1 Introduction
In September 2019, Congress was back in session after its summer break. The political world was starting to rev up as the gravity of the 2020 elections pulled Washington and the nation to attention. It had been a highly charged spring and summer. That March, the investigation into President Trumpâs associations with Russia had culminated in a report issued by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the US Attorney General, William Barr, summarized before the report was made available to the public. President Trump declared that the report vindicated him and his campaign of any wrongdoing. Muellerâs testimony to Congress in July did little to change the narrative Barrâs memo had established that the investigation was not going to result in any Watergate-level damage to the President. However, it was during September that a curious story began to gain attention. It would rapidly result in just the third impeachment of a president, but at the outset, this was not a story that splashed across newspaper headlines, went viral on social media, or broke into regular TV programming. It was the sort of âinside baseballâ story that only dedicated readers of The Hill or Politico would judge as worth following at first; the Trump White Houseâs Director of National Intelligence failed to provide a complaint filed by a whistleblower to the chairman of the Houseâs Intelligence Committee. In an era charged with scandals over possible Russian influence on the 2016 election and on the President himself and his countercharges of partisan witch hunt, what appeared to be a minor dustup between a House committeeâs chair and someone in the administration with an important-sounding title but very little, if any, public name recognition did not seem to have the ingredients for a major presidential scandal. Yet, as became clear in a very short time, the scandal surrounding President Trumpâs call to his Ukrainian counterpart in July of 2019 exploded into a fully formed scandal about President Trumpâs use of formal power to gain personal political advantage.
The Ukraine scandal and President Trumpâs subsequent impeachment transfixed many, bored others, and largely reflected a nation whose views about President Trump seemed fixed in amber after his election in 2016. The scandal, impeachment, and subsequent trial by the Senate created a hallucinatory environment for students and observers of the modern presidency; we knew we were living through a seismic patch of history that would change the nation and its politics in fundamental ways, but much of the country also seemed to shrug this scandal off as âjust more politics.â Had scandal ceased to shock and challenge us as it had in the past because of a change in our politics or culture? Had President Trump discovered that fighting scandal with countercharges of scandal removed or at least deflected the damage that a major scandal can inflict on a presidency?
Asking these questions about presidential scandals is really another way to state the broad contours of how political scientists study the presidency and presidential leadership in particular. Which matters the most? Is it the external factorsâthe framework of politics and government that is difficult, if not impossible for presidents to augmentâor is it the person in the Oval Office whose skills and weaknesses matter more to our understanding of presidential power? The paradigmatic view of presidential power, at least since the 1960s, has been that espoused by Richard Neustadt in his seminal work Presidential Power (1960); power is derived from skills, such as persuasion, and all presidents can at least practice to become more skillful. Other presidential scholars, especially from the subfield of American Political Development, place their understanding of presidential power inside a frame of systemic factors, principally the partisan alignments, coalitions, and policy programs of the day. Stephen Skowronekâs The Politics Presidents Make (1993) is emblematic of this approach. To greatly oversimplify, much of the scholarship of presidential power can be categorized as based on an individual approach (e.g., Neustadt) or a systemic one (e.g., Skowronek).1 This book sees presidential scandals as a unique testing ground to work with these basic questions about presidential power by evaluating the efforts of presidents to try to manage political scandals.
2 Why Scandal?
Presidential scandals have long been the topic of journalistic and pop-cultural interest, but there is a surprising lack of social scientific study of them. Sensing their promise, there have been calls for the creation of âscandalogyâ or the study of political scandal as a subfield of political science (e.g., King 1986; Lowi 1985). As a graduate student in the early 1990s, I attended a talk given by the eminent scholar, Theodore Lowi, in which he made the case for a serious study of scandal by political scientists. This was around the time of the âcheck-kitingâ scandal that ensnared dozens of members of Congress over their misuse of the House bank to get no-interest advances on their paychecks. Iran-Contra and George Bushâs pardons of key players in that scandal were still fresh events, but this was well before the world knew of Monica Lewinsky.
