(upbeat music) (graphics popping) - Hello and welcome to "The Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall.

Watergate, the War on Terror, January 6th.

Can we, and if so, how do we hold sitting presidents and former presidents accountable for their actions that may be illegal?

Our guest is Dr. Stuart Streichler, author of "Presidential Accountability in Wartime."

But it also touches on basically that, in broader sense, the breadth and width of what presidents are allowed to do or not do and the counsel they receive in the process of doing that.

So, Dr. Streichler, thank you for being here today to talk about this.

And welcome to "The Journal."

- Thank you for having me.

- And one of the things we want to bring out too is the fact that you have a Bowling Green State University connection.

So talk a little about your background before we dive deep into presidential accountability.

- Right, well, I grew up in Bowling Green.

And then I went to, attended Bowling Green State University.

And I majored in mathematics and I had a design pro, minor in philosophy and politics.

And I really was value the time I had there and some of the professors were just outstanding to work with.

So I look back with fondness at my memory.

- Yeah now, you've written this book and it's called "Presidential Accountability in Wartime," specifically deals with George W. Bush; his time as president, obviously following 2001.

A lot of things were changing in the country and we still feel those effects today.

Talk a little bit about the fact too that if you look back in history, all presidents have tried to push the envelope or find just how wide their authority was.

I mean, you can go back to Abraham Lincoln, FDR, obviously Richard Nixon during Watergate, looking for ways to expand presidential authority or what they believe they were allowed to do.

So historically, is this what all presidents do or have we have presidents that haven't tested the water, so to speak, on just what they're allowed to do as president?

[Stuart] Well, we have a, it's a complex series of presidencies where some are obviously failed presidencies and ineffective.

You know right before Lincoln, you had James Buchanan who's considered one of the worst presidents.

And he did not use his powers of his office to try to stem the tide towards the Civil War.

So he's blamed a lot.

But then you have a lot in that 19th century period.

Franklin Pierce or Millard Fillmore, who don't get much recognition and not considered strong presidents.

But one way to think about it is this concept of the imperial presidency that a historian Arthur Schlesinger developed.

And a lot of people have heard that word and the question might be, well, what does that mean?

And the idea he had was that there was a, what he called a constitutional presidency, the one set up by the framers of the Constitution and that was ratified in the Constitution.

And it was a presidency that was limited by the checks and balances of the other branches and also that would be bound by the rule of law.

And his view was, over time, that presidents, even if they failed, but often with stronger presidents, they changed the nature of the office.

So it became you know, in his words, imperial.

More like the king of England than the president of a republic.

And so what we see, I would say that there are failed presidencies but even then, there's this institutional buildup of power in the presidency.

So that, for example, Congress was envisioned to be the main policymaking branch.

But in many ways, presidents have taken over a lot of the policymaking process.

It's Democratic presidents and it's Republican presidents.

So that over time has changed the nature of the presidency.

And wartime is one particular area where we see things go off the rails and can easily go off the rails.

And it makes sense that the President is going to be the one to exercise extraordinary power during war, a national short-circuit crisis.

But what happens then is you have some presidents who take the nation to war when maybe Congress didn't say we should go.

Or in Nixon's case, he had bombed Cambodia and was completely unauthorized in the secret bombing.

Or in other cases, you have presidents like Lincoln who infringed on the civil liberties of civilians in different ways during wartime, justified or not.

I mean, he authorized the military to arrest many civilians and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus.

So the military was arresting civilians and could sentence them to death in a military trial.

So you've got a mix of things where we get to this point today, and it looks like the President is in many ways unchecked when he or she ought to be, and not bound by the rule of law.

[Steve] Yeah and it's interesting too because you mentioned obviously Abraham Lincoln who was held as, you know, high regard, usually rated as the best president the country's ever had.

And yet even he did some things that if we look back from a legal standpoint and say, wow, that really technically shouldn't have happened, legally shouldn't have happened.

But at the same time, you can look at other presidents who didn't have the skillset he had, didn't understand the nature of the presidency, and what he could and couldn't do, who weren't even as restricted as he was, who went beyond what he would have done.

And, you know, we were talking before we came on that Abraham Lincoln sort of had some boundaries.

He kind of knew, hey, I could go farther but I don't feel comfortable doing that.

Where another president, maybe not with the same character structure of him, would have really gone crazy during the Civil War and just made a total mess of everything, both on the domestic front and on the war front as well.

When you look at- And through history, FDR another good example, we look back now and say, gee, Japanese internment, that just doesn't seem right.

