A King? A Pawn? A Rogue? The Founders Could Barely Imagine a President.

“How do you like our new Constitution?” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in mid-November 1787. Jefferson mostly wanted to vent. The two-month-old document left him reeling, especially in its provisions for a new chief executive. The American president, grumbled Jefferson, “seems a bad edition of a Polish king.”

Jefferson was in Paris, Adams in London. Neither knew that no issue had so bewildered the 55 men who, at various times, attended the Constitutional Convention than the shape of the office both were eventually to occupy. The separation of powers, a gift from Montesquieu, had come easily. But how to design a national executive for a people who had jettisoned a king? The Articles of Confederation provided for no such individual.

The question of the presidency arose on the first day of June. It was resolved in September, having come to the floor in so many permutations that one delegate wound up arguing contradictory sides. The sole issue on which everyone could agree was that the words “imperial” and “presidency” should maintain a chaste distance. The idea was to keep the new nation out of the hands of a power-mad, self-serving individual, susceptible, as British oppressors seemed to be, to bribery and flattery.

Pointing out that even Turkish sultans relied on councils, Virginia’s George Mason proposed a six-person executive board, appointed by the House or the Senate and composed of two members from each region of the country. Benjamin Franklin suggested a sort of privy council, adding that it “would not only be a check on a bad president, but be a relief to a good one.” Both ideas were rejected. (There was a reason Franklin later suggested that if an angel had descended from the heavens with an American Constitution, “it would nevertheless meet with violent opposition.”)

Over and over the delegates wrangled with the question of how to protect a president from foreign influence and his own worst instincts. Alexander Hamilton, the great champion of a powerful sole executive, made an eloquent case for life tenure. Nothing, he said, better insulated a president from corruption, which reared its head with every election. It fell to the 81-year-old Franklin to point out that some individuals outlived their prime.

Ultimately, the convention settled on a presidential term of four years, to be repeated without limit. As to executive powers, Franklin objected to any kind of absolute presidential veto. “One man,” he reasoned, “cannot be believed to possess more wisdom than both branches of the legislature.” The questions around the limits of the office so baffled the convention that it settled on how to remove a president before it had defined what one did. Mason and Franklin embraced impeachment. The president did not occupy a law-free zone. The only alternative method by which a president might be removed, Franklin added, was by assassination, which left its victim “not only deprived of his life but of the opportunity of vindicating his character.”