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CONGRESSIONAL ACTIVISM AND FOREIGN POLICY Robert David Johnson: Congress and the Cold War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xxxii, 346. $25.99, paper.)
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670508000090
The debate among political scientists regarding the relationship between Congress and the executive on issues of Cold War foreign policy would seem, in some structural ways, to be analogous to the very relationship itself. While, as Edwin Corwin famously noted, the Constitution provides the executive and legislative branches with an "invitation to struggle" over foreign policy, and sporadic Cold War congressional activism nominally influenced foreign policymaking, the president generally appeared to reign supreme. Likewise, though both the prospect and manifestation of Cold War activism spurred scholarly arguments identifying the legislature as an important foreign policy actor, few of these arguments have appeared to present existential challenges to the dominant pro-executive and consensus themes in academe. Illustratively, one of the most prominent studies of the relationship (Barbara Hinckley's suggestively titled Less than Meets the Eye) concludes that congressional foreign policy asserti veness- even after the War Powers Act- is largely mythic, and effectively chides scholars who infer systematic congressional power from intermittent attempts to influence policymaking for making mountains of molehills.
In Congress and the Cold War, Robert David Johnson composes what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive attempt to dispute these overriding views. In his richly descriptive analysis of the entire Cold War period, Johnson utilizes hundreds of archival sources to develop a complex conceptualization of Congress's foreign policy role. His central contention is that Congress routinely employed several agenda-setting techniques to exercise influence well beyond its constitutionally-mandated powers. Specifically, the emergence of "subcommittee government" in the wake of extensive, legislative reorganization afforded chairs and ranking members the opportunity to constrain presidential policy options through the use of legislative procedure, the conduct of oversight and fact-finding hearings, and, most notably, the introduction of riders and...