A Question of Style

...In "The Presidency As I Have Seen It...

...That such platitudes must be voiced in what is at bottom a serious book says something about the anomie currently weighing upon an apparently substantial number of Americans...

...Consequently, the White House has by now amassed powers of truly formidable proportions...

...Although the early 19th-century conception of history as the valiant deeds of heroes succumbed long ago to the academics' notions of social classes and governmental systems, Hughes has retained enough common sense to recognize the significance of people...

...when an FDR employs his larynx and cigarette holder for political purposes, his successful use of style redounds to the public's welfare...

...For one thing, Presidential power is frequently checked by "the often instinctive inclination of the Chief Executive toward self-restraint...

...His new work, while full of heavy doses of blah (the opening chapters are as ponderous as a typical Eisenhower speech), is a thoughtful and intelligent study of the development of the American Presidency, and an astute appraisal of its fundamental nature...

...For another—and of greater importance—the more the President is empowered to do, the more there is that he should do, and hence, the more there is that he is expected to do...

...Any President, therefore, whose managerial abilities are unequal to the task of properly delegating authority to competent and responsible persons can besludge the corridors of Executive authority...

...What Hughes has to say about personal manner is also shrewdly acute: "The authority and success of any President's answer to [ his ] constituency ultimately depend, I believe, on the most elusive of all these matters: the quality and force of the Presidential style...

...To be sure, every occupant of the White House has had a personal style of sorts (dependent in large part on the particular era of his administration and the national mood), but for the purposes of leadership and political success, some styles have proved more potent than others...

...And the President himself may be wondering today whether that triumph was not a major political disaster, too...

...Pondering John Jay's question-"Shall we have a King...

...The fact is that the President makes his decisions as he wishes to make them, under conditions which he himself has established, and at times of his own determination...

...The office, he insists, is the man...

...raised immediately prior to the Constitutional Convention, Hughes wonders: "Do we have a King . . .? And what is the right orbit for the sweep of his power: with the people, through the people, or above the people...

...Nonetheless, in answer to Presidential critics eager to reduce the power of the White House by statute, Hughes says he has "come to believe that there is more prudence in the . . . view of James Bryce that 'historical development is wiser than the wisest man...

...A succession of small improvements, each made conformably to existing conditions and habits, is more likely to succeed than a large scheme made all at once in what may be called the spirit of conscious experiment.' " Looking beyond Watergate and the clandestine bombing of Cambodia...

...In the 1950s he was Eisenhower's speech writer, as well as Ike's administrative assistant...

...an appendix to Hughes' book, Theodore Sorenson doubts "the wisdom of deciding long-range institutional questions in terms of passing Presidential personalities...

...The vast increase, for example, in the Federal bureaus and social service agencies, which trace their lineage back to the New Deal years, has given the Chief Executive far wider power than he enjoyed in the 1920s, yet the management of those agencies has at the same time necessitated an enormous growth in the size of the White House staff...

...And in the last analysis, the fact that political style arises from a craving for leadership deeply embedded in the human personality is rather worrisome...

...They amounted to neither more nor less than the way he felt...

...This view, of course, squares not at all with the demands for popular access to the "decision-making process" heard on campuses a few years back, and echoed now in the rhetoric of many politicians...

...Hughes recognizes that history runs, in its broadest trajectory, along the principles of laissez-faire—not laissez-faire in the economic sense but in the same philosophic sense the members of the Constitutional Convention had in mind when they abandoned the Presidency to the winds of change...

...Eisenhower's attitudes, the author tells us, "did not derive from some complex structure of orthodox politics and economics...

...It is the author's belief that the "life of the Presidency has been from the beginning...

...a reign of chance," that "the Founding Fathers .. . left the Presidency, their most special creation, to be shaped by the live touch of history...

...Perhaps the problem is simply a lack of imagination on their part, resulting in an inability to picture the President of the United States sitting at his desk with his head in his hands...

...Hughes says that his guiding purpose in writing The Living Presidency was "to come to some better knowledge of whatever was there [Philadelphia] and then [1789] created...

