hich governed him in his exercise of the presidential office
was that he had not only a right but a duty "to do anything that the
needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the
Constitution or by the laws."[53] In his book, _Our Chief Magistrate and
his Powers_, Ex-President Taft warmly protested against the notion that
the President has any constitutional warrant to attempt the role of a
"Universal Providence."[54] A decade earlier his destined successor,
Woodrow Wilson, had avowed the opinion that "the President is at
liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can".[55]

But it is the second Roosevelt who beyond all twentieth-century
Presidents succeeded in affixing the stamp both of personality and of
crisis upon the Presidency as it exists at this moment. In the solution
of the problems of an economic crisis, "a crisis greater than war", he
claimed for the National Government in general, and for the President in
particular, powers which they had hitherto exercised only on the
justification of war. Then when the greatest crisis in the history of
our international relations arose, he imparted to the President's
diplomatic powers new extension, now without consulting Congress, now
with Congress's approval; and when at last we entered World War II, he
endowed the precedents of both the War between the States and of World
War I with unprecedented scope.[56]

It is timely therefore to inquire whether American Constitutional Law
today affords the Court a dependable weapon with which to combat
effectively contemporary enlarged conceptions of presidential power.
Pertinent in this connection is the aforementioned recent action of the
Court in Youngstown _v._ Sawyer disallowing presidential seizure of the
steel industry. The net result of that Case is distinctly favorable to
presidential pretensions, in two respects: First, because of the failure
of the Court to traverse the President's finding of facts allegedly
justifying his action, an omission in accord with the doctrine of
Political Questions; secondly, the evident endorsement by a majority of
the Court of the doctrine that, as stated in Justice Clark's opinion:
"The Constitution does grant to the President extensive authority in
times of grave and imperative national emergency".[57] That the Court
would have sustained, as against the President's action, a clear-cut
manifestation of congressional action to the contrary is, on the o