Farewell to "President Knows Best"

Daniel Yankelovich

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1978

Article preview: first 500 of 9,637 words total.

Summary:  For many years, public attitudes toward foreign policy leadership in the United States could be summed up as "President knows best." Virtually throughout the Vietnam War, up to its very end, the public gave the President - whether Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon - the benefit of the doubt. A President, any President, was presumed to possess vital information unavailable to others, and therefore to be in the best position to judge what actions were in the nation's interest. Several years ago I calculated a pre-Watergate, 50 percent "automatic support" factor for presidential decisions in foreign policy. Analyzing a number of public opinion polls taken before and after presidential decisions in foreign policy, I calculated that the President could count on adding up to 50 percent of the electorate to his support column once he had made a decision, almost regardless of the policy initiative in question. So untroubled was public confidence in executive legitimacy in foreign affairs that people simply assumed the President must have access to knowledge and wisdom denied to ordinary citizens.

Daniel Yankelovich is President of Yankelovich, Skelly and White, a public attitude research firm in New York, and of the Public Agenda Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded to encourage public involvement in national policy issues. The author wishes to acknowledge the significant contribution to this article made by his research associates, Larry Kaagan and Deborah Durfee Barron. Larry Kaagan in particular was indispensable in both data analysis and drafting of the article.

For many years, public attitudes toward foreign policy leadership in the United States could be summed up as "President knows best." Virtually throughout the Vietnam War, up to its very end, the public gave the President - whether Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon - the benefit of the doubt. A President, any President, was presumed to possess vital information unavailable to others, and therefore to be in the best position to judge what actions were in the nation's interest. Several years ago I calculated a pre-Watergate, 50 percent "automatic support" factor for presidential decisions in foreign policy. Analyzing a number of public opinion polls taken before and after presidential decisions in foreign policy, I calculated that the President could count on adding up to 50 percent of the electorate to his support column once he had made a decision, almost regardless of the policy initiative in question. So untroubled was public confidence in executive legitimacy in foreign affairs that people simply assumed the President must have access to knowledge and wisdom denied to ordinary citizens.

In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, these "old rules" of presidential latitude largely collapsed, victims of abuses under the so-called imperial presidency. Although it is difficult to calculate the precise shrinkage of automatic public support since the end of the Vietnam War, my impression is that it has dwindled to less than half its previous 50 percent margin, and in some instances may have disappeared altogether. Increasingly, the President may find himself having to justify his initiatives to a critical, reluctant public, with few citizens going along just because the President is presumed to know best. Under the conditions that now prevail, not only has automatic support for presidential policymaking dwindled, but public opinion data have indicated that the American people are eager to have more say - both directly and through their surrogates in Congress - in the formation of foreign policy.

Vietnam and Watergate were pivotal events in spurring the American public to withdraw automatic support for presidential initiatives. But the continuing mood of skepticism and lack of confidence in the presidency can no longer be blamed on these fast-receding historical episodes. Today, public mistrust of presidential leadership in foreign affairs is an almost accidental by-product of a larger decline of confidence in government that has been gathering force for 20 years. Except for Vietnam, the decline is almost unrelated to foreign affairs, having to do mainly with the enlarged role of government in the daily lives of people. We are witnessing an accelerating breakdown of the consensus, formed in the early 1930s, that government has to play a key role in correcting the defects of the private sector. The growth of doubts about how well government is carrying out this larger role begins to show up in University of Michigan surveys in the early 1960s. The doubts pick up momentum in the late 1960s and continue to grow throughout the 1970s.

The statistical record of this growth of mistrust is simple, ...

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