The presidency is a loaded gun, for better or worse

Patrick Henry warned us that the president's vast powers could go unchecked

Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine Black students who sought to enter Little Rock Central High School in 1957, is followed by Hazel Bryan, shouting insults. Photo by Will Counts.

In February, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower invited Chief Justice Earl Warren to a “stag dinner” at the White House. It was two months after the Supreme Court heard arguments for a second time on the case of Brown v. Board of Education, and it would be three months before the court would issue its historic ruling striking down racial segregation in schools.

The president’s seating plan for the all-male dinner put Warren near the lawyer who had argued the case in favor of keeping students separated by race.

After dinner, historian Corey Brettschneider wrote, “Eisenhower took Warren aside, a conversation Warren recounted in his memoirs. ‘These are not bad people,’ Eisenhower reportedly said. ‘All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big …