POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Why Presidents Succeed: A Political Psychology of Leadership. Dean Keith Simonton. Yale University Press, $22.50. This book is part of a wounded tradition of...
...The networks feel they have become appendages of the political campaigns...
...Not only did this full range of conflicts deny the nominee much chance to orchestrate his own convention . . . ," Shafer writes, "his acceptance speech...
...Given Jones's long immersion in Congress, the book ends up coming out surprisingly sympathetic toward Carter, and even more surprisingly, sympathetic towards Carter's much-maligned congressional liaison, Frank Moore...
...And Simonton's failures, and occasional strengths, help explain why we don't have better books about those who occupy the Oval Office...
...Reforms have left the leaders with very little power to broker...
...Campaign reporters uncovered that Ronald Reagan's favorite meal is macaroni and cheese and that Richard Nixon put ketchup on his scrambled eggs...
...They may endow huge libraries but they have yet to write any revealing veto-and-tell memoirs...
...Cutbacks mean that convention managers can no longer be confident that the events they have scheduled will be covered...
...From this vantage point, birth order becomes as important as ideology or party affiliation...
...The consistent judgment of scholars from so many different fields—political science, history, sociology—over such a long period of time is impressive...
...Interesting reading...
...Not surprisingly, then, the literature on Congress is abundant and of high quality, and research on the House of Representatives is better and more plentiful than that on the U.S...
...It depends on what will be done with that power...
...Instead, conventions have become launching pads, sometimes providing an exemplary lift-off, sometimes not...
...The pressure for low-conflict conventions could push the parties in a number of different directions...
...Louisiana State University Press, $24.95 One of the most interesting developments at the Democratic convention in Atlanta in July was the focus it gave to Jimmy Carter...
...By institutionalized, he means that the office is more likely to determine a president's performance than is the occupant's personality...
...This need for consensus bodes well for the GOP...
...Just as the networks, the political strategists, the print media, and the political parties themselves are attempting to come to grips with the realization that conventions no longer meet traditional expectations, Shafer has produced an incisive analysis of these gatherings...
...Sounds simple, but from these elementary facts Shafer builds an elegant argument, extending beyond conventions to illuminate the interior political dynamics of the new, post-1968 political parties...
...The results are not exactly surprising: Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR are consensus choices for "greatness," and Grant, Harding and Buchanan are pretty much the pits...
...Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a person of more than middling honesty and intelligence, was almost as hagiographic in his writing as was Dave Powers, author of that detached piece of scholarship Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye...
...Many of the most significant events, formal and informal, took place at the Carter Center and Carter Library, impressive facilities on an imposing site...
...In an essay on Eisenhower, Greenstein reiterates his argument that Ike was a behind-thescenes doer...
...And ex-presidents haven't helped the cause of scholarship much...
...And he also presents compelling evidence that it is probably better to have a president with few close friendships than one who lets those close to him corrupt him with favoritism...
...Greenstein, one of the most industrious and insightful political scientists, recruited essay writers to portray presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan...
...Their pomposity is enough to make a person long for a presidential memoir entitled, Gabbing with Gorbo or Putting the Red Phone on Hold...
...Relying heavily on a series of in-depth interviews with key personnel in the Carter administration done by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, Jones lays out a model of the Carter presidency and systematically explores how it shaped Carter's apapproach to Congress and Washington...
...There are times, all too rare, when a scholarly book is on the cutting edge of the news...
...You've got to be hit...
...The Roosevelt-TrumanEisenhower serial looks evolutionary as the welfare state stepped forward first beyond Roosevelt and then beyond Democrats...
...But some grab them and go, while others slack back...
...Jimmy Carter's, the most recent, is virtually unreadable...
...Almost inevitably, historians and political scientists, having had time and access to documents and interviews, are beginning to weigh in with more systematic and definitive analyses of the Carter years...
...Had we chosen our 1988 nominees based on Simonton's factors we would have looked for a tall, friendless man in his fifties who came from a small family and wrote many books...
...How does he go about it...
...Should the power of the White House be raised and firmed...
...James David Barber...
...He thinks the presidency "has become firmly institutionalized and is undergoing its own evolution...
...The essays culminate in a piece on Reagan's rhetoric, by William K. Muir Jr., which supposes Reagan was involved in writing his own speeches...
...Edmund Burke laid out the model 215 years ago, and his words, quoted by Jones, apply unerringly to Carter...
