By accident Theodore Roosevelt became President in September 1901, upon the assassination of President William McKinley. Having achieved his lifelong lust for power, he then proceeded to lay the foundation for the Imperial Presidency. An edifice of ever expanding presidential power next was constructed by many of his successors. And now, in the opinion of many, the Imperial Presidency threatens all of our civil liberties because it is contrary to the system of checks and balances which was designed by the Founders in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Characterized by his contemporary Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as a “pretty unscrupulous politician,” who “doesn’t give a damn for the law” (542), during his presidency Theodore Roosevelt was relentless in seeking to expand presidential power, as is shown by his own words set out above. READ MORE.

When he became President in 1953, like George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant before him, Dwight Eisenhower (“Ike”) was an unqualified War hero and a successful manager of armies. As President he had the wisdom and courage to speak the truth about and act on the dangers of the nuclear age in which we found ourselves. Adults, who were not cowboys fortunately, ran the government at that time when this reviewer and many others spent our youth in elementary school practicing hiding under our desks or in school basements awaiting the inevitable atomic Armageddon so often illustrated in episodes of Rod Serling’s TV series, the Twilight Zone. READ MORE.

While President, Ulysses S. Grant destroyed the terrorizing Ku Klux Klan to protect the lives of the freed former slaves. But with the intensely disputed presidential election of 1876 to succeed him in office came the “Compromise of 1877,” which gave the White House to the Republican candidate in exchange for the removal of Grant’s federal soldiers from the South and the return of complete control of the region to the racist Southern Democrats. This end of the Reconstruction period enabled the Klan eventually to rise again and to terrorize and murder Blacks until President Lyndon Johnson used the FBI to destroy the Klan a second time, almost 100 years later. READ MORE.