After its annual summertime publishing lull, The New York Review of Books is again arriving in my mailbox with sufficient regularity to make it hard to keep up. The current number, dated October 8, includes an article, "The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers," by David Cole, that in my opinion could never have been written but for the phenomenon described in another, by Garry Wills, called "Entangled Giant."
The entangled giant is President Obama. He is entangled, for lack of a less awkward phrase, in "the national security state." Having typed that phrase with some dissatisfaction, I see now that Wills himself deploys it, only with capital letters, "National Security State." I'll let him explain:
After most of the wars in U.S. history there was a return to the constitutional condition of the pre-war world. But after those wars there was no lasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriously assembled in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War I, for instance, there was no CIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorized readers, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness on land, in the air, and on (or in) the sea. . . .
A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. . . .
Perhaps, in the nuclear era, the Constitution has become quaint and obsolete. Few people even consider anymore Madison's lapidary pronouncement, "In republican government the legislative authority necessarily predominates." Instead, we are all, as citizens, asked to salute our commander in chief. Any president, wanting leverage to accomplish his goals, must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief, the mystery and majesty that have accrued to him with control of the Bomb, the awful proximity to the Football, to the Button.
The Cult of the Bomb has created The Cult of the Commander in Chief, "The Decider" in the phrase of Obama's predecessor, who also referred to himself as a "war president" and "war leader." This figure is not so much a politician or even a statesman as he is an existential hero before whom we all must make obeisance, not being privy, as is he, to state secrets and other forbidden knowledge, the successful manipulation of which is evidently our only hope for survival. Yet there is also this quaint tale we enjoy telling schoolchildren about a nation of laws, et cetera. David Cole does not say, but he might have, that the torture memos represent the effort of government lawyers to accommodate The Cult of the Commander in Chief without gobbing spit on the quaint tale--a difficult task, as their memos prove. Turns out nothing the Commander in Chief wants to do is ever against the law. It is possible, as the ladder is climbed, wall banging and stress positions having won approval and waterboarding now under consideration, to hear something like uneasiness in the spaces of their lawyerly prose. But they never say, No.
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