So Russ' post has got me thinking about Jon. He's an interesting character - Moore does a great job in portraying a sentient, yet objective point of view, which is something that our planet has never known.
However, Jon wasn't always the superpowered-superweapon that he is during the period illustrated in Watchmen. He was once a totally normal human being, who - like many traditional superheroes - got his powers through a freak accident. Unlike most superheroes, however, he seems to have lost his humanity in gaining is powers - and not in the way supervillains, do either.
All of the passion and emotion of humanity seems to have leeched out of Jon. I guess that once you can see the universe on a subatomic level and manipulate everything you see, stuff like emotion and morals must seem.... silly. At the end of the book, when he leaves for another universe, Jon seems to be a completely alien being.
But I don't think that it was just his transformation that changed his emotions; I think it was the time spent with a completely different, non-human point of view. Russ, this is how I'd answer your question as to why Jon continued to respect the authority of the President: he remembers and acts on the emotions and morals of his previous human self, and hasn't yet begun to change as a result of his deeply technical worldview. Perhaps as he stays longer and longer as his new self, particles and atoms and physics become more and more understandable and familiar, but passion and morality become more foreign and strange.
Another factor, on the other hand, could be love. Jon seemed to be losing contact with his human emotions as soon as he became a superbeing; however, he just seemed cold, a bit too logical - not completely inhuman. For example, when he vanishes the crew and audience of the film set to the street and moves himself to the moon, he's displaying rather human emotions - fear, anger, grief, frustration, pouting.
It is really when Laurie tells Jon that she's sleeping with Dan that Jon seems to truly leave emotion behind. Not too long ago, he gave a huge emotional response to the news that a number of people who associated closely with him might have cancer. Now, he seems unconcerned that the whole human race might bomb itself into oblivion. Was it love that kept Jon just a little bit human? Or was his progress to a frank objectivity inevitable in a being who can see and manipulate the very material of existence?
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This explanation makes a lot of sense; I agree. I hadn't thought of Jon as having a human -> superhuman (slash quasi-God) character arc after his transformation, but I can definitely see where you're coming from on this.
I guess maybe what I'm questioning beyond authorial justification for Jon's actions is a more rational justification for Jon's actions - specifically, his obedience to Nixon (and I'm only half kidding when I say that Jon's ability to see the future should have made him a little more apt to question Nixon's judgment, or the political prudence of acting as his puppet). It just seems like, prior patriotic obligations aside, Jon's ability to see things on a larger, more universal scale might have shown him the injustice of the Vietnam war... but perhaps he did, and justified his own intervention in an effort to save human lives.
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