The Presidency
HUITT, RALPH K.
BOOKS The Presidency by RALPH K. HUITT rriHE inauguration of the thirty-sixth ¦*- President of the United States for his first full term should move Americans to give some sober thought to the...
...3.50...
...The views are immediate, often colored by personal feelings, partial but intense...
...Emmet John Hughes is an insider whose memory is as sharp as his pen...
...5.95...
...Presidential Power, by Richard E. Neustadt...
...Theodore Sorensen shared Mr...
...John Adams and John Kennedy simply are not talking about the same thing...
...We have nominated a man conspicuously outside the national consensus, whom most of us were sure could never be nominated...
...What does this add to our understanding...
...he was indeed formed by the New Deal and was ideologically at home with liberal Democrats...
...Every line carries a sense of the human being in the office, restricted by myriad institutional and situational influences, making the best decisions he can...
...Moreover, the office has evolved over nearly two centuries...
...9.50...
...We have lost a President in an instant...
...372 pp...
...Presidents Kennedy and Truman were fortunate: each had a loyal assistant who shared his confidence and who had rare analytical powers and qualities of detachment...
...How should one get at the baffling complexity of a job only an incumbent can really know...
...Koenig, it should be added, shows the bias of the academic liberal: he believes in a strong President leading a disciplined party and he sees even the most energetic frustrated by that old devil of the liberals, Congress...
...He presents selected Presidential comments on eleven important topics...
...Another way is to let the insiders talk...
...We have given a smashing victory to a man few of us feel we know...
...Richard Neustadt spent nearly four years with Mr...
...Harcourt, Brace, and World...
...505 pp...
...Perhaps it is time then to turn to the books...
...Neustadt deals with the President's problem in translating formal powers of office into power for himself, power he can use, "the classic problem of the man on top in any political system: how to be on top in fact as well as name...
...Mandate for Change, by Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...Kennedy's work life both in the Senate and in the White House...
...throw shafts of new light into old corners...
...Mandate for Change is an important book...
...This is a big book and a happy one, because there are no mistakes to recount...
...Truman...
...It is doubtful that a man with the governmental experience of Sorensen or Neustadt could ever quite share Koenig's confidence in the efficacy of the powerful executive or have so little regard for his Constitutional partner on the Hill...
...Columbia...
...He draws from all the Presidents...
...Louis Koenig has done this job impressively in The Chief Executive...
...Doubleday...
...In the last half-century it has assumed such importance to the peace and well-being of the people of the planet that nearly everywhere they watch our elections more anxiously than their own...
...His book, Presidential Power, is not new, but its reissue in two paperback editions is excuse enough to say again that it is the best thing on the Presidency to come out in a long time...
...Eisenhower remembers...
...Some recent books suggest the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches...
...Hughes worked as a speech writer and adviser to Eisenhower through two campaigns and his first year in the White House but was never an Eisenhower man...
...Signet, $.60...
...Heaven knows there are enough of them, but are they helpful...
...It may be said, therefore, that Tourtellot has provided a volume to be recommended to writers and speakers who want to quote Presidents...
...224 pp...
...Obviously the President himself is the ultimate insider...
...One way is to let the Presidents talk —and this is what Arthur B. Tour-tellot (The Presidents on the Presidency) has done...
...6.95...
...Presidents speak and write in many contexts with various motives...
...The events of the last fourteen months should have shattered any remnant of confidence in Bismarck's aphorism, "God looks after fools, drunkards, and the United States of America...
...Nevertheless one leaves his book, The Ordeal of Power, with the feeling that Mr...
...what he says about his own experiences should be invaluable, one would think, to the historian...
...BOOKS The Presidency by RALPH K. HUITT rriHE inauguration of the thirty-sixth ¦*- President of the United States for his first full term should move Americans to give some sober thought to the character of the Presidency...
...the Administration he describes, its leaders at odds and its lofty goals left vaguely hanging, is hardly the one Mr...
...5.95...
...Eisenhower deserved more loyalty than this...
...His little book, Decision-Making in the White House, consists of lectures he gave at Columbia University in the spring of 1963...
...435 pp...
...The insiders' books at their best The Presidents on the Presidency, by Arthur B. Tourtellot...
...Hughes is a superior intellect...
...Doubleday...
...Science Editions, $1.65...
...650 pp...
...He was not edified by his experience...
...The Ordeal of Power, by Emmet John Hughes...
...His learning is enormous, yet he has written for the intelligent layman who will like it and should read it...
...what they say, therefore, is suspect as political theory most of the time...
...he understood what he saw and writes tellingly about it...
...He joined Eisenhower to help shape the destiny of the Republican Party, to save the two-party system, and for sundry other high-minded reasons...
...Just the same, insights and partial views must ever so often be assimilated in a new full-length synthesis on the Presidency...
...It should be read because it reminds us how much the office is shaped by the man who holds it and how merciful is the memory of the aging...
...Decision-Making in the White House, by Theodore C. Sorensen...
...94 pp...
...The Chief Executive, by Louis W. Koenig...
...And so should Dwight D. Eisenhower's account of his first term be—for what it reveals about Eisenhower the President...
...Atheneum...
...But what books...
Vol. 29 • January 1965 • No. 1
