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Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush |  | Author: John Yoo
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $16.98
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Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 9471
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 544
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.9
ISBN: 1607145553
Dewey Decimal Number: 342.7306
EAN: 9781607145554
ASIN: 1607145553
Publication Date: January 5, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
An American President faces war and finds himself hamstrung by a Congress that will not act. To protect national security, he invokes his powers as Commander-in-Chief and orders actions that seem to violate laws enacted by Congress. He is excoriated for usurping dictatorial powers, placing himself above the law, and threatening to âbreakdown constitutional safeguards.â One could be forgiven for thinking that the above describes former President George W. Bush. Yet these particular attacks on presidential power were leveled against Franklin D. Roosevelt. They could just as well describe similar attacks leveled against George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and a number of other presidents challenged with leading the nation through times of national crisis. However bitter, complex, and urgent todayâs controversies over executive power may be, John Yoo reminds us they are nothing new. In Crisis and Command, he explores a factor too little consulted in current debates: the past. Through shrewd and lucid analysis, he shows how the bold decisions made by Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR changed more than just history; they also transformed the role of the American president. The link between the vigorous exercise of executive power and presidential greatness, Yoo argues, is both significant and misunderstood. He makes the case that the founding fathers deliberately left the Constitution vague on the limits of presidential authority, drawing on history to demonstrate the benefi ts to the nation of a strong executive office.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
 HaHaHa! March 1, 2010
Freesmith
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read that the Patriot Act was just renewed by the Democratic-controlled Congress and signed by Mr. Obama. So now it should be clear that all those deranged criticisms directed at Bush were exactly what Glen Greenwald recently admitted: poseur morality put forward simply for temporary political opportunity. What hypocrites!
And speaking of hypocrites - and naifs - look at the crazed vision of Bush and Cheney which so many of the posters here have running around in their enraged minds. What would these poor fools do if faced with a real dictator, a Josef Stalin perhaps, rather than a calm and civil man like Bush, whose diffidence in pursuing the WOT are well-known.
It reminds me of the "Real Last Episode of M.A.S.H.," the one never shown on TV. Hawkeye and BJ, after years of running down the military they were ostensibly part of, and gainsaying the mission of preserving the South Korean people and of war in general, are about to leave Korea. Suddenly, Chinese Communist soldiers overrun the American front and storm into the medical compound. Hawkeye, BJ and the other doctors and nurses are methodically tortured to death by the sadistic Reds before the US Army can counter-attack.
Credits. The End.
 Yoo's Love Letter to Totalitarianism February 14, 2010
Thomas R. Eddlem (East Taunton, Mass)
12 out of 28 found this review helpful
John Yoo's Crisis and Command is a turgid, 524-page love letter to an all-powerful presidency generally and to dictatorship specifically. His theme? More Caesar, less Senate. Infamous for penning the "Torture Memos" under the Bush administration where he justified Bush administration torture by virtually defining torture out of existence, Yoo's book contends presidential powers are unlimited: "The executive was, rather, the servant of necessity, bound to act in accordance with, in the absence of, or in extraordinary emergencies, in defense of the republic, even contrary to regularly constituted law." Yes, you read that right. Yoo says the President is above the law.
Yoo criticizes Thomas Jefferson and all who say that the power of the presidency has limits under the U.S. Constitution. The "great" Presidents, Yoo contends, are those who recognize they possess unlimited power, use it, and get away with it politically. Thus he applauds all of the worst excesses of the "great" presidents Lincoln and Roosevelt, from Roosevelt's court-packing scheme and internment of Japanese during World War Two to Lincoln's arrest of congressmen and newspaper editors who disagreed with him during the Civil War.
If this pretty much defines the concept of dictatorship, Yoo claims he's got Founding Fathers who will back him up. He doesn't, but it is a bit of fun to look a little further into his blatant dishonesty. Even Alexander Hamilton - that great lover of executive power - explicitly acknowledged that only Congress could bring the nation to war. Hamilton states unequivocally "war is a question, under our Constitution, not of executive, but of legislative cognizance. It belongs to Congress to say--whether the nation shall of choice dismiss the olive branch and unfurl the banners of war." Since Yoo quoted liberally from this same anonymous correspondence between Hamilton and James Madison over Washington's neutrality proclamation in Crisis and Command, he can't claim to be ignorant of Hamilton's views on the lack of presidential power to bring the nation to war. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison also each wrote explicitly that only Congress can bring the nation to war.
Yoo explains his view of what those "political developments" were at the time of the founding. The Natural Law? No, Yoo fails to mention it entirely. Inalienable rights of man as "endowed by their Creator"? Nah, the whole concept of individual rights is only discussed in the context of privileges that the President can suspend when he deems it necessary. And forget about any role God has on those rights. God makes no appearance in Crisis and Command, not even a cameo.
Enlightenment writers such as Locke, Montesquieu and Blackstone are mentioned in Crisis and Command, but Yoo acts as if they had nothing to say about individual rights or God. After all, if you have an unlimited executive, you can't have inalienable rights. An all-powerful President can't tolerate an all-powerful God giving out inalienable rights to everyone willy-nilly. The all-powerful presidency is a jealous god. The real lesson of the Enlightenment era, Yoo implies, is a clarion call for the same old unlimited executive power that has existed in every dictatorship in most of the governments throughout world history.
A God who gives out rights to all people by nature of their births and which are inalienable - inseparable - from those people is anathema to Yoo. "It is naïve to say, as Obama did in his inaugural speech, that we can 'reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.' That high-flying rhetoric means that we must give al Qaeda - a hardened enemy committed to our destruction - the same rights as garden-variety criminals at the cost of losing critical intelligence about real, future threats." Once again, Yoo claims that government gives out rights, though he implies that it ought not do so. Every freedom-loving American should have cheered Obama's statement quoted above, even if most experienced patriots had good cause to doubt Obama's follow-through.
Yoo's statements would be regarded as the rantings of a deranged post-communist apparatchik in a better time.
Poor scholar. February 8, 2010
J. Wood (Sausalito, CA United States)
8 out of 31 found this review helpful
I won't belabor the obvious harms to the country and to the world that have been, and continue to be, done by people who, like John Yoo, are in love with the idea of unlimited executive power. What I want to point out is that Mr. Yoo, as a Boalt Hall professor, is supposed to be an honest and careful constitutional scholar. He is neither. I recommend that anyone even considering this book first read any of the critiques of Mr. Yoo's writings by Jeremy Waldron or David Cole. As those authors clearly demonstrate, Mr. Yoo simply does not know what he is taking about. Save your money.
Keep things simple ... January 31, 2010
R. L. Albanys (Boston. MA)
5 out of 36 found this review helpful
Anything can be rationalized.
This book is a perfect example.
Regardless, "AGGRESSIVE WAR" - theme of BUSH II foreign policy - is literally and truly an international crime; It's unethical, it's immoral, and, it is a "mortal sin" as it is "murder", not "defense".
"THOU SHALL NOT KILL."
Keep things simple.
REPEAT: Anything can be rationalized.
Do not let this book convince you that "EVIL" is "GOOD".
George Orwell, we understand. Thank You.
this book is brilliant, persuasive, and devasting to the Obama administration January 22, 2010
publius (western usa)
15 out of 52 found this review helpful
Straightforward, compelling, this book puts to the lie the crazy criticisms of those who support the current administration.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
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