Mr. President (14 page)

Mason’s speech—a grand but innocuous acknowledgment of the people’s supremacy, unencumbered by any measure that would actually grant them power—was perfectly suited to his audience. He had taken command of the high moral ground. Immediately, Benjamin Franklin, as committed to republican virtue as any man in the room, proceeded to fortify this territory with his customary wit:

Mason and Franklin made a vote for the single-term limitation seem virtuous and patriotic. Delegates could feel good about themselves by favoring that. Perhaps even more important, by returning to their original track, before Gouverneur Morris had steered them off, they could feel as if they were finally done with the matter. We have no way of assessing whether it was republican virtue or fatigue that determined the results on Mason’s motion, but in any case it carried handily if not overwhelmingly, seven states to three.

Delegates were tired. They were done. They had just appointed five of their number—James Wilson, Edmund Randolph, John Rutledge, Nathaniel Gorham, and Oliver Ellsworth—to a workforce they called the Committee of Detail, which they instructed to flesh out matters that had not been fully defined. While that group hammered out a more complete draft, the rest of the delegates could take a ten-day breather. They would not meet again till August 6.

Here’s the draft delegates handed to the Committee of Detail, the sum total of what they had decided over the course of two months about the new executive department:

Sound familiar? Delegates had made no changes to the office of the executive since June 4. They had entertained many alternatives, some seriously; a few of these had made their way briefly into the working plan, only to be removed later. We can infer two things from this. First, for many delegates, several of these measures created serious problems, for they kept getting challenged. Second, since they had withstood the
challenges, the measures had staying power. They were on course, at that point, to become part of the final document and ultimately the law of the land.

Imagine if they had. President Buchanan and President Lincoln each serve a seven-year term (assuming no assassinations in this scenario). John Tyler, never elected to the presidency and known today as the junior partner in “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” serves for six years, eleven months after William Henry Harrison falls ill on Inauguration Day and dies one month later. Franklin Pierce, Benjamin Harrison, Herbert Hoover all enjoy seven years in office, as does Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is limited, like the others, to a single term. Strong presidents or weak, effective leaders or not, all would serve lengthy identical terms.

Very possibly, the office would have been allocated to a very different set of characters, politicians who, in today’s parlance, were “Washington insiders.” If members of the legislature chose the president, they probably would have selected power figures who had made their way up through the ranks of Congress, not men who were born in log cabins or otherwise presented themselves as “of the people.” Meet President Thomas Hart Benton and President Thaddeus Stevens. Presidents Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill. Or try President Tom DeLay and the sitting president, Nancy Pelosi, secure in her office from 2007 to 2014, unless impeached and convicted “of malpractice or neglect of duty.”

Well, maybe not. Probably, when the majority party in Congress selected one of its own, it would have paid some attention to national popularity, since one unofficial role of the president would be to attract voters to his political party. Heavy hitting on the inside would have to be balanced by appeal to the electorate, and who knows how that might have played out. In any case, though, the presidency would certainly have been launched on a very different trajectory, with powerful consequences for the subsequent history of the United States.

Try to imagine, too, what a man selected by Congress to serve as president would actually have
done
, had there been no guidance from the framers beyond what appeared in the working draft on July 26. Would he have been commander in chief of the military forces? Not necessarily, no word on that. Could he have engaged in international diplomacy? Not unless he went beyond the strict construction of his office. Propose a budget, place an agenda before Congress, or argue for
laws he preferred? He was not empowered to do any of those things. Appoint judges? No. That authority, just five days earlier, had been granted to the upper house of the legislature.

Some of these powers had been suggested, but none enacted. The New Jersey Plan granted the executives (note the plural) the authority “to direct all military operations,” but the authority was granted to multiple executive officers, not to one man—and it didn’t matter in any case, since the New Jersey Plan was rejected four days later. Hamilton’s schema gave to the executive, with consent of the Senate, the power to appoint ambassadors and negotiate treaties. He would possess the “sole” authority to appoint “chief officers of the departments of Finance, War and Foreign Affairs” and also take charge of “the direction of war when authorized or begun.” Yet Hamilton’s proposals, tainted by the politically dangerous views of their author, were quickly discarded. Further, regardless of who suggested them, they had been highly controversial.

Charles Pinckney, at the very outset, had feared the powers of the executive “might extend to peace & war &c., which would render the Executive a monarchy.” For men of the Revolutionary generation, whose nation had fought the king’s army during seven grueling years, allocating any authority over “peace & war” to a single individual still raised concerns. Virginia’s James McClurg, in a postscript to the deliberations of July 20, “asked whether it would not be necessary … to determine on the means by which the Executive is to carry the laws into effect, and to resist combinations against them. Is he to have a military force for the purpose, or to have the command of the Militia, the only existing force that can be applied to that use?” A good question, and as yet unaddressed.

The only specific power delegates had handed the executive was a limited veto, and that was actually legislative in nature, not an executive matter per se. Instead of allocating powers, they had focused their attention on questions of access to the office, not the office itself. Who chose the executive and how long he might remain in office had a lot to do with politics but little to do with governance.

