Chinua Achebe Quotes
Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.
Achebe, Chinua. The Trouble with Nigeria. Fourth Dimension Publishing, 1983.
This concept of Presidential powers greatly expanded the traditional power of the Presidency. To one degree or another this became the view of every president who followed until George W. Bush who went one large step further. He maintained that the President could do that which was specifically prohibited by law if the purpose was to perform a Constitutional duty.
Contrast Hoover's complaining tone with John F. Kennedy's quote on the subject.
Before assuming the presidency in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife called on President and Mrs. Hoover in the White House. Social custom required that the call be returned, but Roosevelt told the outgoing President, "I realize, Mr. President, that you are extremely busy, so I will understand if you do not return the call." Hoover responded:
Taken from the Nixon Tapes of June 14, 1971. This quotation illustrates the mental set of the Nixon White House where the President must be seen as infallible and obeyed without much questioning. After Nixon, that view did not surface again in American politics until the George W. Bush Presidency. The Federal Courts were not very sympathetic to the Haldeman assertion and allowed the publication.
He had been specifically asked about the Federal Affordable Care Act—Obamacare, which he had opposed when it was debated.
And the New York press is probably the most difficult and cynical in the world.
That is one view—the one tried the most frequently by Presidents who by their own estimates didn’t get a responsive civil service working to his priorities. Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson had great cooperation from their civil servants; they instead appointed very competent people with strong senses of fairness and leading personnel. Ronald Regan tried both techniques. He used Wilson’s technique in his Education and Justice Department where there was slow-rolling and dissonance when his appointees tended to be ideologues with little or no outstanding professional competence in the fields they supervised. However, his military and State Department bureaucracies was very responsive to his appointees who were excellent leaders.
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his masterpiece, is the most widely read book in modern African literature.