...What's certain is that both parties have adapted remarkably to a political environment changing at an increasingly rapid pace...
...State legislatures created more primaries and caucuses, shifting power from party officials meeting at the conventions to the voters...
...nor would two scholars, one to check on the honesty of the other...
...For both parties, the last "nominating" conventions were in 1952, 36 years ago, when Adlai Stevenson needed three ballots to beat Estes Kefauver and Dwight Eisenhower had to demonstrate his strength in a series of credentials battles in his contest with Robert Taft...
...The purpose of Simonton's book is to look at the great presidents, find out what they have in common, and construct a formula that will predict greatness...
...Since then, four major changes have evolved: "increased unilateral policy-making capacity" (presidents give orders), "centrality in national agenda setting" (pushing, not reacting), "far greater visibility" (via media), and "acquisition of a presidential bureaucracy" (a big corporation, not a shoe shop...
...Conversely, television might also force each of the parties to begin in the presidental primaries and caucuses to productively address the internal conflicts that could become debilitating if left unaddressed by convention time—conflicts for example, between blacks and blue-collar whites, between supply-siders and traditionalists concerned with deficits, between unionists and suburban reformers, between moralists and libertarians...
...Despite the infusion of Christian fundamentalists, the GOP remains far more homogeneous than the Democratic Party, whose racial diversity alone may, for the moment, help foster a public image of internal conflict...
...That the presidency has got itself institutionalized—fixed beyond the person in the Oval Office—is questionable...
...There is a growing consensus that the parties should reduce the number of days for the convention from four to three, a reflection both of the lack of genuine nomination drama and of declining television coverage...
...It now appears that insights such as Shafer's are beginning to be reflected in the thinking of both political strategists and media officials...
...In contrast, Joan Hoff-Wilson sees Nixon as a "corporate" president with "an impressive foreign and domestic record," which makes one wonder if she has read about his forsure impeachment or has taken a stroll thmugh the Vietnam memorial...
...The Air Force also chose the brilliant strategy of using the same airspace and schedules time after time, giving the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft defenses plenty of opportunity to expand and improve...
...True, the presidency itself is very visible, but its operations are hidden from the public eye...
...He takes as his starting point the obvious: that conventions no longer nominate presidents...
...First, he accepts at face value the judgment of several scholarly panels that have distinguished great presidents from not-so-great presidents, using factors like popularity in the polls and success at pushing through major legislation...
...Shafer points out that the party holding a convention with lower levels of conflict has, at least for the elections from 1964 through 1984, been the winner in November...
...And if you risk becoming a cheerleader as a Capitol Hill staffer, imagine the seductive influences of the Oval Office...
...The candidate's goal is to suppress conflict and demonstrate full executive control, while the delegates committed to a special interest try to get their issues fully before the convention and television cameras...
...within smaller time periods the networks can, at any time, cut away to their own commentary, to separate discussions of issues, or to their own prepared stories...
...The convention is also a struggle between the strategists for prospective presidential nominees and the networks themselves...
...Having tried myself to bring this off in twoyear-long stints studying Congress, I found it hard not to be contaminated by loyalty...
...Of course these interests can use the threat of a primetime protest to coerce the nominee and the party into recognizing them...
...One struggle takes place between the prospective nominee and the competing collection of special interests —both those supportive of the nominee and those linked to the losers— over the convention agenda...
...For example, Greenstein is right when he sees the bureaucracy as available for presidents "to use, to abuse, or lose control over discretionary policy making" As for the evolution, doubts arise as well...
...Charles 0. Jones...
...Ironically, this contest becomes most intense in relatively conflict-free conventions...
...He would come from a family of three or fewer siblings, would remain in office for a long time, and be assassinated...
...Harvard University Press, $2750...
...The battle between the networks and the winning campaigns has become all the more important as the networks have cut back coverage...
...If we get a punk president, he needs reigning in, not turning loose...
...Within this political setting, Shafer also describes how the domination of convention proceedings by television and the growing power of special interest groups (such as the National Education Association and the Moral Majority) in the selection of delegates have converted conventions into new battlefields...
...Greenstein sees the modern presidency as triggered by FDR in 1933...
...The presidency, however, does not exactly provide a wealth of statistics...
...Taking nothing away from it, it is a quarter century old and, despite recent updates, remains something of a period piece...
...This is a very good book, coming at a very appropriate time...
...Presidential scholars have to coax sweeping conclusions from some very skimpy numbers...
