The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

After 9/11 the major concern of the Administration was that an incident like that must never happen again. A second act of destruction would surely bring down the government. The Terror Presidency is written by an acknowledged conservative, and I am in no way a conservative, yet I found the book to be quite interesting. First of all it is not the typical raving rant that constitutes many books written by conservatives and liberals alike. Mr. Goldsmith was, for a short time, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel. He quickly found out that legal opinions were most valued when they did not in any way constrict the powers of the president. This attitude was again based on the compelling need to see that no further terrorist attacks occurred in the United States. David Addington, VP Cheney's chief lawyer, is the most adamant proponent of the idea that the powers of the presidency cannot be limited during this war against terror. When Mr. Goldsmith finally told the Administration that the anything goes opinion on torture written in 2002 by John Yoo was on shaky legal ground, the response was to kill the messenger. Mr. Goldsmith resigned. But here is the fascinating part of the book. The author spends a lot of time comparing President Bush's wartime responses to those of Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. FDR wanted to provide help to England at the beginning of WWII. The mood of congress and the nation, however, was soundly for isolationism. FDR got everything he wanted by a variety of actions. First he dismissed the Secretaries of War and the Navy, and installed two Republicans. His fireside chats to the nation forcefully presented his cause. He consulted with Congress, and even with his Republican opponent (Willkie) in the upcoming election campaign. He got what he wanted. Mr. Goldsmith feels that President Bush has gone too far along the route of secrecy, consulting with no one. His opinion is that Mr. Bush could learn from the approach of FDR. While I do not always agree with everything Mr. Goldsmith says I did learn something from his reasoned interpretation of both current and historical events. On the other side of the coin I was somewhat frustrated with the author telling us from time to time that he engaged in various debates with White House lawyers, but due to security reasons he wasn't free to tell us what the substance of those debates were. Anyway, this is a book that should be interesting to all but those on the extremes of the right-left continuum

This is a rare book in our polarized age: a book about the Bush Administration that doesn't paint the participants as either angels or demons. Jack Goldsmith is a former Bush Administration official who took over as the point man in the Administration's anti-terrorism legal strategy just as that house of cards, hastily erected in the aftermath of 9/11, began to collapse. He obviously had some "issues" with how that strategy was being handled, but might as well have been banging his head against a wall. His frustration is palpable as he loses one bureaucratic battle after another against other factions in the Administration, and he finally left his post after less than a year. What makes the book unusual is that Goldsmith doesn't demonize his antagonists; to the contrary, he portrays them as reasonable people doing what they thought was best to protect the country. His view is that, in their zeal to protect and enhance executive power, they wound up diminishing it, by pursuing a go-it-alone approach that ultimately backfired. But this is a dispute over means, not ends. Those who are looking for a broad-based indictment of the Bush Administration are looking in the wrong place. Instead, this book is about the messy intersection of policy, politics, and principle in the Age of Terror. It should be required reading for anyone interested in becoming a government lawyer. Particularly interesting is his thesis that "The Terror Presidency" is not limited to this Administration, but is a fact of life in our times, and will continue regardless of who wins the White House in 2008. Definitely an engaging and erudite read.

Countless people on the outside have accused the Bush administration of being isolated and immune from public perception. Jack Goldsmith's riveting new book, "The Terror Presidency" not only confirms these fears but adds a new level of questions about the Bush White House....the author was there for many months and his first hand account is invaluable. Make no mistake about it, Goldsmith is a conservative and in many ways applauds Bush's views of a strong presidency but his parting of the ways with the current administration is proof enough that things are not well in our nation's Executive branch. Goldsmith, who was head of the Office of Legal Counsel from October, 2003 to July, 2004, paints a sobering picture of how policy is made and the contributing factors to it. He tells us that the administration is surrounded by lawyers who often suggest how policy should be made, even though many of them are simply out of their element of expertise and fail to take in other factors such as public opinion and relations with Congress. Indeed, the most damning comment Goldsmith makes is that the White House, rather than debating what is the right course of action, settles for, essentially, what they can get away with, legally. I suspect that when Bush leaves office in January, 2009, much more of Goldsmith's observations will see the light of day. The author writes a dry, but serious book. The narrative is not colorful but his assessments more than pop off the page. A chapter on counter-terrorism is worth the whole book, but his chastisement of how lawyers have infiltrated the process of decision-making is nothing less than profound. Did we know this? No! Goldsmith, an academic at heart, parallels Bush with FDR...the comparisons couldn't be more stark with Goldsmith underscoring again and again in his book that failure to get the public on board with the war in Iraq and failure to get Congress to help legitimize the whole shebang has been the abject undoing of the last six and a half years. Summing it up, even before the book nears its conclusion, Goldsmith says, "it was said hundreds of times in the White House that the President and Vice President wanted to leave the presidency stronger than they found it. In fact they seemed to have achieved the opposite". Words for posterity, no matter how Bush wishes his legacy to be. I highly recommend "The Terror Presidency". It's an insider's view of things that give this book a solid and firm ground on which to make the case of why the Bush administration overreaches and continues to do so. In the meantime, read this book....it's the best in peeling away the layers of Bush and how he got there along the way.

A fabulous insight into how our government operates under pressure, during war times--It is wonderful that Jack Goldmith has the principles and morals to stand up for what he believes in.

I give this book five stars despite the fact that I have several disagreements with the author. Why five stars? Because this book is basically fair and puts the Bush administration's actions into historical perspective, which is hard to find in a book about the Bush administration, pro or con. Although highly critical of the Bush administration's view of presidential power, as well as Bush's shortcomings as a communicator and consensus builder, Goldsmith nonetheless portrays an administration bound by the rule of law and compliant with the legal opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel, where Goldsmith served for ten months as an Assistant Attorney General. Goldsmith provides no evidence that the Bush administration ever acted contrary to counsel, and nearly always had a solid constitutional basis for its actions. Indeed, a couple of Supreme Court decisions which struck down elements of the war on terror were themselves departures from long-standing precedent. (In making this point, Goldsmith observes that the Supreme Court, not just Congress and the President, is influenced by public opinion, the press, the academy, the spirit of the times, and the passions of the moment. Here, too, he faults Bush for being tone-deaf to the nuances of leadership and the importance of getting everyone on board. He has a point: whenever a court bounced some thorny issue back to the president, he was nearly always able to get what he wanted from Congress, even the Democratic-controlled Congress. Had he been more prone to consultation, Bush arguably could have avoided some of these legal challenges.) Goldsmith points out the extreme difficulty of discerning the exact limits of the law during times of crisis, and describes how these issues played out in the administrations of Lincoln and FDR. This leads to one of my main quibbles with the author - he is more critical of Bush for potential abuses of power, stemming from his imperial view of the presidency, than of the actual abuses of Lincoln and FDR, which far surpassed any of the excesses of Bush. (It will also come as a surprise to many readers that the controversial rendition program, considered by many as one of the black marks of the war on terror, was actually conceived during the Clinton administration.) I also disagree with Goldsmith when he tries to contrast the views of Bush and FDR on the limits of presidential power. FDR, he says, made limited claims geared towards specific situations, whereas Bush made broad claims with no discernible limits. But Goldsmith himself admits that FDR was being cagey, a salesman, and relied upon tendentious opinions that were purpose-built by a compliant Attorney General. There is no doubt that FDR/Truman would have done - and did do - whatever it took to defeat the Germans and Japanese, Constitution or no Constitution. (Readers may recall that it was Truman, not Bush, who ordered the use of atomic bombs, and it was FDR, not Bush, who interred 90,000 Japa