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There was a very interesting article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about Jack Goldsmith’s tenure as head of the State Department’s Office of Legal Council, from Oct. 2003 to June 2004. (The article is written by a law professor and friend of Goldsmith’s, Jeffrey Rosen. It is part interview, part biography, and part review of Goldsmith’s upcoming book about his experiences within the Bush Administration.) The OLC is the branch of the State Department that basically tells the rest of the government what is and is not legal, and it was during Goldsmith’s tenure that the infamous torture memos (which were written before Goldsmith arrived) were repealed and the equally infamous incident at Ashcroft’s hospital bedside took place. In general, Goldsmith is sympathetic with the Bush Administration’s goals of fighting the war on terror by expanding the surveillance and police power of the federal government, but he also disagreed strongly with the Bush Administration’s “go-it-alone” strategy. In his opinion, the executive branch should have been working with Congress and the Courts to produce strong and legal tools to go after terrorists, instead of ignoring FISA and rewriting the Geneva Convention only to have Congress and the Courts strike them down later when those programs became public.

I was especially struck by a passage at the end of the article:

The Bush administration’s legalistic “go-it-alone approach,” Goldsmith suggests, is the antithesis of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s willingness to collaborate with Congress. Bush, he argues, ignored the truism that presidential power is the power to persuade. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense,” Goldsmith concludes in his book. “This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

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