...planes flew strike after strike against the same targets, the North Vietnamese became adept at quickly rebuilding factories, bridges, and other structures after they were knocked out...
...On the one hand, such pressure could turn pluralism, once a strength in American party politics, into a weakness...
...The failure of the field can be seen in the fact that Richard Neustadt's Presidential Power still ranks among the preeminent texts...
...For the GOP, the process was a little slower, falling from 52 percent party-selected delegates in 1968 to 39 percent in 1972 and to 15 percent in 1976...
...Sure enough, the above four factors are standing at attention as each new president takes office...
...Based on his years as a fighter bomber pilot in Vietnam, Broughton has written a damning account of Operation Rolling Thunder, the 1965-68 bombing campaign that was supposed to force Hanoi to sue for peace...
...Our conclusions are most persuasive when we use vast numbers to yield important correlations or associations...
...Shafer's data demonstrates that the percentage of Democratic delegates chosen by party structures fell from 57 percent in 1968 to 18 percent in 1972 and to 9 percent in 1976...
...Erwin Hargrove sees Jimmy Carter's "greatest deficiency as president" not as a Washington problem but as a national problem: "his inability to establish a bond with the public...
...This was epitomized by the dispute over coverage of the video used to introduce President Reagan in 1984, coverage that only ABC agreed to supply...
...The Trustee Presidency is a balanced and even-handed examination of one key aspect of the Carter presidency, written by one of the best scholars of Congress...
...No one should be intimidated by the number-crunching used to find meaning in statistics that are pathetically small...
...Students of the presidency have long sought to post a scholar-inresidence at the White House...
...The closer scholars can get to an institution, the better the research is likely to be...
...Nixon's are so suffused with wounded innocence that they should have been printed on Kleenex...
...There is little that is surprising in this inventory and little that has not been observed already by those armed with nothing more than a trained eye and a perceptive mind...
...Senate, in large measure because the House is more open...
...It is as true in politics as it is on Wall Street that greatness shouldn't be confused with a bull market...
...Larry Berman reports LBJ's own recognition—far too late—that he was wrong about Vietnam...
...Clearly, eight years have softened harsh judgments and provided some distance from the pain and immediacy of the Carter presidency...
...Roger Porter confirms Ford as a healer...
...Fred I. Greenstein ed., Harvard University Press, $29.95...
...But if I were elected president this November, I would spend Thanksgiving reading of Roosevelt: how he made use of professors without falling into their class, how he moved his vision beyond the shortterm myopia to a new ideal of the rights of humans...
...Being the object of an unsuccessful attempt on your life won't do...
...As for the former, Alonzo Hamby, linking Truman's complex and fascinating biography to his presidential style, tells how that surprised president rose to the occasion and started externalizing a system FDR had located mainly within himself...
...This book is part of a wounded tradition of presidential scholarship...
...For instance, his vice-presidential choice of Sen...
...Shafer's is one of those books...
...To be sure, we do know bits and pieces about individual presidents, particularly recent ones, because of the long primary season...
...Carter gave a primetime address and appeared at the podium with other dignitaries after Dukakis's acceptance speech...
...It's Muir's contention that "what is required to make society understandable even to the youngest and least experienced Americans is metaphor...
...What you are left with in your search for regularities in the conduct of the office is 37 people over a 200-year period...
...More convincing than the theory are the bits of wisdom this book offers...
...Thomas Byrne Edsall Leadership in the Modern Presidency...
...I should have thought it was reality...
...But I'm not sure that would help much...
...The problems of access associated with the presidency are exacerbated by the restless need of modern political science to quantify the human behavior it studies...
...In the long run, however, the developments cited by Shafer point toward growing pressures within each party to suppress conflict—lest disputes hurt the nominee's chances in November...
...Contrast this with Congress, where almost 12,000 have served and which has seen 31,000 congressional elections since 1789...
...That Carter accomplished some of the things he did—water project cuts, civil service reform, energy programs, the Panama Canal Treaty, government reorganization—suggests that a Trustee Presidency is not entirely ineffective or obsolete...
...Before you sneer at this as a kind of Presidential Aptitude Test, keep in mind that Simonton judiciously claims nothing more for his data than what the statistics will bear and acknowledges the eternal importance of Machiavelli's fortuna: presidents benefit who lead the nation to victory in wars they didn't start or who prosper from economic cycles over which they had little influence...
