The story of the presidency has not been one of whether the president is really the chief human resources officer of the executive branch. The central element of the presidency has been the growth of its executive powers, not its powers of management. The Framers created the presidency so that a branch of the government would always be “in being” and could exercise substantive powers in times of crisis and emergency. Indeed, the basic theory of the unitary executive was born not out of a debate over removal, but over President Washington’s declaration of American neutrality during the wars of the French Revolution. Our greatest presidents failed not because they carefully husbanded the removal power, but because they responded to great challenges using every tool at their disposal, including their substantive powers as chief executive and commander in chief. Authority through the removal and command of subordinates, no doubt, was an element of executive power, but it was secondary to the more important issue—the scope of the president’s constitutional authorities.
It is true that the revolutionaries rebelled against King George III and his perceived oppressions of the colonies, but it does not follow that they opposed the idea of executive power. To most of those who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, post-Revolutionary efforts by the states to allow only weak executives with fragmented functions and powers had largely failed. Undermining the integrity of the executive branch had led to unstable, oppressive legislatures. The drafters of the Constitution came to Philadelphia in large part to restore the independence and unity of the executive branch—a republican, not a royal, restoration.
Independence put American theories of governance to the test, and they failed miserably. The Revolutionaries established one national charter, the Articles of Confederation, which soon proved crippled from lack of executive organization and leadership. The revolutionists wrote their state constitutions to undermine the structural integrity of the executive branch, and the results were legislative abuse, special-interest laws, and weak governments. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, even in a postwar time of relative peace and prosperity, led American nationalists to draft a new Constitution that would create a stronger, more independent executive branch within a more powerful national form of government.