White House Watching
GRAFF, HENRY F.
White House Watching Roosevelt to Reagan: A Reporter's Encounters with Nine Presidents By Hedley Donovan Harper & Row. 352 pp. $24.95. The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise...
...With similar respectfulness Donovan recounts his interesting experience in the Carter Administration as a Senior Adviser in the critical months covering the hostage crisis...
...Subsequently Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon also fenced with Donovan and his subordinates, sometimes appreciatively and sometimes chidingly—although, in the end, always respectfully...
...Still, echoing students of the office then and now, he asserts that Eisenhower misperformed in not committing some of his popularity to smashing McCarthyism, and that in his slowness to move on civil rights he was excessively attentive to the wishes of old-line Southerners...
...A man of strong opinions, his conclusions nevertheless parallel the widely held views of other mainstream journalists and most academic President-watchers...
...Collectively these volumes form a genre that is only a generation old...
...Not many contemporaries, for example, realized how severely handicapped Franklin D. Roosevelt's bout with polio had left him...
...The books have in common appreciations of the institution of the Presidency, plus suggestions for improving its effectiveness...
...During Kennedy's Presidency Donovan already was playing a determinative role in the Time empire...
...At the same time, he taxes FDR with insisting on the unconditional surrender of the Axis countries, with underestimating the deviousness of Stalin ("He didn't really understand that Stalin was from another planet"), and with failing to intervene in the destruction of European Jewry (but decides the President could not have known enough details to act against the concentration camps...
...All the authors are torn between their understanding that the incumbent's character determines the operation of the office, and their abiding faith that a little tinkering and adjusting could provide the vitality and adaptability it increasingly requires whoever the occupant may be...
...The account of Reagan's reign is naturally more tentative, yet Donovan's commentary on the first term bears directly on the central problem of leadership in a republic...
...Despite careful prescription of what is required in a Chief Executive (and Donovan concludes his book with a chapter on "Job Specs for the Oval Office"), the unheralded emergence of a magical personality remains the serendipitous element in the Presidency...
...Donovan downgrades JFK for character flaws revealed in aspects of his private life, and particularly in his acceptance of a Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, even though he had not himself written the book...
...Now we live in another era...
...Lowi writes: "The desperate search [of the society under our system of personal Presidency] is no longer for the good life but for the most effective presentation of appearances...
...Some of them, like this one, will be inclined to believe that reform can only arise out of evolutionary change, the way the "plebiscitary Presidency" itself came into being...
...A muckraking look at a President, living or dead, would have been lese majesty...
...On Eisenhower, Donovan is inclined to follow Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein's recent interpretation of Ike's tenure as a "hidden-hand Presidency...
...Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President By Louis Fisher Princeton...
...He argues that the last generation or so has witnessed the rise of a "plebiscitary Presidency"—a product of the public's steadily growing appetite for services, but locked nonetheless in no-win battle with the same public...
...Readers will be touched by Donovan's candor in evaluating Carter, as well as struck by the extent to which the general public impression of the Georgian's performance matches Donovan's close-up view...
...His book's detailed scholarship shows the hand of a master of the subject...
...The Rubicon was crossed at the time of General Eisenhower's first heart attack, when his cardiologist reported publicly on the Chief Executive's bodily functions...
...Theodore Lowi addresses this subject with lucid analysis and keen concern...
...Periodically he was hectored by the JFK White House for what the corporation's magazines wrote about high policy...
...Understandably the book is uneven, for Donovan's earliest White House "encounters" occurred when he was just beginning his career...
...40.00...
...Clearly television has had a commanding part in forming the new Presidency and in raising the nagging questions that are at the heart of the thinking embodied here...
...The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled By Theodore J. Lowi Cornell...
...Louis Fisher's offering updates and enlarges his earlier study of the working relationship of the legislative and executive branches...
...each President was known through a campaign biography and, after a respectful passage of time, a stately "life...
...in addition, his position as editor-in-chief of Time, Incorporated made him a friend Presidents sought to cultivate and sidle up to...
...No picture of him in his wheelchair ever appeared in print, or in the newsreels, through which most Americans became familiar with his visage and manner...
...Moreover, as the range of leaders in American life expands to embrace, besides professional politicians, figures from the worlds of sports and music— not to speak of other forms of entertainment—it becomes as difficult to set specifications for the Oval Office as it is to predict the quality of a Presidency...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of History, Columbia University...
...Whether Lowi's call for a third party to help put starch in the major parties would help solve the problem, citizens will have to decide individually...
...disappointingly close to the guaranteed minimum Presidency...
...As the bicentennial of the Constitution approaches, the state of the reshaped (or is the word misshapen...
...It winds up somewhat lamely with a plea for Congress to be more vigilant in fulfilling its function as a check upon the President...
...Theodore J. Lowi's monograph is a social scientist's examination of the Chief Executives' growing power and concomitant impotence...
...Indeed, the very word "Presidency" used as a label for the nation's highest office institutionally considered is of recent origin...
...Donovan points out that he had always thought better of Eisenhower than many professors and fellow Fourth Estaters...
...Louis Fisher, in examining the ancient struggle between the President and Congress, deals with the great constant of national history...
...His own charm and grace undoubtedly brought out in the individuals he discusses the best behavior they cared to show the press...
...The three books under review here represent the main branches of the field...
...221 pp...
...Meanwhile, the task of governance is more complex and demanding than ever...
...If Roosevelt sometimes dissimulated in his stewardship of foreign affairs, Donovan avers, "I think the danger justified the deception...
...Presidency will be to the fore...
...Kennedy gets lower marks than Ike...
...372pp...
...Woodward's pathbreaking George Washington, published in 1926, all books about the men at the helm were hagio-graphic...
...The decline of Congress as a rival base of power to the executive branch, and the weakening of the traditional parties that once functioned as an ordering and disciplining force, have been both cause and effect of the recent development...
...He judges FDR to have been "agreat President"—"the founder of the modern Presidency, the focus of authority and initiative in a greatly extended and centralized government...
...With a few notable exceptions, such as W.E...
...Hedley Donovan's entry is a memoir of Presidential performance as witnessed by an influential and accomplished journalist...
...This is a pathology because it escalates the rhetoric at home, ratcheting expectations upward notch by notch, and fuels adventurism abroad, in a world where the cost of failure can be annihilation...
...Until roughly 1960, White House occupants were studied discretely...
...19.95...
...No brief statement of how Lowi develops his case can do justice to the elegance and intricacy of his argument...
...It is hard today to recall that the aura of the office, no less than the man temporarily holding it, was under constant protection as if it were a sacred obj ect...
...Yet he had the historical good luck to grow in his profession while the so-called Imperial Presidency was arriving at full tide...
...Donovan's assessments of the Presidents he has known result in a "good read," full of anecdotes, chit-chat and thoughtful generalization...
...This piercing of the veil shielding our Presidents from full view came as their number was reaching 35—apparently the critical mass enabling them to be studied as a group...
...Declares Donovan, "That John Kennedy might have become a great President, as Time and I once thought, I now seriously doubt...
...The anxieties expressed in these books— and others of the genre—will be valuable in the discussion sure to emerge about how an 18th-century instrument of government and the barnacles it has gathered can be adapted to the needs of the 21st century, whose early Presidents are already in the political pipelines...
...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" In the absorbing work—and play— of President-watching, the making of books is endless...
...The Administration, says Donovan, was "not a disaster, but...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 6
