36 pages • 1 hour read
Richard E. NeustadtPresidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
PrefacesChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface to the 1990 Edition Summary
The Preface to the 1990 edition summarizes the thesis and core insights of the 1960 edition; it then explains how the additional five chapters included in Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents (1990) tested them against an additional 30 years of historical development that saw five more individuals occupy the presidency. The Preface closes with a strong endorsement of the book’s original premise 30 years earlier.
Neustadt explains that a core argument of the 1960 book is that the presidency is intentionally designed to be “weak” in the Madisonian structure of the US government. That is, the presidency demands much of its occupant but affords that person relatively little inherent support and capacity to meet those demands.
Accordingly, Neustadt suggests that the primary contribution of the 1960 book was to conceive of the matter facing any president as a question off generating, conserving, and exercising political power in a prospective way. He interrogates the questions facing a president in strategic, forward-looking ways, examining how a president’s choices today are likely to affect his or her power tomorrow.
Neustadt then reviews recent political developments (and the additional chapters discussing them) briefly. For instance, Chapter 10 wrestles with the application of the book’s original framework to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon’s spectacular failures to maintain power, since both men had excelled at acquiring and exercising power prior to becoming president.
Preface to the First Edition Summary
The Preface to the 1960 edition notes that, when written, Neustadt had only known one of the presidents treated by the book (Harry Truman, under whom he served). It also notes the unconventional yet analytic posture assumed in the text. That posture would come to redefine study of the presidency in political science and largely reform the way that the US presidency is thought of in America and beyond.
Prefaces Analysis
These two prefaces, written 30 years apart, provide the reader with an intriguing set of reflections and comments by Neustadt on his most significant academic project. The Preface to the 1990 edition is particularly valuable and insightful, as it provides the reader with the author’s own critical appraisal of his work, 30 years after publishing the core of the argument in Presidential Power (1960), and takes the matters raised by intervening events as a challenge to be faced head on. In so doing, Neustadt defends his perspective on the presidency in a manner that supports the continuing preeminence of the book as a foundational text for studying the presidency in political science.
