Scholars and citizens alike have endlessly debated the proper limits of presidential action within our democracy. In this revised and expanded edition, noted scholar Phillip Cooper offers a cogent guide to these powers and shows how presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have used and abused them in trying to realize their visions for the nation. As Cooper reveals, there has been virtually no significant policy area or level of government left untouched by the application of these presidential “power tools.” Whether seeking to regulate the economy, committing troops to battle without a congressional declaration of war, or blocking commercial access to federal lands, presidents have wielded these powers to achieve their goals, often in ways that seem to fly in the face of true representative government. Cooper defines the different forms these powers take—executive orders, presidential memoranda, proclamations, national security directives, and signing statements—demonstrates their uses, critiques their strengths and dangers, and shows how they have changed over time. Cooper calls on events in American history with which we are all familiar but whose implications may have escaped us. Examples of executive action include, Washington’s “Neutrality Proclamation”; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation; the more than 1,700 executive orders issued by Woodrow Wilson in World War I; FDR also issued the order to incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II; Truman’s orders to desegregate the military; Eisenhower’s numerous national security directives. JFK’s order to control racial violence in Alabama. As Cooper demonstrates in his balanced treatment of these and subsequent presidencies, each successive administration finds new ways of using these tools to achieve policy goals—especially those goals they know they are unlikely to accomplish with the help of Congress. A key feature of the second edition are case studies on the post-9/11 evolution of presidential direct action in ways that have drawn little public attention. It clarifies the factors that make these policy tools so attractive to presidents and the consequences that can flow from their use and abuse in a post-9/11 environment. There is an important new chapter on “executive agreements” which, though they are not treaties within the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and not subject to Senate ratification, appear in many respects to be rapidly replacing treaties as instruments of foreign policy.

When an assassin targets the president, an outsider finds evidence of an even deeper conspiracy in this thriller from the author of The Valkyrie Project. The gunman crouches in his crawl space, dreaming of revenge. The United States has turned his homeland into a combat zone, killing his family and ruining his life. Today, vengeance will be had. President Henry Hampton is visiting Gettysburg, and the band has just struck up “Hail to the Chief” when the first shots ring out. Blood stains the old battleground once more. The president takes a bullet to the neck, and his bodyguard hustles him into his limousine—rushing him not to a hospital, but to Camp David, where he can be best protected against the conspiracy that threatens to consume America from the inside out. As days pass with only vague news about the president’s condition, the country threatens to slide into chaos, and it will fall to 2 unlikely heroes to rescue the government: a California adman and the desperate vice president of the United States.

On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible. Now, using Roosevelt's own writings, his advisors' letters and diaries, and internal government documents, Greg Robinson reveals the president's central role in making and implementing the internment and examines not only what the president did but why. Robinson traces FDR's outlook back to his formative years, and to the early twentieth century's racialist view of ethnic Japanese in America as immutably "foreign" and threatening. These prejudicial sentiments, along with his constitutional philosophy and leadership style, contributed to Roosevelt's approval of the unprecedented mistreatment of American citizens. His hands-on participation and interventions were critical in determining the nature, duration, and consequences of the administration's internment policy. By Order of the President attempts to explain how a great humanitarian leader and his advisors, who were fighting a war to preserve democracy, could have implemented such a profoundly unjust and undemocratic policy toward their own people. It reminds us of the power of a president's beliefs to influence and determine public policy and of the need for citizen vigilance to protect the rights of all against potential abuses.

When a leased Boeing 727 is violently hijacked from Angola and flown to parts unknown, the President turns to an outsider—Major Carlos Guillermo Castillo—for answers. A pilot, West Point graduate, and veteran of Desert Storm, Castillo has a sharp eye for the facts—and the truth behind them. In Africa, he is helped and hindered by unexpected allies and ruthless enemies, and begins to untangle a plot of horrific dimensions—a plot that, unless Castillo acts quickly, will end very, very badly.

Contains the reports of state departments and officials for the preceding fiscal biennium.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1860.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1840.