Until James Frey and Martha-Ann Alito took over the news cycle, the revelation that the George W. Bush administration had spied on American citizens without a warrant was provoking much debate. To be sure, it raises many questions about how this country should and does operate. Even leaving aside the privacy vs. security debate and ignoring the "well that's odd that they have a secret and fairly cooperative court just to give warrants for this sort of surveillance and why didn't they just use it?" question, one cannot escape the sense that the office of the President is at one of its periodic zeniths of power.

The balance of powers carefully pieced together in the US Constitution does not create a static system. Checks and balances are fluid, dynamic forces and the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches all swing along their axes of power. The Executive branch, as these latest spying revelations -- and the growing sense that nothing will really be done about them -- attest, is ascendant.

On some level, I have a gut reaction that supports powerful presidents. Some of the most popular presidents, especially during war time, have exercised sweeping authority. Roosevelt and Johnson and Eisenhower and Jefferson all pushed the limits of their power to, as they saw it, improve the union. Bully for them, I find myself saying. After all, there are hundreds of federal judges, over 500 congressmen and one lone chief executive. Some base part of me cheers for him.

Which, of course, misses the whole point. George W. Bush is not personally tapping phones and searching records. The Executive branch is just as sprawling and massive as the Legislative and five years of a Republican administration have not changed that. Strong presidents don't just start wars and push through their favorite legislation. They also have the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI at their disposal and if Congress doesn't exercise strong oversight those agencies will act as they see fit.

During the imperial presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon the Executive office went largely unchecked as it executed both Congress' will and its own. A case can be made for a strong Executive (the Bush administration has been making it since September 12, 2001) but Watergate convinced Congress and the nation the pendulum of power had swung too far.

Nonetheless, that previous period of unchecked presidential authority offers an easier to grasp (thanks to hindsight) picture of what powerful Executive branches look like. Intelligence in that era was also left to the offices of the President and J. Edgar Hoover's power peaked during that time as his expertise for blackmail and intimidation came into full bloom. The CIA, an intelligence agency with a nominally international focus, also carved out fiefdoms of unchecked power and, like the NSA recently, acted unknowingly against US citizens.

Just as the growing power of the Bush White House draws its justification from the War on Terror, the imperial presidencies of the '60s were conceived in the Cold War. In the '50s as concern over the Soviet Union settled over the government, CIA director Allen Dulles inducted a program known as MKULTRA to study mind control and manipulation. The program was headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was sufficiently bizarre that Dr. Gottlieb is the supposed inspiration for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Gottlieb set out to find chemicals and drugs that could be used both as weapons and truth sera and for mind control. A surprising number of the chemical drugs on today's illicit market passed through MKULTRA on their way out of the labs. Ecstasy, marijuana, heroin, alcohol, sodium pentathol, and other drugs were also used in human testing by the CIA under MKULTRA. Early experiments even explored the possible uses of radiation for mind control.

Every schoolyard discussion about the CIA making and distributing LSD has its roots in MKULTRA. The experiments the agency did with LSD are indeed worthy of a playground. At first, agents tested the drug on each other, slipping it into coworker's drinks and then tipping them off so they could take the day off and study the possible government uses of their trip.

After this line of investigation had run its course the CIA expanded its research to the general population without the public's consent or knowledge. They drugged and studied unknowing prisoners, prostitutes, and mental patients. The CIA opened and ran brothels in New York City and San Francisco to round up johns when test subjects were in short supply.

In a move that has echoes in the modern CIA's alleged exporting of terror suspects for interrogation on foreign soil, some of the deadliest experiments under MKULTRA were farmed out to Canada. Electroshock therapy with ludicrously high currents and still more LAD experiments were carried out in Montreal at the CIA's direction and expense.

In short, Gottlieb and MKULTRA under the auspices of the CIA and, by extension, the President, did damaging and dangerous things to Americans and foreigners without their consent. All of it was secret and all of it originated within the Executive branch.

After Watergate, and spurred on by reporting in the New York Times, both houses of Congress held hearings on the MKULTRA program and its successor MKSEARCH. Gerald Ford signed an executive Order on Intelligence Activities that banned the testing of drugs on human subjects without informed consent. Straining their credibility, government witnesses at the Congressional hearings defended the CIA programs on the basis of national security. The MKULTRA experiments mark a low point in the trust between the US government and its citizens and a high water mark for the power of an unchecked Executive.

It is obviously a slippery slope to compare government surveillance and government drugging and torture. The similarities exist, however. Most tellingly, the government acted without oversight or knowledge from its citizens or their elected representatives and its actions directly impacted those same uninformed citizens.

Powerful presidencies are about more than just the man in the oval office. Those who work for that man also become more powerful and less regulated. If the nation is ready to excuse a strong President because it feels the resultant security is worth the risk -- and, after all, they elected and trust the President -- it is worth recollecting that strong presidents have many people working for them. Whether asked directly, indirectly, or not at all they will carry out the work of the Executive branch, the scope of which grows with the strength of the President.

It is possible, of course, to strike a balance between national security and privacy. While MKULTRA blatantly did not strike that balance, the current administration and all its subordinate agencies may be doing a better job. Still, as we try to weigh the effects of the current powerful Executive, it is worth acknowledging how much is unknowable about the actions of any branch of government when it swings away from the checks and balances of the other two. It is worth looking back at previous muscular Presidents and noting their extremes. Those excesses provide context and insight as we decide how strong is too strong.

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