GARY W. REICHARD

The long and bitter war in Vietnam not only produced deep social and political cleavages in the United States but brought into sharp focus the problem of defining the constitutional balance of power between president and Congress in the area of foreign relations. Beginning in the late 1960s, Congress increasingly turned its attention to this problem, culminating its efforts in the passage of the War Powers Act in late 1973.

This recent congressional insurgency has precedent in an earlier sustained offensive against presidential power, the Bricker Amendment challenge of the 1950s. In four successive congresses between the years 1951 and 1958, Republican Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio introduced his amendment to limit the powers of the president to make treaties and enter into executive agreements. Despite widespread support for the amendment among congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, allegedly a naïve politician and a believer in the whiggish concept of a weak executive and strong Congress, successfully blocked passage of the Bricker Amendment in its various forms. The story of Eisenhower and the Bricker Amendment not only reveals something of the history and personalities of the 1950s but illuminates certain facts of American political life. This study examines that story, emphasizing the methods and types of arguments used on both sides and the parts played by various individuals in the long negotiations over the amendment. It also attempts to assess the im

1974 by Gary W. Reichard

mediate and long-range impact of the Bricker Amendment controversy on the broad question of who controls American foreign policy.

Although most of the struggle over the amendment occurred during the Eisenhower administration, the idea originated earlier. Bricker first introduced his resolution for a constitutional amendment to limit the president's treaty-making power in late 1951, as Senate Joint Resolution 102 in the Eightysecond Congress. His proposal reflected ideas that had been forwarded three years earlier by Frank E. Holman, a prominent Seattle attorney and former president of the American Bar Association. Two months before introducing the measure, in fact, Bricker had written to Holman about his intentions, asking for "any suggestions which you might have along this line." 1 Holman and his fellow attorneys Alfred J. Schweppe of Seattle and Eberhard P. Deutsch of New Orleans were to serve as close advisers to Bricker throughout the long campaign for the amendment.

Bricker's proposal was aimed primarily at curtailing executive autonomy in the area of foreign relations. With the Korean War going badly, President Harry S. Truman's dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951 exacerbated Republican opposition toward his administration's foreign policy. Nationalist Republicans of the Taft wing of the party, who had long been critical of the substance and style of Democratic foreign policy, used the

'Herbert S. Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades (New York, 1972), p. 306; Bricker to Holman, July 23, 1951, John W. Bricker Papers, in possession of Senator Bricker, Columbus, Ohio (hereafter cited as Bricker Papers).

MacArthur episode to launch an offensive against Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the administration's Asia policies.2 Beyond this, the nationalists became increasingly vocal in their criticism of Democratic internationalism and the World War II-spawned tendency of the executive branch to make international commitments on behalf of the American people. Bricker shared these ideas, as he demonstrated in a magazine article in late 1951. Objecting specifically to the proposed United Nations Covenant on Human Rights, which he saw as incorporating "civil and political rights... completely foreign to American law and tradition" and of a "distinctly scarlet hue," the senator insisted that such "bartering of the rights of the American people must be stopped." Only a constitutional amendment, he wrote Robert A. Taft, could "protect the sovereignty of the United States and the freedoms of American citizens from abuses inherent in the treaty-making power." 3

Institutional considerations also played an important part in Bricker's thinking. In a Senate speech of March 1951, he clarified certain of his motives, charging that Truman's plans to commit American troops to a NATO defense force had produced a "constitutional crisis." This crisis, according to the senator, grew out of a frontal assault by the executive branch: "The constitutional power of Congress to determine American foreign policy is at stake. It is our duty to preserve that power against presidential encroachment." The question was not merely one of states' or civil rights; the institutional principle that Congress ought not to abandon its constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy underlay the arguments of Bricker and his followers from the outset and eventually came to play a leading role in their strategy.

2 Ronald J. Caridi, The Korean War and American Politics: The Republican Party as a Case Study (Philadelphia, 1968), pp. 146-155, 190-191; James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston, 1972), pp. 491-492.

3 Bricker, "UN Blueprint for Tyranny," The Freeman 2 (1952): 265-268; Bricker to Taft, Jan. 15, 1952, Robert A. Taft Papers, Library of Congress. See Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades, pp. 308-309.

* Congressional Record, 82 Cong., 1 sess., 1951, pp. 2863, 2864. In his December article Bricker described "addiction for multilateral agreements" as "one of the outstanding vices of Administration foreign policy." Bricker, "UN Blueprint for Tyranny," p. 267.

In the early phases of the struggle, the clearly partisan motives of Bricker and the Republicans were also transparently present. In that same speech of March 1951, Bricker had digressed somewhat from strictly constitutional considerations to editorialize on the policies of the Democratic president. "That Mr. Truman should seek dictatorial power of unparalleled dimensions is hardly surprising," he remarked. "Since 1948... the outstanding characteristic of the Truman Administration has been its persistent effort to usurp legislative functions." 5 Nor were the transgressions of the Democrats limited just to foreign affairs. "The power greediness of the New Dealers," Bricker wrote privately in early 1951, "has led them to assume responsibilities which the Constitution never intended." Other Republican supporters of the amendment agreed. The archconservative William E. Jenner of Indiana spoke for a number of his colleagues when he wrote to congratulate Bricker "for the prolonged effort you have made to stop the destruction of our Constitution by means of pseudo-international agencies designed to carry on the Fair Deal revolution." 6

Pleased by the generally favorable response of his party colleagues to the proposed amendment, Bricker looked optimistically to 1952. "Support for the idea of a constitutional amendment... is most encouraging," he wrote in November 1951 to Holman. "I have good reason to believe that a majority of the members of the Senate are also apprehensive about the proposed novel applications of the treaty power." As it became obvious, however, that the amendment had little chance to pass in the Democratic-controlled Congress, Bricker and many of his followers turned their efforts to inserting a proamendment plank into the Republican platform. Since the party's electoral prospects looked bright in 1952, the Brickerites hoped that such a public commitment would lead to certain passage of the amendment by a

5 Congressional Record, 82 Cong., 1 sess., 1951, p. 2865. 6 Bricker to Frank Wellings, Jan. 12, 1951, John W. Bricker Papers, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio (hereafter cited as Bricker Papers, OHS); Jenner to Bricker, Jan. 23, 1952, Bricker Papers.

7 Bricker to Holman, Nov. 13, 1951, Bricker Papers, OHS. For encouraging responses to the proposal, see Sen. Robert C. Hendrickson to Bricker, Sept. 24, 1951, and Sen. Leverett Saltonstall to Bricker, Sept. 26, 1951, ibid.