But at the time to him, he was getting counsel from both sides saying, "Do it."

"No don't do it, this is a civil rights infringement."

"Well, we're at war.

We have to use quote unquote extreme measures maybe to accomplish, to protect national security."

Obviously a word that comes up a lot.

So this isn't something new, it isn't something that just recent presidents, as you said, it's been expanding over time, both with very capable presidents and, in some cases, presidents who we would look at and say, well maybe not the best president we've ever had.

When you context it that way, are there certain personality types or anything that comes up as you've looked at it historically that say, here are some presidents who knew what they were doing, here are some that just weren't good at this particular thing?

[Stuart] Right, well, you know it's interesting.

There was a book from around the Watergate time written by, um, that suggested there are personality types that you can classify the presidents in.

I think it's more of a, well, Lincoln, I'm actually a fan of Lincoln and I think I can actually, if I was around at that time, I could argue in favor of what he did.

Because he was not, he didn't reach out right away and suspend habeas corpus everywhere.

Habeas corpus is the right to appear before a court, a civil court.

And it's, I mean, technical legal language, but the idea is fundamental.

It's the idea that, you know, the military in our country can't just arrest a civilian and then try them on their own.

But he was careful.

And then I always think, you know, they were always worried in Washington DC that the Confederate army would take over Washington DC.

So his time period is really, it's hard for me to judge and say, you know, Lincoln was wrong when he finally extended his suspension of habeas corpus all across the country.

Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, just to go into that one, he got advice from his Attorney General, "No, we should not do this."

And on the one hand, you know, you're thinking of the time after Pearl Harbor.

I mean, it was a sudden razing attack that destroyed the Pacific fleet.

And, you know, there was cause for concern of whether the West Coast was vulnerable.

But to, you know, if you, if anyone looks at the images, you can see online of the Japanese American families, it's about 120,000 that were taken throughout the West Coast and placed in desolate camps.

I think Roosevelt knew that it was not the right thing to do.

So it's interesting on his personality that he still did it anyway.

[Steve] He still did it anyway.

Yep, hm mm.

Yeah, well- [Stuart] So, yeah.

And then we get to today.

I mean, that's the question- You know, you asked a good question which is, you can't depend on a president having one personality or another.

They're not going to be all like Lincoln.

But so what happens is, what does that mean when you have the power of that office increasing so much?

Magnified power where the law doesn't really, it's hard to use the law to cabin the president.

And it's because you get all sorts of their personality types.

You have Lincoln and Washington and then Trump.

And Nixon.

And, you know, some people didn't like what Obama and Biden have done.

So it does vary on how you perceive it based on party but they're a bunch of different personality types.

Except for one thing, they're all ambitious.

So.

- Right, that's a good point.

When we come back, let's talk a little about, well, we'll move forward to George W. Bush because obviously your book, "Presidential Accountability in Wartime," really focuses on that, with the backdrop of some of the things that we've talked about.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Stuart Streichler, author of "Presidential Accountability in Wartime" here on "The Journal."

Thank you for staying with us on "The Journal."

Our guest is Dr. Stuart Streichler, author of "Presidential Accountability in Wartime" which specifically looks at President George W. Bush and how he handled things after September 11th, 2001.

Dr. Streichler, obviously we talked a little bit about how presidents over the years have dealt with various issues, whether it's wartime, whether it's civil war, whether it's wars that we were fighting across the globe and other places.

But obviously when we look at the War on Terror, it was something that we hadn't seen.

This was actually an attack on American soil, which leads to all sorts of political ramifications and obviously the way people feel.

Very similar to Pearl Harbor and the fact that it was US territory.

Talk a little about why you decided to write this book and why specifically about George W. Bush and what went on in that time after September 11th, 2001.

- Right, well, um, you know, there's no question I should just start and say 9/11 was a, this is a serious major national security crisis.

There's no question about that.

And demanded some strong vigorous response from the United States.

I don't think there's any question about that.

I mean, personally, I'm still angry about what happened then with the attack.

I mean with the attack, not- I'm not talking about- I'm talking about Al-Qaeda attacking.

[Steve] Hm mm, right.

- And so, President Bush had enormous support, if everybody remembers back to afterwards.

And what happened was they felt that this was different.

President Bush said this was different than other wars.

The old conventional wars between two nation states doesn't apply here.

And he called it a new paradigm.

And as part of that new paradigm, and some of this seems to make sense, well we need to gather intelligence because our enemy, the terrorists are disguising themselves and attacking civilians with the intent of inflicting mass casualties.

