The Dunster Political Review

The Dunster Political Review's third issue doesn't quite fulfill the hope that the quarterly would provide a forum for articulate and convincing undergraduate political thought. The current issue is, however, a distinct improvement over the previous two largely because it includes a published interview with associate professor of Government James Q. Wilson, a scathing review of James McGregor Burns' Presidential Government by Barney Frank, and some eloquent, enlightening observations about Charles De Gaulle by Jean Lacouture.

The Review focuses on "Presidential Power" and the four undergraduate pieces on the problem demonstrate an acute sense of timing. The first two condemn and revise respectively President Johnson's abortive and widely criticized proposed Constitutional amendment to increase the term of U.S. Representatives from two to four years and to hold House elections at the same time as those for President.

William Espinosa does his best to consign the President's plan to the ash heap with Buckley-esque logic and equally obtuse prose. His argument that Johnson's plan represents a thinly veiled desire to extend the control of the President over Congress may be valid. But paranoid statements like "the Executive searches with lupine voracity for problem areas that it may entrench itself in yet another sphere of life" are absurd.

Like all conservative ideologues these days, Espinosa intersperses the familiar litany against executive encroachment with 18th century talk about the "rejection of sovereignty" being the "essence of the preservation of liberty." Unfortunately, those sodbound theorists were talking about the civil liberties he glosses over, not the special economic interests he wants to protect from executive and Congressional regulation. Espinosa also fears that "uninhibited expression" of the will of the majority backing a President with increased power over Congress might lead to a prohibition of anti-war demonstrations. He should take solace in Johnson's reluctance to outlaw a free-speech-minded Supreme Court.

In the next article on the Presiden't plan, Harris L. Hartz tries to resurrect the four-year term. He proposes that "Congressional districts should be doubled in size by joining adjacent districts in the same state. Each district should then have two representatives one elected with the President, one in a off-year election." Hartz answers a number of criticisms of his plan with a welter of detail and statistical data. Indeed, his plan seems almost convincing except for one point: could party machinery handle the switch to the new plan? But intra-party haggling over such a plan on a district level casts doubt on its viability. And as Hartz points out, the opportunities for gerrymandering would be magnified.

Predictably, the festering sore of U.S. policy in Vietnam is reopened this time by Review's editor, F. A. Richman. He attacks Dean Rusk's myopic vision" and alleges that President Johnson's decision to transfer the responsibility for multi-agency foreign operations from the White House basement to the State Department Secretariat represents an "abdication of presidential perspective." It's too bad he neglects to mention that today the rigid White House perspective on foreign affairs, especially toward Vietnam, seems identical with that of the State Department. Coordination of the White House with the State Department has improved markedly since Johnson became President--but maybe that's part of the trouble in the first place.

Richman does point to one general deficiency in executive conduct of foreign affairs: "the foreign policy programs these presidents carry into office with them usually amount to no more than a few pledges to defend freedom against communism." However, one must recall the nation's repudiation in 1964 of Goldwater's very specific list of intentions abroad--and he was the first candidate in a while to avoid Richman's criticism. Richman fears that as a result, the burden for policy planning ends up in the tradition-encrusted State Department with obsolete policies, like an insistense on stability in Southeast Asia. What he seems to be suggesting then, is the transfer of responsibility for long-range planning from the Foreign Service-laden Counselor's office in the State Department to an ideal White House, where irrelevant myths would be challenged and revised.

Ronald L. Trosper's interview with Wilson on the problems of "The President and the Bureaucracy" is necessary reading if only because of the recent criticism of the anti-poverty program. Wilson doubts that the government can effectively man organizations to combat discrimination and poverty or solve problems of urban affairs.

Wilson's partial alternative to the confusion of the present anti-poverty program is to disburse federal funds directly to the poor: "it increases the freedom and resources of the recipient" and "places minimal demands on the bureaucratic system."

Lacouture's piece on De Gaulle is written with a delicacy that is refreshing in contrast to the mere competence or polemical outrage of the other articles. De Gaulle, according to his longtime observer, is no overbearing dictator in the conventional sense. "Authoritarian by temper, unfit for negotiation, impatient in dispute, he wants to dominate by the highness of his thoughts and depth of his views, not by forcing upon," writes Lacouture.

The author of Vietnam: Between Tow Truces also traces the evolution of the French parliamentary government under De Gaulle and demonstrates how the President appropriated control over the "reserved realm" of foreign affairs and defense.

About the only aspect of Presidential Government Barney Frank does not condemn is the author's writing style, which admittedly is: elight, Frank does examine and refute Burns' assumptions with as much eloquence and force as any of the reviewers who have panned the book. As for Burns' prescription for the federal government to direct a program of "cultural uplift," Frank reports "the tentative conclusion that the equality of my life is none of he government's goddamned business."

In general, the Dunster Political Review has posed some perplexing questions and has taken a good first shot at replying to some of them. Hartz's article, in particular, is laudable for its originality and adroit attempt to answer its hypothetical critics. The review is valuable both as a stimulant for political debate and a source of possible solutions to the contemporary problems of "Presidential Power"; it should, and I hope, will publish next year.