Team of One

Presidential Command
By Peter W. Rodman
(Knopf, 351 pages, $27.95)

In a recent interview, Vice President Dick Cheney outlined his view of presidential power by noting that the American president is followed at all times by a military aide carrying the so-called nuclear football, which can be used to launch an immediate nuclear attack. "He could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen," Mr. Cheney said. "He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in."

Quite a curious interpretation: the nature of our world allows the president to define his own constitutional power. More curious for a conservative to assert a reinterpretation of the constitution, and deny that conservative darling, "original intent."

Mr. Rodman's central argument is that presidents perform best when they are consistently engaged in matters of national security and when they empower subordinates to impose policy on the bureaucracies at State and the Pentagon. President Clinton's successes, for example, came when he gave clear direction and appointed a powerful envoy – George Mitchell for Northern Ireland and, eventually, Richard Holbrooke for Bosnia. President George W. Bush called himself the "decider," but Mr. Rodman argues that many of his foreign-policy failures – including the incoherence of his approach to North Korea or the absence of a workable plan for postwar Iraq – came in part from "a systematic failure to manage conflicts among his advisors."

Management is crucial. Obama has chosen potentially contentious, and certainly strong personalities for his cabinet. It will rest on his ability to manage to make his presidency work.

We don't know what Mr. Rodman would think of Mr. Obama's incoming national-security team. He didn't know that Hillary Clinton would be heading the State Department when he wrote that the "pivotal" figure is a "strong and loyal Secretary of State." And he wasn't writing about Mr. Obama when he warned: "The risk involved in the future is that a president who is not a master in foreign affairs may have a difficult time keeping an energetic secretary under control."

The loyalty of that equation will be a question to ponder over time.

Much has been made of Mr. Obama's Lincolnesque "team of rivals" approach to assembling his cabinet. Mr. Rodman's history lesson suggests that installing strong people to challenge the president can be a good thing -- if leadership ultimately comes from the top. Mr. Rodman offers the apocryphal story of Abraham Lincoln asking his cabinet to vote on whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. After all his cabinet secretaries voted "no," the story goes, Lincoln declared: "The ayes have it!"

In his remarks introducing various members of his cabinet, Obama stated that he is the one with the vision and the decision.