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.
Themes
The President’s Choices Today Affect His Power Tomorrow
The primary theme running through Neustadt’s 1960 text, which is defended in Part 2 of the 1990 edition, is the president’s ability to affect his own power through the choices he makes. As Neustadt describes it, the extent of the president’s power lies partly (perhaps largely) in his own hands. This is because the president’s choices affect how he is perceived and the extent to which others understand their interests to be aligned with his, among other factors. Others with power, such as congressmen, will base their estimations of whether to support the president’s agenda, the extent to which they can afford to oppose his priorities, and similar calculations on their past experiences or perceptions of him. Therefore, each choice the president makes can increase or squander his power for the future. Accordingly, Neustadt instructs the president to be mindful of how his decisions will affect his future power resources.
Neustadt takes care to distinguish between the presidential “powers,” by which he means the formal constitutional authority to do specific things (like sign a law or officially communicate with foreign nations), and “power,” by which he means the ability to accomplish personal or policy objectives. This book focuses primarily on the latter. In that context, the theme of presidential “weakness” runs through all of Neustadt’s discussion. If the book’s purpose is partly to advise presidents on how they might be most effective, recognition of the president’s dependence on others in government to achieve goals is a prerequisite to even entertaining the discussion. “Weakness” in this sense is not inability to act but rather a need to be conscious of others with political influence because of their role in determining, through their actions and alliances, whether a president is successful in any specific policy objective.
Neustadt later identifies bargaining as the only advantage conveyed to the president by his office. The presidency’s inherent weakness (intended to prevent dictatorship, for example) makes it necessary for the president to work with others to achieve his goals. The extent of his skill in doing so is essentially a measure of his ability to persuade others to act in accord with his desired policy. Thus, this book looks at how presidents may conserve and expand their power resources by recognizing their limits as well as the type of power they actually have, and then making choices that will increase that power to be more effective in light of the concrete realities of how the country is governed.
Management Style Affects Perceptions of a President’s Caliber
Throughout the book Neustadt highlights several factors that act as continuums along which he evaluates the presidents. The broadest and perhaps most important of these has to do with how the president relates to the complex and uncertain concrete factual matters that require some evidence and nuance of understanding regarding the details. This relates to both the information itself and the individuals with whom the president interacts in obtaining it. In other words, presidents are assessed according to the extent that their management style shows curiosity, skepticism, and personal responsibility rather than relying on a delegation which leaves them ignorant, uninformed, and vulnerable.
Neustadt uses Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to demonstrate how each president’s management style affected his power and image. Roosevelt communicated with many people, not all of them allies with each other, and he was deeply interested the details—of policy, yes, but also of the acquisition of and tending to of the favors and obligations and commitments today that ripen into power tomorrow. In contrast, Reagan limited himself to very few close advisors, and he trusted them to sort out the details while he emphasized communication with the public and a few policy priorities.
The other presidents discussed in the book are also examined through the extremes of this continuum. Problems of delegation, for example, are illustrated through the lead up to President Truman firing General MacArthur—an incident that Neustadt suggests could have been, if not avoided, then handled with less negative impact if Truman had stayed current on details rather than following the advice of experts without gaining a command of the details underlying their advice or insuring that he was hearing a debate from experts with differing points of view.
Presidents Are Assessed by the Flexibility or Rigidity of Their Policy
Another continuum that Neustadt cites as crucial to determining a president’s quality hinges on flexibility versus rigidity in terms of initial positions and policy goals. He again places Reagan on one end of this spectrum—the inflexible end. Although Reagan clearly excelled at using television to maintain and enhance his popularity with the general public (which Neustadt called “public prestige” in the 1960 edition), Neustadt takes him to task for being stubbornly inflexible on the few policy goals that he paid great attention to.
In the first edition of the book Neustadt also portrayed Eisenhower as suffering from his own inflexibility, but the 1990 edition paints (with the availability of additional sources) a more nuanced picture of him. Johnson stands as an example of a president who, despite some contrary tendencies displayed elsewhere, was ultimately brought down by inflexibility regarding the Vietnam War. Roosevelt, perhaps not surprisingly, epitomizes the type of flexibility that Neustadt sees as desirable in a president. While far from being a pushover, Roosevelt would delay his ultimate decisions long enough to assess the various points of view advocated by his advisors, who were often selected to ensure he received multiple viewpoints.
One might say Neustadt endorsed a type of flexibility that sought to maximize power in a quasi-Machiavellian manner but for the purpose of selecting the best available policy option, rather than falling prey to the hazards of an ideologue blinded to options outside of his pre-scripted worldview. In this sense, perhaps surprisingly, Neustadt seems to offer an admiring portrait of Eisenhower in the later chapters of the book and similarly embraces Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis, as well as Truman’s on-the-job learning regarding the labor unrest and steel plant seizure.
Temperament Is a Determining Factor of a President’s Quality
The core of Neustadt’s highly influential book is actually quite simple. This is nowhere more evident than in his argument that what most determines the quality of a president is his individual temperament. This also explains his exaltation of Roosevelt as a president close to ideal even as he quotes Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s quip that Roosevelt was a “second-class intellect.” For Neustadt, neither intellectual capacity, preexisting knowledge, nor managerial skills stand out as the ingredients that make a great president, although all are clearly helpful. While an appropriate type of experience and the contacts that come with it may be closer, Neustadt ultimately settles on temperament as the core of what makes an exceptional president. By this he is referring to an ability to detach oneself from concerns such as ideology and perhaps even party to focus on cultivating a position of power in a manner that nurtures the American system of government and benefits the country as a whole.
That “temperament” is essentially a psychological makeup that Neustadt believes a president should strive for or that voters should look for in choosing a president. The person in the presidency, Neustadt suggests, should focus primarily on increasing his influence as a personal and professional goal above others. The temperament to do so is not simply that of a politically oriented person but of an “extraordinary politician,” as Neustadt puts it. Such a person reads the situation, looks forward, and acts to establish himself in the best possible position for influencing the course of events.
It may be argued that Neustadt seems to recommend that a president should have self-aggrandizement as a primary goal and personality trait. One must also account for his faith in the American system of government, however. Whatever one may say about the dangers of encouraging such a power-focused individual to assume the presidency, Neustadt’s book suggests that the “weakness” of the presidency as structured by our system of government is such that we safely can—and should—support their quest while in office because, as Neustadt states several times, the good of the president is effectively equivalent to the good of the country in a real and practical way. In that way, his focus on this certain “temperament” that makes a president successful in cultivating power—and fulfilling the president’s role in our government—relates directly with the book’s major innovation and primary theme: that the presidency lends only so much to the power to persuade and, ultimately, what the president does to enhance that power will determine his level of success in office, his legacy, and his effect on the country.
