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Over the past 50 years, most theoretical checks on the "imperial presidency" and the "national security state" have proven toothless. Carpenter and Weissman examine sources of the weakness of the media and Congress, respectively, in foreign policy matters. As Carpenter relates, tension between those who manage foreign policy and those who report on it was clear in the U.S. as early as the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Co-option and coercion dominated government-media relations through two world wars and the early decades of the cold war; more critical journalism in the Vietnam era produced a defensive, even vengeful reaction in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf. Carpenter pursues this pattern into the present with analyses of Somalia and Bosnia. In the end, Carpenter maintains, global interventionism has weakened essential media freedoms; this foreign policy must change in order to restore genuine First Amendment freedom of the press. Weissman, a veteran of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, offers lots of inside information in his thoughtful analysis of why "Congress has substantially ceded its fundamental constitutional role in foreign policy." His title describes "a powerful set of internal norms and attitudes, customs and institutions" that disarms members of Congress on most foreign policy issues, shifting significant power to narrow-based special interests (often corporate interests) as well as to the president. Weissman traces "deference" via, for example, Congress' treatment of El Salvador in the early 1980s. On the other hand, Congress transcended this culture and adopted a more assertive role in El Salvador after the 1989 murder of the Jesuits. Weissman concludes that the American people would benefit if members of Congress took their foreign policy responsibilities more seriously. --Mary Carroll