"Why don't we just go to Congress and get it to sign off on the whole detention program?" I asked, explaining that the Supreme Court would have a much harder time striking down a wartime detention program that had Congress' explicit support.

"Why are you trying to give away the president's power?" Addington responded. He believed that the very act of asking for Congress' help would imply, contrary to the White House line, that the president needed legislative approval and could not act on his own.

Addington once expressed his general attitude toward accommodation when he said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." He and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint.

These men believed that the president would be best equipped to identify and defeat the uncertain, shifting, and lethal new enemy by eliminating all hurdles to the exercise of his power.