...Unfortunately, Hughes does not adequately face up to the complexities of the problem of style...

...Martin's Press If Emmet John Hughes is to be taken at all seriously, Richard Nixon has done nearly everything wrong save get himself reelected...

...But Hughes has solid support for his position: "It is assumed," wrote Lyndon Baines Johnson, "that there is something called a 'decision-making process' which can be charted in much the same fashion as the table of organization for a business corporation...

...Hughes allows that the President has amassed too much power in the area of foreign policy (although he maintains that the blame lies at least as much, and probably more, with a complacent and acquiescent Congress...

...He further concedes that the Cabinet is—as it has always been-largely a gang of trained puppets dangling from the President's fingers, a far cry from the policy-making group that bears the same title in England...

...Still, the whole question of style is a profound one—with sinister depths...

...Yet throughout his years of political service, Hughes found enough time to write several creditable books, the best known of which is probably his memoir of the Eisenhower Administration, The Ordeal of Power, one of the principal sources on the period...

...For this reason, to complain that Richard Nixon is utterly uncharm-ing is to speak of matters that are more than personal...

...Member, editorial department, St...

...In particular, strong Presidents have probed the limits and recesses of their mandates, extracting from them what they could, and passing on, over the heads of the Pierces, the Hardings and the Eisenhowers, the fruits of their victories to future wielders of big sticks...

...Moreover, since style fulfills a popular need, a hunger for leadership that, according to the author, "stays almost beyond satisfaction," one may even say that a President owes a certain degree of panache to the country...

...George Wallace, after all, has an abundance of style...

...Neither good nor evil in itself, style can unquestionably lead to political success wrongly conceived and wrongly used...

...Given Hughes' emphasis on strong-willed Presidents, it follows naturally that his reading of history inclines to the doings-of-great-men interpretation...

...Hughes is a journalist out of the Time-Life-Fortune complex who has devoted much of his career to politics...

...Reviewed by Chilton Williamson Jr...

...Although Hughes' answers are nowhere delivered with the same explicitness, they do contain a good deal of very interesting material...

...Political, like material, affluence is a double-edged sword, as its eager inheritors discover upon acceding to the legacy...

...One personality can captivate an electorate where another fails, and the difference is not something that can be reduced to a fixed formula...

...Seen from a certain perspective, style is merely a self-serving attribute, potentially harmful to any rational political process...

...And he observes that as the President's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger was accountable only to Richard Nixon...

...In the course of time, a line of chief executives, some aggressive, some remarkably passive, succeeding one another through cyclical bouts of activism and lethargy, has worked out the fundamental ambiguities of the office...

...This sums up, I think, the detailed and careful argument of The Living Presidency...

...Yet under our democratic system, Hughes insists, a Chief Executive must dramatize his actions for ordinary people if he is to muster the kind of enthusiasm necessary to propel his program through Congress...

...Elsewhere, he writes: "A look at the styles of a few men in the White House might easily bring despair to all students of the Presidency seeking a science, rather than recognizing an art...

...Thus power is not merely a license but a burden, Hughes tells us, involving so many complexities of responsibility that the bearer can very easily be brought to a full stop...

...Afterward, he went on to serve as Governor Rockefeller's adviser on public policy...

...Just as political decisions are not accountable to machinery, they are also not necessarily accountable to strictly patterned ideologies...

...Not the least virtue of The Living Presidency is its reminder of this oft-forgotten aspect of reality...

...This development, though, does not in the least alarm Hughes, who sees constraints operating to forestall any tendency toward absolutism...

...He does, however, offer us a valuable and insightful overview of an institution that is at present a center of controversy, and he places himself on the side of a strong executive...

...Indeed, he has little sympathy for the structuralist biases of the so-called political scientists, and cites William Howard Taft, who, after listening to a presumptuous aide lecture him on governmental mechanics, turned to a friend and remarked amusedly: "You know, he really thinks it is machinery...