7. One historian has argued that Watergate was the crucial event which brought down the "imperial presidency," which emphasized a powerful activist president. Evaluate this view, examining presidential power and challenges to this power between the 1960s and the Reagan administration.
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 advisors in the policy of escalation, with the administration-proposed Gulf of Tonkin resolution--based on a trumped-up naval conflict--a key enabling act for the purpose of allowing the chief executive great latitude with regard to the commitment of troops and supplies to the region (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 259). What began as a strong confidence in the military capabilities and superiorities of American forces vis-a-vis containment of Asian communism...