...To Jones, Jimmy Carter saw himself clearly as a "trustee" in the Burkean sense—as one elected to do what is right in his own judgment, in contrast to a "delegate," one elected to represent faithfully the views of others, one whose actions are dominated by politics...
...Primary and caucus electorates do...
...eastern time, when an estimated 80 percent of the earlier viewing audience had already gone to bed ." By contrast, in 1984 Ronald Reagan ran as an unchallenged incumbent who was able to fully orchestrate his convention, suppressing all conflicts between moderates and the new right, the country club traditionalists, and the Christian fundamentalists...
...Carl Bauer is on target in focusing on Jack Kennedy's inspirational mode...
...In that case, ABC may have done Dukakis a favor, as Clinton's speech was one of the less gripping events of the 1988 Democratic convention...
...Material waiting to be sifted so that the great big rights and wrongs presidents do are not fuzzed over by institutional trivialities...
...Reflect on the reluctance of Michael Dukakis to fire aide John Sasso after the Biden tape incident or Jimmy Carter's tardy dismissal of Bert Lance, not to mention Reagan and Meese...
...But looking back on the campaign coverage there was little to tell us about the mesh of personality and institution that gave us scandals like Watergate and the Iran-contra affair...
...I agree with some of the characterizations and disagree with others...
...This development is already evident in the calculated blandness of the Dukakis and Bush campaigns, as each has assiduously sought to paper over the substantial intra-party conflicts facing both Democrats and Republicans...
...The collected essays, uneven as they are, do set forth lessons of history likely to be confirmed...
...Byron E. Shafer...
...First, there's the problem of access...
...Jones uses rigorous social science but in a compact, readable form...
...A composite figure of a president that Simonton finds likely to be adjudged great: he (certainly not she, since the database on female presidents is rather small) would come to the presidency after having had a distinguished military career and written prolifically...
...Simonton's book is an honest effort to sort out the question of why presidents succeed, but it ends up being unpersuasive because of the small number of cases used to back up this ambitious effort...
...Thomas Eagleton was challenged on the floor by feminists, many of whom backed McGovern but insisted on running Frances Farenthold of Texas against Eagleton...
...Orion Books, $18.95...
...While the Supreme Court in its icy palace might seem to be an unlikely focus of scholarship, it is actually quite rich, if for no other reason than the fact that opinions are published and reflect on both the reasoning and philosophy of their authors...
...That Neustadt continues to hold such a prominent place in the literature of the presidency tells us some things both about the office and those who choose to study it...
...Leuchtenburg sees that Roosevelt did not do everything right...
...Because the U.S...
...Scanping this year's contenders, there was only one who appeared to fit the profile of the great president: Gary Hart...
...The literature of White House staff and advisers is similarly flawed—ranging from Brzezinski's sententiously titled Power and Principle to Califano's arrogantly titled Governing America...
...When virtually everyone points to Lincoln as a great president, it's worth asking why...
...Especially useful is William Leuchtenburg's commentary on FDR, who succeeded in guiding us through a time when our democracy could have broken and died...
...John Damrosch The Trustee Presidency: JillunY Carter and the United States Congress...
...Norman Ornstein Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the National Party Convention...
...But much of it may be useless in understanding how they govern...
...The whole idea of ranking presidents may sound foolish, but there is value to the enterprise...
...But thereafter the Darwinism begins to scatter, as when "Kennedy's Executive Office operating methods departed most dramatically from Eisenhower's in the area of foreign affairs" and as when "Johnson left office, American politics was becoming even more intractable for presidential leadership than it had been in the 1940s and 1950s," as well as the Carter to Reagan bump, which illustrates character and style more than institutional evolution...
...This was the case with ABC in Atlanta in July when the network broke from Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton's nominating speech to present a Jeff Greenfield story on Dukakis's early political career...
...It was not, however, until after 1968 that Democraticinitiated reforms radically altered the delegate selection process for both parties...
...Ross K. Baker Going Downtown Jack Broughton...
...And even if a president can command those instituted factors, they point in no direction...
...Not surprisingly, as a social psychologist, Simonton puts as much emphasis on personality as he does on politics...
...George McGovern is the quintessential example of the candidate who could not maintain control over the constituencies he had mobilized to win the nomination...
...Like King Solomon, Greenstein does not hesitate to pronounce straightforward lessons...
...We can hope that they will measure up to the standards set by Jones's study of Carter and his relationship with Congress...
...could not be delivered until 3 a.m...
...What hinders the study of the presidency...
Vol. 20 • September 1988 • No. 8
