The most provocative aspect of Goldsmith's argument, however, is also the least persuasive. He contends that the problem was not that Addington and the administration did not care sufficiently about the law, but that they cared too intensely, so much so that they were "strangled by law." He claims that "this war has been lawyered to death," and describes government officials as overly chilled by the prospect that they might be held criminally accountable for actions taken in the name of the country's security. Goldsmith prefers the good old days when matters of national security and war were, for the most part, not regulated by federal legislation, and presidents, such as FDR, were free to shape their judgments without regard for law, and could concentrate instead on "political legitimation." In the post-Watergate era, he laments, Congress passed "many of the laws that so infuriatingly tied the President's hands in the post-9/11 world." This view, of course, is fully consonant with that of Cheney and Addington. Cheney, for example, told reporters on board Air Force One in 2005 that "a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs."
It's interesting how none of this perspective comes through in the PBS specials or the NYT stories. Was he "saving it" for his book?
