Two Commanders in Chief: Free Expression's Most Severe Tests

Abstract

War puts the constitutional guarantee of free expression to its most severe test. For a president, war heightens immeasurably the classic First Amendment conflict between confidentiality and openness in a democracy. War exacerbates the usual free expression tensions between access and governing, £rankness and caution, the people's right to know and the need to operate a crisis government. In other words, war and war crisis conditions chill free expression in a democracy. With war, values are traded between individual freedom and group survival. The self protection of the group becomes so important that the government interferes with individual liberties. When the country as a whole is committed to a war, there will be few defenders of individual free expression, especially that expression opposed to the military conflict. In the United States, such free expression confrontations are but part of an old story of clashes involving the president as the commander-in-chief.