So it's true, intelligence is gonna be important.

What happened here though, was they decided to employ what they called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, which included, many people would say, torture.

And these would be a violation of different human rights laws.

One would be the Convention Against Torture which the United States has ratified, but another would be some of the Geneva Conventions, the Laws of War.

And what struck me, I think, one- There were two points where I got interested in writing this book.

One was, I learned as news reports came out, of military lawyers who opposed what President Bush was doing.

Now some of this didn't come out right away but in every branch of the Services, the highest ranking military officers who are called judge advocates, Judge Advocate General, in the judge advocate general court, they were saying, (chuckling) "This is torture."

They would raise different questions like, "Even if we are legally okay with this, is this the right thing to do?"

when asked.

And that impressed me a lot.

It wasn't that- They were in a panic.

They thought this is not the way to go.

And they were also arguing it's not effective.

You're not going to get solid intelligence that you could rely on.

The other thing that interested me was, I wasn't interested in writing a, what I think of as a straight line argument that President Bush violated the laws of war and then he should therefore be prosecuted.

What I found fascinating was the torture debate and the idea that no one was held accountable for waterboarding or some acts of torture.

Not only the President but everybody.

And what was that about?

What does that say about our constitutional system?

Because in my view, this is very serious.

We're talking about serious war crimes in which, you know, some detainees were really tortured to death.

I mean, there were homicides that the Army was investigating as homicides by Military Guard.

So what I was interested in was thinking about, what does it mean for us in the United States, that we have apparent war crimes and that you might be able to tie it directly to the President of the United States, as sad as that is to say, and then nothing happened in terms of accountability?

So that was where I came in on this.

[Steve] Yeah because if you think about it, there's been really no discussion after the, well at least in the past few years, about any of that.

That is sort of now almost like ancient history.

What went on during that time in terms of, we did, you know, we practiced some things that, if another country had done that to soldiers or prisoners of war, we would have been outraged by it.

And yet we've sort of practiced and it was sort of like, well the ends are gonna justify the means sort of approach.

Which it's difficult when we look at that and think of ourselves as being better than that and yet some of that went on.

And as you said, no one's really ever been held directly accountable for much of it or if any of it.

So it is an interesting time.

Similar in a way to the fact that you did have, because there was concern I think too at that time that people, American citizens, you know, just like the Japanese in World War Two that as you talked about, were moved from the West Coast to internment camps, a lot of people of Middle Eastern descent suddenly were looked at as, well, are they on our side or not?

And I think that fueled a lot of that, that, well let's just do whatever we need to do to prevent this from ever happening.

And I guess that's a difficult thing to swallow when we believe ourselves to be better than that.

[Stuart] Right.

I mean I understand, in a moment of crisis, you know, you're going to be- The issue is you're going to be tempted to start to go down different roads, which somehow, like the military lawyers, they said, "No, no.

We don't go down that road."

But they were overruled.

I would say, one way to think about this, I mean it goes back to the golden rule but you know if our troops were treated like that with these Enhanced Interrogation Techniques by other countries, we would be up in arms.

And one problem that should have been a signal that, wait, do we really want to go here, was discovered by the Senate Armed Service Committee later.

In 2008, they published a report that the Bush administration had reverse engineered techniques that originally were used on our Service members in the Korean War by the Chinese Communists and North Koreans.

And so then we had developed in the military a program to protect our Service members.

It was called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.

And the idea was, we're gonna treat you badly under these controlled conditions to make sure you can protect yourself if you are caught.

And they reverse engineered these.

And we started to use those same techniques on our captives.

I mean, some of these captives were at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is when it became really public.

And you know, some of them were involved in 9/11.

I mean, they should be treated appropriately.

And the problem is, I mean one problem is if they're tortured, then the evidence that came out cannot be used in the military tribunal.

So that's what's going on at Guantanamo now is you've got an aging population, some of whom were involved or implicated in 9/11 but we can't really prosecute.

- Yeah, interesting.

When we come back, we can talk a little more about this too because obviously as you just said, it's still kind of going on and yet we have never really reached any kind of conclusion about that particular time in our history and with President George W. Bush.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Stuart Streichler, author of "Presidential Accountability in Wartime" here on "The Journal."

Thank you for staying with us here on "The Journal."

Our guest is Dr. Stuart Streichler, author of "Presidential Accountability in Wartime."

In the intro, I talked about the fact that obviously we're now in the process of dealing with what happened on January 6th and presidential power, presidential activities, what's allowed to happen, what's not allowed to happen.

