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Congressional-Executive Relations and the Foreign Policy Consensus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Roger Hilsman
Roger Hilsman
Affiliation:
Library of Congress and Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research
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Extract

When Woodrow Wilson, still in the early years of his academic career, studied the relations between Congress and the Executive, he focussed on organization and channels of leadership and responsibility. He was distressed at the disorderliness of affairs in which Congress had a part, and he was convinced that its noisy and often undignified procedures were an impassable obstacle to good government. He pined for the logic and clearly fixed responsibilities of parliamentary government on the British model of that time, for its party discipline and for the clear-cut choices between alternative policies that it offered to the electorate.

For contemporary observers, Congressional-Executive relations still attract attention, particularly in the field of foreign affairs. But the factors which Wilson examined with the greatest care of all seem now to be less central than they were to him. Partly this is because the federal government itself has changed: it now has a vastly wider range of both responsibilities and control than it once had, and there have been shifts in the relative power of the different branches within the government, to which Wilson himself as President contributed much. But there are also other reasons. In an age of ideological extremes, a wider consent than a simple majority seems more desirable than it might have been in Wilson's day, and no one is certain that the parliamentary form is superior in providing for this wider consent.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 1958 , pp. 725 - 744
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1958

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References

1 Wilson, Woodrow, Congressional Government (Boston, 1885)Google Scholar.

2 On this point, see Acheson, Dean, A Citizen Looks at Congress (New York, 1957)Google Scholar

3 I have myself drawn most heavily on Dahl, Robert A., Congress and Foreign Policy (New York, 1950)Google Scholar; and Galloway, George B., The Legislative Process in Congress (New York, 1953)Google Scholar, who also read this manuscript and corrected a number of errors. Others among the more recent works are the following: Griffith, Ernest S., Congress, Its Contemporary Role (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; Westerfield, H. Bradford, Foreign Policy and Party Politics (New Haven, 1955)Google Scholar; and Young, Roland, The American Congress (New York, 1958)Google Scholar.

4 George B. Galloway, op. cit., p. 373.

5 The word is Dahl's, op. cit.

6 Brogan, D. W., “Politics and United States Foreign Policy,” International Affairs, Vol. 33 (April, 1957), pp. 166–167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 When a man changes parties completely, of course, he will ordinarily lose his privileges, as Wayne Morse did when he declared himself an independent in 1953. See Huitt, Ralph K., “The Morse Committee Assignment Controversy,” this review, Vol. 41 (June 1957), p. 313Google Scholar.

8 At about the same time, Powell also lost the chairmanship of a subcommittee he had previously held. This act, however, was not done by the party or even in the name of the party. Each committee has its own custom in regard to the establishment and staffing of subcommittees, but in general the power to establish subcommittees and appoint their chairmen lies completely with the chairman of the parent committee. See George B. Galloway, op. cit., pp. 288–289.

9 See Dahl, op. cit. p. 50.

10 Dahl had hoped that Congress might find an alternative source of information in the Central Intelligence Agency. But due to its unusual—even unique—relationship with the policy-making parts of government and its almost total isolation from Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency is in no position to help Congress break the Executive monopoly. See my Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions (The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1956)Google Scholar.

11 See Westerfield, op. cit., pp. 260–262.

12 Almond, Gabriel A., The American People and Foreign Policy, New York, 1950Google Scholar.

13 For an analysis of the requirements for a rational determination of the level and allocation of defense expenditures, see Warner Schilling, “Fiscal '50,” a case study being prepared for the Civil-Military Relations project of the Institute for War and Peace Studies, Columbia University. Also of interest in this connection is his “Civil-Naval Politics in World War I,” World Politics (July, 1955)Google Scholar.

14 See Hyman, Sydney, “Cabinet's Job as Eisenhower Sees It,” New York Times Magazine, July 20, 1958Google Scholar.

15 See Donovan, Robert J., Eisenhower: The Inside Story (New York, 1956)Google Scholar, ch. 19, passim; and Childs, Marquis, Eisenhower: Captive Hero (New York, 1958), pp. 201–203Google Scholar.

16 For an attempt to examine the role that research might play in the making of foreign policy decisions, see ch. 8, “Knowledge and Action,” of my Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions, already cited.

17 The phrase is Cohen's, Bernard C.; see his Citizen Education in World Affairs (Princeton, 1953)Google Scholar.

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