Prescriptions for the Presidency:
JR., ARTHUR SCHLESINGER
WRITERS and WRITING Prescriptions for the Presidency The Enlargement of the Presidency. By Rexford G. Tugwell. Doubleday. 508 pp. $6.95. The Presidency: Crisis and Regeneration. By Herman...
...And, as he watches the expansion of the Presidential burden, Mr...
...If many judgments are better than one and many men more likely to produce reasonable judgments, perhaps several Presidents might be better than one...
...The President's power in this life of perpetual collective bargaining depends in part on his professional reputation—on the use other professionals expect he will make of his power...
...The war of 1914-18, he suggests, first made this question urgent...
...224 pp...
...For a time, Mr...
...He does say, "If one wants effective policy from the American system, danger does not lie in our dependence on a man...
...Tugwell had better write his book, because Mr...
...I have here compressed an argument made vivid in Mr...
...Finer's The Presidency: Crisis and Regeneration as this book, but it does contain a full-dress argument for a collective Presidency...
...Neither issues nor advisors as they reach him are a substitute for sensitivity to power on his part.;' Nobody and nothing helps a President to see, save as he helps himself...
...He understands the nature of the Presidency, knows the history of his country, is a cool and tough-minded political operator and has a high sense of national possibility...
...His own sympathy is for those leaders who believed that an integrated economy required an integrated polity...
...Neustadt agrees that his skill at building "effective competitions" into the system became the means by which, more than any other modern President, he kept himself master in the White House...
...Finer...
...Neustadt is concerned less with saving the Presidency by gimmicks than with seeing how the President can make his existing powers work—how he can be on top in fact as well as name...
...He would also be empowered to dismiss any or all of his colleagues and appoint others to take their places...
...The new Administration will give the traditional Presidency a better chance to see what it can do...
...Government is energized by a productive tension among its working parts...
...The essential technique of persuasion is bargaining, and the President's job becomes one of persuading everybody, not just citizens or Congressmen but even his own appointees in the executive branch, that what the White House wants of them is what they ought to do for their own sake and on their own authority...
...The character of our Government—a Government of separated institutions sharing powers—sets the framework for Presidential persuasion...
...The three books under review, though conceived independently, form a kind of sequence...
...The analysis of the contrasting Presidential styles of Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower is a masterpiece of sharp and subtle delineation...
...Tugwell feels, the elaboration of the Presidential staff and the reorganization of the executive office sufficed to meet the problem...
...Under the Federalists, "the nation had the chance to shape constitutional practice in the way it must be shaped for a burgeoning society with the need to establish organs of Union...
...He illustrates his argument with cases from the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations...
...Tugwell and Herman Finer think, the Presidency in its present form has reached the limits of its usefulness and must be radically revised if it is to bear the terrifying burdens which lie ahead...
...Tugwell does not press his thesis too far...
...If there is a serious case for a collective Presidency, Mr...
...The reality of the institution, he correctly suggests, lies not in what the framers intended for it but in what the occupants have made of it...
...In addition, he writes too well to be a political scientist...
...The only serious political thinker in America to have suggested anything like this is John C. Calhoun (a fact not noted by either Mr...
...Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership...
...His development of the argument for plurality, though, is sketchy, and the main value of the book lies in its historical analysis...
...Presidential power, as he sees it, is "the power to persuade...
...Tugwell would accept Mr...
...Neustadt's account of the modes and resources of Presidential leaderships seems to me to offer more hope than the Tugwell-Finer argument for a multiple executive...
...The British cabinet system, he says, is only a technique for disguising the central importance of the top man...
...his preference accordingly lies with Washington, Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, rather than with Jefferson, Jackson or the pre-war Wilson...
...The important thing is for the President to guarantee himself the opportunity for choosing and the information essential for wise choice...
...Tugwell concludes, "Discussion of this further problem needs at least the space of another book...
...it lies in our capacity to make ourselves depend upon a man who is unexpert...
...I cannot see how any such arrangement could reliably produce the qualities of "energy, despatch, vigor and promptness" which Hamilton rightly deemed essential to the Presidency...
...Finer describes is in any real sense a plural executive...
...As Mr...
...No mortal can be trusted to exercise the office both beneficently and responsibly...
...And he is obviously (and, I think, rightly) skeptical of the whole notion of a collective executive...
...In any case, it is hard to argue that the Eisenhower Administration represented a fair test of the one-man system...
...the failures of Truman and of Eisenhower, in Mr...
...Neustadt succinctly, "is no place for amateurs...
...With these doubts about structural reform, Mr...
...He finds this hazard "intolerable" whether in terms of efficiency or of democracy...
...H the President can tell his colleagues what to do and fire them if they don't do it, he is plainly the boss...
...The Presidency: Crisis and Regeneration is not a very satisfactory book...
...Neustadt's particular focus is on the politics of mid-century—that is, on this strange period wrhen the electorate has become accustomed to chronic crisis and where in consequence we have "emergencies in policy with politics as usual.' But his general argument applies to the Presidency at any stage in our history...
...But it depends most of all on himself, on the choices he makes and on his instinct for the vital components of Presidential authority...
...But the question now is whether, as Mr...
...He continues that, "except for the dictator-governed nations, the United States is very nearly alone in having a singular Executive" (cabinet and collegial governments he counts as plural...
...Both the House and the Senate would have the same term as the President...
...Neustadt tries to grasp the Presidential process as a totality—which is, of course, the way the President must come to terms with it...
...The President who, like Eisenhower, surrenders personal prerogatives to a staff denies himself both information and opportunity...