And that's still obviously gonna get litigated now.

And obviously there are gonna be trials and things like that, supposedly.

How does that fit in this context?

We've talked about presidents who see it as an imperial presidency.

I can do what I want, I'm the president.

How does that fit with this particular setting?

Because that's kind of the feel you get when you hear some of the things that have come out in the media about what President Trump was talking about in January of 2021.

- Right.

Yeah.

I would say, I go back to President Nixon for one line that he had stated on an interview after Watergate.

He had resigned and he said, "Well if the President does it, it means it's not illegal."

[Steve] Not illegal, yeah.

- I think President Trump seems to have that view sometimes but that's the question of accountability is not restricted, like you suggested, not just a wartime issue.

Even though in wartime, we get a certain different set of issues coming up related to a national security crisis.

But here, what we have is we're in an interesting moment.

I mean, we might have just reflect that at this point, the latest polling showed that President Trump, if he won the Republican nomination, which looks that way, is tied and running neck and neck with President Biden.

So, you know, I think a lot of people, pollsters, are thinking, well that's not gonna hold for the general election.

But I mean, I would say, who knows?

And what's interesting is for the first time in our history, we've had a president who's now facing, a former president, numerous prosecutions.

And when I started writing this book, I actually had to change a line at the last minute just recently.

Because I had a line that no president has ever been indicted or prosecuted.

(chuckling) And I had to change it just because at that time, the New York Grand jury had indicted.

So where does it go from here?

I don't know.

I mean, could we see presidents who are prosecuted quite often?

Could we see one possibility is that we start to see tit for tat so that you could have Republican state prosecutors- I mean, you have New York for indicting President Trump.

Do you have Texas indicting President Biden for something?

You know, and I don't know.

I have my own sense is that, President Trump is in so many ways an outlier.

And I mean it could be in good ways or bad ways.

I mean, he's got a charismatic connection with a loyal base that is not leaving him.

And so that affects everything around him and it affects the other Republicans, his competitors.

[Steve] Well and- [Stuart] So- [Steve] Go ahead, go ahead.

[Stuart] This last indictment is what's really interesting because it does get to what you were referring to, the January 6th indictment.

So, how far that'll go is interesting.

- [Steve] Well, and I think when you talk about January 6th too, there's a belief, at least in some people's minds, that we were actually at war, in their minds, that this was for the life of the country.

We have to keep President Trump in office because otherwise the country will be gone.

Some people on his side of the aisle and some people who were counseling him saw this, we're actually at war right now with a portion of the American public who doesn't understand what we're trying to do.

Which is, you know, people can believe what they want to believe but that's, it was interesting 'cause it was, because if you think about this, when you hear the rhetoric of, you know, unless you elect me, we're gonna lose the country, I mean that almost, that sounds like a wartime statement.

Do this or we'll lose this war.

And that gets into people's minds and maybe even a president's mind that, hey, I've gotta do this to save the country.

And maybe they're right.

I don't- I mean, no one knows what will happen in the future but that seems to be a little bit of the context too, that they felt they were at war with the portion of the public that didn't vote for them.

[Stuart] Right.

Yeah, it's an excellent point.

And what it reminds me of, one of the point I'd like to say in thinking about that is that among Nixon's people, there was this idea, you know, that was a very polarized time and a very dangerous time of coming out of the Vietnam War.

And the idea then was, that they had, was that the ends justified any means.

I mean, they even said this among themselves.

And so it's a dangerous concept in the United States because what I feel myself about what I value in some of what the American government is about, is this idea that process matters, law matters.

You know, it's not true that in our country you can do any mean, take any means to arrive at what looks like a good end.

It's a dangerous road to go down.

So, you know, process, law, rules, these are very important.

It's how you get to the end that matters in my view, as well as just getting to a particular end.

[Steve] Now, if people want to find your book and it's called "Presidential Accountability in Wartime," Dr. Stuart Streichler, what's the simplest way for them to find your book and get a copy, purchase a copy?

[Stuart] Right, they can go- I mean, it's on Amazon.

And you can also check at the University of Michigan Press, as the website dedicated to my book particularly.

And you put in "Presidential Accountability in Wartime," it'll come up.

[Steve] It'll come up.

Okay, well thank you so much for being here and giving us a broader spectrum and a broader view of presidents as they work through issues whether in wartime or not, but presidential power and the accountability, if we have it or we don't have it with them.

So thank you so much for being here.

[Stuart] Thank you very much for having me.

[Steve] Great, and you can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you next time on "The Journal."

Goodnight and good luck.

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