Running Alone: Presidential Leadership from JFK to Bush II: Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It (review)

James MacGregor Burns is a distinguished and well-published student of the American presidency and leadership. The more than twenty books he has authored have been careful, largely non-polemical, and well received. He received both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1971 for his Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).

In Running Alone, Burns returns to these familiar topics. However, this effort more avowedly reflects Burns's distinctive political sentiments, experiences, and subjective judgments. Although the title suggests that all nine of the U.S. presidents who occupied that office from 1961 through 2007 are analyzed and given consideration, the coverage in fact is highly uneven, with 35 percent of the 199 pages of text devoted solely to John Kennedy and only 1 percent to Gerald Ford. Despite the sparse accomplishments of the tragically abbreviated Kennedy presidency, Burns's attention to Kennedy leaves no doubt that he is enamored with the man, that political era, and the milieu. It is never difficult to ascertain where Burns's heart lies.

This is much less a book about transformational leadership versus transactional leadership (a subject on which Burns's contributions have been seminal) and much more a treatise about the plight and proposed future of today's Democratic Party. Leadership is about the effective exercise of power, but the well-known 1959 essay by John R. P. French and Bertram Raven on the sources of power and similar scholarly literature are not the centerpiece here. Instead, the focus is on each president's decision-making and whether he "ran alone" (p. 4); that is, whether he ran as a real or perceived outsider independent of the political and economic establishments.

Burns forthrightly asserts that running alone and governing alone are recipes for presidential failure. Rather, the secret to success is to imitate Franklin Roosevelt—use the established party apparatus, advocate a partisan platform that can be easily contrasted to that of the opposition, and appeal to masses of potential voters who otherwise might choose to stay home on Election Day.

In Burns's view, every president from Kennedy to George W. Bush too often has run alone or governed alone and therefore has under performed or failed. If Burns sees an exception, it appears to be Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric often suggested running alone, but who nevertheless heavily used Republican Party structures and personnel, developed an easily understood set of programs, and captured the hearts of masses of voters who in the past either had not voted or had voted Democratic.

Burns sees Bill Clinton's "triangulation," the program of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council (closely associated with Clinton), and presidential policies that attempt to occupy the "vital center" (p. 46) as recipes for long-term failure. One might get elected advocating a centrist platform, but ultimately, according to Burns, one cannot effectively govern in this fashion for the simple reason that s uch an approach eventually turns off legislative leaders and the ruling party's vital constituencies (such as organized labor in the case of the Democrats).

Burns's political leanings are easy to divine. Essentially he shares The New York Times editorial board's view of the world. He labels Ronald Reagan "radically conservative" (p. 107) even though Reagan captured 45 states in 1980 and 49 states in 1984. Perhaps Burns's perception of the U.S. political spectrum is a bit dated and requires some adjustment. George McGovern's electoral debacle seems to have receded from his view.

Burns's rejection of centrist approaches to presidential effectiveness reminds one of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004), which argued that Kansas voters did not really understand what was best for them when they voted Republican. One...