...or whether, as Richard Neustadt seems to contend, the one-man Presidency is still viable if we take care to elect men who understand what the office is all about...
...The more determinedly a President reaches, the more he brings all government to life...
...By Herman Finer...
...Tugwell begins to wonder whether the institution itself is not being strained to the breaking-point...
...Professor of History, Harvard University...
...He is, moreover, a penetrating observer of the administrative process, and the result is a fascinating description of the way the Presidents have remade the Presidency...
...The institution sought to respond: In the next period one saw the transformation of the President into the Presidency...
...Tugwell or Mr...
...Neustadt's book by graphic illustration and striking personal characterization...
...Thus Jefferson, "in the interest of a theory that agrarian smallness was a positive good, that largeness and regulation were inherently bad, and that the President was the agent of the centralizers," diminished the Presidential office at the same time that he gained in personal power...
...And what could the answer be...
...Finer says, rests on a gamble—"the gamble of the sufficiency of one man's personal qualities of mind and character and physique, pitted against the appalling tasks that history has thrust on the office of the President...
...And this can be done only by men who intuitively understand political power...
...He is brilliant on Polk, provocative on Lincoln, generous on Cleveland, excellent on the two Roosevelts, ungenerous on Truman...
...As for the multiple executive, Mr...
...John F. Kennedy is no amateur...
...While it has some interestinginformation and is written with vigor, it is diffuse and repetitious in its presentation and unconvincing in its argument...
...By Richard E. Neustadt...
...Tugwell traces the response of the Presidency to the swiftly multiplying challenges of our ever more complicated world...
...While disapproving the studied chaos of some of Roosevelt's methods...
...His image of the office keeps him faced away from power...
...The advocacy of a plural executive comes a bit surprisingly from so resolute a champion of administrative integration...
...the intellectual demands are unfulfillable...
...Finer doesn't make it...
...and his experience as a member of the White House staff under Truman enriches his insight...
...But with the accession of Jefferson "it chose the easier way of evading the difficult disciplines" and embarked on a detour away from positive government lasting many decades...
...The Presidency, as Rexford Tugwell points out, has always been an evolving institution, steadily absorbing new powers and responsibilities in the long course of American history...
...Several admirable books about the Presidency have appeared in recent years, but Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership, in my judgment, is the most brilliant and searching essay on the Presidency that we have had for a long time...
...Here Mr...
...He wants one President and 11 Vice Presidents, elected on the same ticket and nominated from Congress (or from men with past experience in Congress), without limit on continued eligibility...
...Neustadt recommends that the President should "induce as much uncertainty as possible about the consequences of ignoring what he wants...
...Chicago...
...author, "The Politics of Upheaval" To an astonishing and dismaying extent, the future of civilization may depend on the capacity of the American Presidency to meet the awesome challenges of the last half of the 20th century...
...Persuasion deals in the coin of selfinterest with men who have some freedom to reject what they find counterfeit...
...The Jacksonians "nearly destroyed the government altogether...
...the charge on the conscience is too exacting for one man alone...
...Mr...
...Wilson found himself "at the center of an organism no man, however vigorous, could in any real sense direct...
...But Mr...
...The Presidential team would sit in the House...
...I don't know whether Mr...
...Instead of analyzing the President in his various responsibilities as chief of state, administrative manager, party leader, etc., Mr...
...The weight of office is impossible...
...But, in the end, the institutionalization of the Presidency was not enough...
...Neustadt addresses himself only peripherally to this problem...
...The question now becomes: What helps him understand what influence is made of...
...Neustadt formulates it: "Influence adheres to those who sense what it is made of...
...Some dangers in political society are not escaped by structure...
...he must do the reaching...
...He even suggests that the decision in the Constitutional Convention for singleness over plurality was responsible for many subsequent problems of our government, and that the plural form might be more efficient and effective...
...374 pp...
...Tugwell aims to study the Presidency "in a behavioral way...
...It was during this period that the limitations of a one-man Presidency began to appear so serious as to call in question the whole institution...
...Finer's answer is brisk and apparently drastic...
...But Mr...
...He describes how, despite himself, Jefferson enlarged the Presidency by the manner in which he purchased Louisiana...
...I do not see that what Mr...
...Tugwell's view, testify to "the structural weakness of the institution...
...Tugwell, of course, brings to his investigation not just the research of a scholar but the invaluable experience of a former Presidential confidant...
...Presidential Power is one of those books which one feels is a classic in its field from its moment of publication...
...and the reason Calhoun favored a plural executive was precisely to prevent governmental action...
...The President would determine general policy and assign responsibilities to his colleagues...
...Reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...The Presidency," writes Mr...
...The Enlargement of the Presidency is a richly illuminating if sometimes discursive account of the growth of Presidential power...
...A genuine plural executive would surely consist of two or more individuals with equal powers...
...If he cannot make the Presidency work for himself and for the nation, then the case for a reconstruction of the Presidency will have a force which its present advocates have not yet been able to give it...
...Our destiny, Mr...
...In this way Mr...
...Wiley...
...No President can assume that useful information and timely choices will reach him...
...It depends in part too on his public prestige—on the degree of trust people in general repose in him...
...The silences of the Constitution have allowed the Presidency to be remade a little by each of the Presidents—and by the strong ones, more than a little—as well as by the forces playing upon it in a changing society...
...the English seem to be no less dependent than Americans upon the contributions of an expert at the top...
...As for Jackson, "as President he would disclose possibilities that no one until then had imagined the office to possess...
...5.95...
...Tugwell admits no contradiction and bravely assails Hamilton's argument in the Federalist Papers for unity in the executive office...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 2
