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THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
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I don’t really want Condoleeza Rice to testify. Not that she’s going to
give anything away. It’s just that I think Presidents are entitled to have their
little secrets between them and their confidential advisors and it’s nobody
else’s business. Certainly not Congress’s. That’s never made sense to me. We
’re supposed to have three co-equal branches of government. But where’s the
equality when Congress can investigate the president and he can’t investigate
them? And only God can investigate the Supreme Court and He won’t take the
case.
The business of Congress investigating the president by calling in his cook,
his maid, and his butler and asking them what he had for breakfast has always
seemed silly to me since they can’t touch the Man himself. What kind of
investigation is that? As I see it, if you can’t do a real one, then it’s better
to have none at all. Let the newspapers do it, let the public do it, let an
election decide it in the end. Or…
Let’s switch to a parliamentary system. It’s prevalent in most of the
world. When the prime minister gets in trouble, a vote of confidence is taken. If
he loses, he leaves. If not, he continues. Another thing I like about that
is that all the ministers of the government are members of parliament. That
means that when they are dragged up before a parliamentary committee, they are
treated with courtesy.
This contrasts with our system, in which Cabinet officers are regularly
insulted and harassed by committee members. The reason? Well, they’re appointed,
not elected, so they’re lower than dirt to the congresspeople. A hack from
East Cupcake, Illinois, thinks nothing of berating the Secretary of the Treasury
or some other grandee who may have been appointed by a President who won
fifty states and represents the whole country, not just some sharecroppers in the
Midwest. If the Secretary had a seat in Congress, he wouldn’t have to take
this abuse.
Those are my two best reasons for thinking a change might be desirable.
Things move better with a parliament. Regarding the 9-11 controversy, Bush would
by now have demanded, and gotten, a vote of confidence. With that over, the
Clarke-Rice-Bush matter would have been handed over to a committee, which would
have produced a report months later when the country had moved on to other
matters. If Bush lost the vote, things would have been done the same way,
except without him.
So why doesn’t the country seize this opportunity and try this way of doing
things? Well, there are other considerations. The biggest one of all is that
we have been doing things differently for over two hundred years now and we’re
habituated to it. We’ve created something and people don’t lightly cast
away anything they have created from their own sweat and effort.
That something is of course the American government, but more particularly it’
s the outstanding feature of the government, the office of the Presidency.
We tend to take it for granted without realizing what a unique creation it is.
We should ask ourselves how many offices there are in the world whose
incumbents are instantly recognizable to all its inhabitants and exert a
gravitational pull able to draw a crowd in any part of the earth where they manifest
themselves.
There are only three offices in the world that have this kind of charisma.
One is the English Crown, another is the Papacy, and the third is the
Presidency of the United States. They’re three very different institutions, but they
all have certain things in common too. The first is longevity; the Presidency
comes in last here, but it’s still been around longer than any similar job
throughout the world. The second is power; this time the Presidency’s first, but
the two others, even the Queen, aren’t without it, even if theirs is more
moral than material. The third, and most important is the word I’ve used above
-- charisma. Its first use came at the time of John F. Kennedy’s incumbency
-- he exemplified it. It can be summed up as the ability to attract
attention. The three offices have it like no others in the world. It exists no
matter who fills them, but obviously some people, like Kennedy, shine extra bright
when in possession of them and increase their radiation.
Successful governments have usually based themselves on the star system,
which is another word for what I’ve been discussing here. People demand
personalization -- they don’t want to hear about the Constitution of the United
States, they want to see the President and make their estimate of him and that will
cover the country too. This is the Age of Celebrity after all.
It’s well-known that this Age is the one where everybody will be famous for
fifteen minutes, and what constitutes one of the hitches in the perfection of
our creation is the fact that the glory is a little fleeting -- it can last
for as little as four years and in any case no more than eight. Meanwhile the
Pope and the Queen go on forever. It’s really about time to repeal the 22nd
Amendment and give the President a shot at more than two terms. Twelve or
sixteen years in office will give him (or her) prestige that can hardly be
measured in human terms -- it will approach the supernatural.
Other ideas for enhancing the incumbency might be considered a little
extreme, so I will only mention them in passing. For instance we could hardly go as
far as the Catholic Church did when it was in a bad way in the Nineteenth
Century with every government against it. The cardinals drew the world’s
attention to the Pope by declaring him infallible in matters of faith and morals. The
reaction was worldwide, but the dogma put the Pope on a pedestal by himself
alone and signaled the comeback of the church onto the world stage.
The infallibility of the President, however, is a doctrine the world isn’t
ready for yet, so I pass it over for now. I also reject the idea of a really
big tomb to enshrine his remains when he has ascended from Earth. We tried this
once, but today Grant’s Tomb is covered with graffiti and under armed guard.
The Russians took a tip from us and built a regular temple around Lenin’s
body where he lies smiling at the visitors who come to see his embalmed remains.
Now they’re sorry and so would we be if we did it again.
Joking aside, the Presidency is a huge asset to this country and shouldn’t be
diminished by forcing people to testify about their private conversations
with him. This kind of thing is precious to defense attorneys, who have
succeeded in forcing disclosure of every scrap of paper created by the prosecution in
assembling a criminal case. They hope to find something in them they can use
to prove, not a frameup or false witness, but wrong hypotheses, speculations,
searches up blind alleys, and the like, to prove alternative theories of the
case were entertained. What of it? Let’s know the final one and let’s know
who was consulted, but that’s enough. Let the DA be judged on his actual case,
not on how he built it, and let the judgment on the President be made in the
same way.
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