To grasp why delegates, somewhat illogically, debated issues of access before determining, or even outlining, what the access was
to
, we have to understand how nervous they were about what they were doing. The driving force of the convention, the very reason for its existence, was to grant additional powers to a central government, but who,
within this new construct, would be exercising the augmented powers? Therein lay the problem.

The legislative branch was prone to division and open to intrigue, many delegates felt, and yet throughout the admittedly short history of the nation the legislature
was
the central government. This created considerable confusion. On the one hand, delegates wanted to load new powers on Congress, the heart of the government; on the other hand, they had little trust for legislatures of any sort, with their incessant wrangling, partisan interests, and thirst for power. The contradiction caught the eye of George Mason. “It is curious to remark the different language held at different times,” he said on July 17, nine days before the recess. “At one moment we are told that the Legislature is entitled to thorough confidence, and to indefinite power. At another, that it will be governed by intrigue & corruption, and cannot be trusted at all.”

The executive branch, for very different reasons, was also suspect. There, the negative examples dated from colonial times and from British history, which was still in a sense their history. Delegates were stretching to their political limits by urging centralization, which perforce would lessen the power of the states. If they centralized power even more by placing it in the hands of one person, the political repercussions could doom the project.

Wary of amassing too much authority in either branch, delegates embraced the notion of separation of powers espoused by “the celebrated Montesquieu.” Since the premise of the convention was to concentrate power within a new central government, Montesquieu’s admonition to disperse powers among separate components of that new and stronger government became an absolute imperative.

But this impeded progress. Any allocation of power to one branch raised fears of imbalance, causing delegates to back off, reconsider, and sometimes revoke the powers they had just granted. So the convention proceeded cautiously, too cautiously perhaps. The new powers of a national government, if they were to exist at all, needed to find their proper homes. And time was passing.

The American “president” was formally christened in the early days of August 1787, after a laborious birth. We have three extant drafts from the five-man Committee of Detail, which had been instructed to turn the convention’s broad outline for governance into a preliminary version of a constitution.

The first draft, in the hand of Edmund Randolph, referred generically to a “National Executive,” who was “to consist of a single person.”

In his reworking of Randolph’s draft, John Rutledge called the chief executive “Governor of the united People & States of America.” The only delegate who had served as both “president” (1776–78) and “governor” (1779–82) of his home state, Rutledge opted for the term implying that a leader should not merely
preside
but actually
govern
. That appealed to advocates of a strong executive, but when Alexander Hamilton had suggested the national “governor” should serve for life, he scared off his fellow delegates and perhaps tainted the very word. A more modest yet still respectful appellation was called for.

It was James Wilson, author of the original motion for a single executive, who once again prevailed. According to Wilson’s final draft of the Committee of Detail’s report, “The Executive power of the United States shall be vested in a single person. His style shall be ‘The President of the United States of America,’ and his title shall be, ‘His
Excellency.’ ” The convention accepted the “style” but not the “title.” (“His Excellency,” though never formalized, did remain in common usage until Andrew Jackson’s administration. A common term during Revolutionary times, it was applied not just to George Washington, as is generally assumed, but to state governors.)
¹

The term “president” struck just the right chord. In late colonial and Revolutionary times, a president was one who presided over a convention, congress, or almost any type of meeting; sometimes he was called a moderator. The Continental Congress had a president, as did this very meeting, the Federal Convention. Typically, the rules governing the body stipulated that to minimize personal discord, speakers must address the president rather than each other. “Mr. President,” a member would say, and then he would make his point. The rules of the convention, passed on May 28, stated: “Every member, rising to speak, shall address the President; and whilst he shall be speaking, none shall pass between them, or hold discourse with another, or read a book, pamphlet or paper, printed or manuscript.”

A president, as moderator, was not to take sides but to stand over and above, a man apart. That was how orderly meetings worked, and couldn’t this serve as a model for the leader of a nation? “The President of the United States of America,” by remaining above the fray, could serve as a moral compass and limit conflict. Political strife, always a threat to civil well-being, would be held in check by “Mr. President,” a man respected by all yet not a monarch, just a citizen.

That was the basic idea, reflected in the name. The draft of the Constitution emerging from the Committee of Detail meshed well with this ideal. Carefully, the committee restrained the president from governing his people with a strong hand, as a monarch would do. He was permitted to “recommend” legislation, but not to push for it or vote on it. He could write letters to state governors, but he was not empowered to force their hands, supersede their authority, or, on his own authority, suppress insurrections within their states. Although he could commission officers and receive ambassadors, the authority to
appoint
ambassadors and judges lay with the Senate, as did the power to make treaties with foreign nations. He could command military forces but not raise them. He could neither declare war nor negotiate peace. Always under close supervision, he could be removed from office through “impeachment by the House of Representatives, and conviction
in the supreme Court, of treason, bribery, or corruption.” Only once, to check the judiciary, did the committee use the word “power”: “He shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons; but his pardon shall not be pleadable in bar of an impeachment.”