How Presidents Lead

HOW PRESIDENTS LEAD HenryC. Kenski Fred I. Greenstein, ed. Leadershipin the ModernPresidency. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 430 pp. J. Richard Snyder, ed. John F.Kennedy:Person,Policy,Presidency.Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books, 1988. xix+ 144 pp. Few topics are as important as the leadership qualities of American presidents. Two recent books make important contributions to our understanding of the positive and negative qualities underlying presidential performance. The more comprehensive and scholarly is a volume edited by Fred Greenstein. In it nine eminent political scientists and historians present their assessments of the leadership styles and organizational talents of presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Greenstein also writes a short introduction, as well as an impressive summary chapter on nine presidents in search of a modem presidency. Like many multi-authored endeavors, the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Greenstein allowed each contributor a free hand in choosing a topic and an organizational structure. Consequently, the end product is not as systematic or comparative as one might hope for, despite Greenstein's exceptional effort to pull things together in the final chapter. Although each chapter is idiosyncratic, each is well-written, stimulating and informative. The insights more than offset the lack of a general systematic and comparativefocus. Because of the strength of the various chapters, this volume is clearly the best work on the presidency since Richard Neustadt's PresidentialPower was published in 1960. William Leuchtenburg provides a superb synthesis of Roosevelt's leadership skills and asks, and answers affirmatively, the question: "If Roosevelt had not been president, would it have made a difference?" Alonzo Hamby documents how Harry Truman coped with and surmounted some rather large personal insecurities to build a presidency that acknowledged his limitations, while actually strengthening the office itself. Greenstein offers an account of the dispassionately analytic side of the often underestimated Dwight Eisenhower. He illustrates how Eisenhower's propensity to think strategically about politics helped him keep simultaneous events from collidingand undermining his leadership. 92 Henry C. Kenski Carl Brauer identifies the salient features of Kennedy's leadership as his inspirational qualities and his ability to influence both mass media and journalists. Larry Berman explains how Lyndon B. Johnson, in his efforts as president to deal with Vietnam, was incapacitated by the very qualities that made him a brilliant Senate Majority Leader. In a refreshing essay, Joan Hoff-Wilson eschews psycho-biographical and character analyses to focus on a relatively neglected area in Nixon scholarship, his administrative style. Roger Porter reveals an unexpectedly complex Gerald Ford who used advisory consultations flexibly and creatively, and even employed different modes of White House organization to address different substantive concerns such as economic policy and foreign policy. Erwin Hargrove puts a more positive emphasis on Jimmy Carter than have other scholars, and explains Carter's failure to adhere to Washington political norms because of his conviction that the public policy problems of the day demanded a comprehensive solution. Carter therefore miscalculated that he could ignore Congress and special interests to advance such public interest policies, because he felt he would have widespread public support. Finally, William Muir describes Reagan's deeply-held convictions and the desire to transform the nation's political ethos that provided the basic support for his rhetorical presidency. Greenstein provides an impressive summary chapter that is explicitly chronological but only implicitly comparative. He identifies and discusses in detail the formative periods of the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower presidencies, during which a striking transition from the traditional to the modern presidency occurred and came to be taken for granted. He then identifies certain descriptive and prescriptive assumptions about presidential leadership that had reached widespread acceptance by 1%0. Finally, he traces subsequent shifts in these assumptions by drawing upon the presidencies of the modern era from Kennedy to Reagan. In general, he illuminates the possibilities and limits of presidential leadership. Given the impressive scope and depth of the chapters, this volume is essential reading for any person with a serious interest in American presidential leadership. The Snyder volume, by contrast a short book of essays, offers twelve asessments of John F. Kennedy's presidency. The appeal of the volume is in...