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the exigencies of the cold war in the 1950s heightened the country’s

reliance on the president to defend its interests. Truman could enter

the Korean conflict without having to seek Congressional approval.

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President Kennedy allowed CIA agents to invade Cuba at the

Bay of Pigs in 1961. The invasion ended in disaster, but In

response, the country rallied to his side: two weeks after the

debacle, 61 percent of the respondents to an opinion survey said

that they backed the president’s “handling [of] the situation in

Cuba,” and his overall approval rating was 83 percent.

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Kennedy is assassinated and Lyndon Johnson becomes president.

He assumed the decision of war and peace largely became the

presidents decision. But as the cold war accelerated events

overseas, Johnson assumed he had license to make unilateral

judgments on how to proceed in Vietnam. It was a

miscalculation that would cripple his presidency. He initiated

bombings and consulted thousands of troops. This costed

thousands of lives and many Americans questioning his

wisdom.

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The supreme court revealed Nixon's Watergate tape recording.

And in response to Nixon’s conduct of the war in Southeast Asia,

Congress, in 1973, passed the War Powers Resolution over his

veto in an attempt to rebalance its constitutional power to declare war.

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In 1975, Ford signaled that the War Powers Act had placed no meaningful restrictions

on a president’s power when, without consulting Congress, he sent U.S. commandos

to liberate American seamen seized from the cargo ship Mayaguez by the Khmer

Rouge, Cambodia’s Communist government. When the operation cost 41 military lives

to rescue 39 sailors, he suffered in the court of public opinion.

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he result of Ford’s action did not keep Jimmy Carter, his successor, from sending a secret military mission into Iran in 1980 to free American hostages held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Carter could justify the secrecy as essential to the mission, but after sandstorms and a helicopter crash aborted it, confidence in independent executive action waned. Ronald Reagan informed Congress of his decisions to commit U.S. troops to actions in Lebanon and Grenada, then suffered from the Iran-Contra scandal.