative chief of staff, Bush sought to recover by appealing to voters over the heads of a "do-nothing Congress," just as the Democrat Truman had done more than four decades earlier. Jim Pinkerton, 32, the White House policy-planning chief, had urged this strategy for months after poring over accounts of Truman's 1948 campaign, in which he pressed his social program, bashed Republican lawmakers for obstructing it and convinced voters to replace them with Democrats. This time, however, neither the actor nor the stage seemed to fit the script. Voters, while disgusted...
...midweek Bush himself was chafing at the Truman approach. So he sought help from outside advisers, including two key figures from his 1988 campaign: political adman Roger Ailes and pollster Robert Teeter. Both men told Bush that his attempts to hang the budget mess on the Democrats looked defensive and that he would do better to change the subject. "Let's remind people that we've got some good things accomplished," a third adviser recommended. "Talk about the Clean Air Act. Talk about the gulf, which is more presidential. Above all, be yourself...
While the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive right to declare war, events have a way of handing that power to Presidents. Relying on a decision of the U.N., Harry Truman committed troops to Korea without specific authorization from Congress. Lyndon Johnson launched his escalation of the Vietnam War from the shaky platform of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the nearest thing to congressional approval he could point to -- or needed...