Presidential Power

While it can be said with some assurance that Watergate was the crucial event that brought down the imperial presidency as such, there is evidence that the concept of a powerful activist president ebbed and flowed from the 1960s to the Reagan administration. Lyndon Johnson's initiatives on civil rights and the Great Society were much more activist and ambitious in practice than the civil rights policies or rhetoric of JFK. Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger (214) say that the vast scale of the Great Society, involving "an end to racial discrimination . . . equal opportunity . . . eliminat[ion of] poverty, and . . . adequate health care," was doomed to disappointment. However, this did not prevent Johnson from domestic leadership in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the War on Poverty, Medicare, Headstart, and the Job Corps. Johnson's pursuit of the Vietnam War, which emerged in and after 1965, can also be seen as an exercise in presidential activism. When Johnson assumed the presidency, a gradual "Americanization" of the protracted civil war in Vietnam began, even as North Vietnamese backed forces gained military advantage. Johnson was encouraged by Kennedy's cold-war

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note, Ford "lacked both a base of popular support and a clearly articulated vision of how to restore public confidence" (441). Ford's pardon of Nixon, possibly an act of national healing, was at once the prime example of his presidential activism and a major factor of his vulnerability to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 419). But Carter--who came into office on a wave of optimism, change, and the common touch--did not obtain the prerogatives associated with presidential activism. Watergate appears to have fostered a widespread cynicism toward the vast majority of elected officials, whether reformist or incumbent, that has persisted from 1976 to the present. When Carter took office, the U.S. economy was in a cycle of inflation that never quite abated throughout his presidency. Double-digit inflation in the American economy, especially in regard to energy prices, oil prices, and real estate was one of the principal causes of Jimmy Carter's failure to be reelected president. Meanwhile, Carter's presidency inherited certain problems that Carter could not shake. For example, it was in 1973 that the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) quadrupled the price of crude oil and put oil-cons
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Approximate Word count = 1883
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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