Presidential politics 177of the most effective of presidents, for it removes whatever doubt might have
remained of the likelihood of the incumbent president running for a third
term. It may also have a potentially more drastic effect upon the term of of-
fice of a vice-president who succeeds to the presidency. A vice-president who
succeeds to the presidency and serves more than two years of the unexpired
term (presumably even if only a few hours more), cannot be elected to the
office in his own right more than once. Almost as soon as he is elected the
speculation will begin about his successor.
The other attempt to limit the president’s power was first introduced into
Congress in 1951 by Senator John Bricker of Ohio, who proposed to amend
the Constitution in order to subject executive agreements made by the presi-
dent to the same control by the Senate as treaties, and to ensure that treaties
would not be enforceable except through federal legislation, which would
be subject to the same constitutional limitations as other legislation. The
Bricker Amendment was proposed to Congress in a number of forms, and a
much less restrictive Amendment was proposed by Senator Walter George
in 1954, but none of them was successful in gaining the necessary two-thirds
majority in Congress.
The power of the presidency
The presidency is then the centre of the American political system, an insti-
tution that concentrates great power in the hands of one person, but subjects
that person also to the humiliations of utter defeat. It is a single point in a
great sea of ever-moving, ever-changing political forces of the most varied
character, which threaten to engulf and beat the president down, but a point
that provides the one central, stable focus of authority which can, for a time
at least, dominate, lead and innovate. By 1974, however, the presidency was
at its lowest ebb. The impact of the Vietnam War on American society, closely
followed by the Watergate affair, shook the confidence of the American peo-
ple in their institutions, and led them to look very closely at the relationships
between president and Congress that lie at the very heart of their system of
government. The resignation of President Nixon, coming as it did barely in
time to forestall his impeachment, together with the conviction of some of
the most powerful members of his administration and the apparently endless
revelations of criminal or corrupt activities by those in government service,
underlined the claim by congressional leaders that the presidency was out of
control and should be subjugated to a reinvigorated Congress. To the outside
observer, perhaps the most striking aspect of this episode in American his-
tory is the fact that the Constitution and the political system managed to
survive these extraordinary events, and to remove highly placed wrongdoers
so effectively. Few if any other systems of government in the world would
have made it possible to relentlessly expose the misdeeds of those still actu-
ally engaged in the exercise of power, and to remove them, without violence,
through proper legal procedures. Naturally enough, however, the scandals