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A president's failure to tell the truth in judicial roceedins in an effort to conceal embarrassing personal behavior is indefensible even if it hardly merits removal from office. It does not follow, however, that there are no circumstances where deception by the chief executive can be justified. Indeed, it is arguable that the very nature of the American political system actually compels presidents, in some situations, to engage in deception. As Hans Morgenthau put it a long time ago, in reference to the making of foreign policy; "No president of the United States, handicapped as he is by constitutional and political conditions, is capable of translating his judgment and that of his advisers into action without overcoming grave difficulties, running grave risks, and resorting at times to evasion, subterfuge and manipulation."
Executive leadership in the United States is infinitely problematical, and in seeking to ensure that his judgment prevails in the policymaking process a president must come to terms with a political system that verges on the ungovernable. It is marked by an anti-authority political culture; it includes a very real separation of powers, has a formidable array of pressure groups and sports a virulent, remarkably uninhibited media. Unaided by consequential parties, at the mercy of a notoriously undisciplined bureaucracy and often unable to rely on the loyalty of cabinet members-or even of his own staff-the presidency is indeed a "beleaguered office." In domestic affairs the many checks and balances, the centrifugal distribution of power, and the individualistic ethos that pervades the political system are relatively harmless disadvantages, but that cannot be said of vital matters affecting the relations of the United States with the outside world.
Notwithstanding the ambiguities of the Constitution, there is no doubt that the president is ultimately responsible for national security a concept that has been appropriately defined by former Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, as "the ability to preserve the nation's physical integrity and territory, to maintain its economic relations with the rest of the world on reasonable terms, to protect its nature, institutions and governance from disruption from outside, and to control its borders." Given these onerous demands, and the problems of governance in the United States, it is not surprising that chief executives should, on occasion, resort...