As Professor Lowi spoke to the assembled graduate students that day, he laid out the case for a new approach to studying topics in our field, but he made it especially clear that a scandal-based approach to the study of the presidency had the most to offer to students of American politics and government. I initially believed at the time that Professor Lowi was giving us a tongue-in-cheek reflection on the current state of decay and corruption in the political system. As he spoke, however, it became clear that he was earnest in his proselytizing. He explained that observing the circumstances that fostered scandals involving the presidency and the behavior of presidents in response to scandals could lay bare aspects of systemic and particular elements of the presidency as an institution and about individual presidents themselves. This is as much as I remember from his talk. To my recollection, he provided no roadmap to designing research in this area and, as I have discovered over my years as a student of the presidency, there are few of us who have taken Professor Lowi up on his call to utilize scandal as a tool of social scientific inquiry. For much of my postgraduate life, Lowiâs talk that day remained an interesting, but minor anecdote about a scholar that I greatly admire and who has shaped a great deal of my work as a teacher and writer. Yet, that germ of a thought stayed with me in other ways, too. My work on related areas, especially regarding the use of spectacle by presidents, drew me back to Lowiâs suggestion. Encouraging responses to a conference paper utilizing my take on employing scandal as a tool of analysis led me to think I was on the right path. What is presented in this book is my attempt to explore a scandal-based analysis of the presidency over multiple presidencies as a way to test the basic assertions of a model of presidential reactions to scandals in their administrations. In so doing, the book also evaluates the merits of the individual vs. systemic approaches that political science has brought to the study of presidential power.
The basic argument is that scandalsâlike elections, judicial and executive nominations, or the legislative creation of policyâare windows into the workings of the American political system and can illuminate the system in unique ways. Building on some of the existing work in this area (Markovits and Silverstein 1988; Thompson Thompson 2000; Apostolidis and Williams 2004; Marion 2015; Basinger and Rottinghaus 2012a, b), this book focuses on presidential responses to scandals. Analysis of these responses provides an opportunity to gain access to a still distinctive exercise of presidential power in the contemporary era. The unitary or at least less-peopled presidency lends itself to the analysis of scandal in ways that the Congress and federal courts do not. While Congress and, to a far lesser degree, the courts have known their share of scandals, the singular nature of the presidencyâwhat Ragsdale (2018) calls the unitary executive imageâhas a resonance with the moral underpinnings of scandals that becomes diluted in scandals involving collective institutions. For example, it is more likely that we look to systemic causes for the motivations to engage with scandal when it comes to something like the Abramoff-era wrongdoing of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sure, the member of Congress and staff who were convicted of taking bribes were âbad seeds,â but there is a sense that Abramoff would have had a harder time corrupting these people in a tighter regulatory environment. The presidency, to the contrary, is more commonly seen less as an institution than as a single person. This is certainly true of the public. Therefore, what presidents do or fail to do is more about the person in the office or their very close associates than the office itself or the entirety of the political system. Watergate, the uber scandal to date, has been treated largely as emanating from the corrupt soul of Richard Nixon, rather than from the environment of American politics. The oft-repeated line used to sum up the lesson of Watergate is that âthe system worked,â that is that the presidentâs fomenting of scandal was thwarted by the system itself.
A subject that is more the preoccupation of journalists than social scientists is the response of presidents to charges of scandals in their administrations. Do they cooperate with investigations or sanctions by Congress, the judiciary, the media, or special prosecutors and councils? Do they stonewall and use all available tools at their disposal to inhibit or outright kill any investigations or attempts at sanctions? Or do presidents look for other means to add to or use in place of these tactics, perhaps by engaging in misdirection to undermine or at least deflect the damage of scandal? This bookâs focus is on this third way, the use of misdirection by presidents to evade or otherwise redirect scandal away from themselves and their administrations. A number of presidents in the post-WWII era, those that we can confidently label as âmodernâ presidents, have either contemplated the use of misdirection, or used it in part or as a core of their strategic response to charges of scandal. This redounds to the basic question about the drivers of presidential power and leadership framed above: Why have some scandal-mired presidents opted for misdirectionâeither in part or in fullâand others avoided it or merely contemplated its use? Evaluating a series of cases with presidents from often vastly different political circumstances helps to provide insights into the factors that drove each president to either embrace or reject the use of misdirection.
The presidencies of Richard Nixon (Chapter 3), Ronald Reagan (Chapter 4), Bill Clinton (Chapter 5), and Donald Trump (Chapter 6) are used here to provide a relatively small universe of information to evaluate the presence and potential impact of misdirection to manage scandal. While the nature of scandal is somewhat subjective, the four p...