Michael Nelson: Neustadt's 'Presidential Power' at 50
[Michael Nelson, a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is co-author, with Sidney M. Milkis, of The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (fifth edition, CQ, 2007).]
50: The number of years Richard E. Neustadt's Presidential Power has been in print since it was published, in April 1960.
6: The book's rank in how frequently it is still assigned in college courses on the American presidency, according to a recent survey of about 250 syllabi by Grand Valley State University's Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies. That's nothing short of remarkable for a book with a chapter called "The Sixties Come Next."
60: The number of cents my father's mass-market paperback copy of Presidential Power cost when he bought it new, in 1961....
I liked the book for the same reason my father did—its solid, suspenseful accounts of Harry S. Truman's confrontation with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower's mostly maladroit dealings with Congress. But JFK and general readers (enough of them to put the original hardcover version of Presidential Power on The New York Times best-seller list for two weeks) weren't the only ones Neustadt's book impressed. Political scientists thought a lot of it, too. "Presidential Power is truly one of the great books of political science," said The Journal of Politics in an early, not atypical review, and the book won the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Award as book of the year....
Neustadt worked for seven years in the Truman administration and then "was 'turfed' out of the White House" after Ike was elected. He started teaching at Columbia University in 1954, and discovered that scholarship on the presidency "seemed to be very remote from what I had experienced." One reason he wrote Presidential Power was "to fill the gap between the academic literature that existed in the middle 50s on the presidency and my experience of it," which was much different from what he disdainfully referred to as the "literary theory of the Constitution" embodied in the book he hoped to topple from the pinnacle of presidential studies: Edward S. Corwin's The President: Office and Powers (1940, and in its fourth edition by 1957).
In particular, Neustadt argued that far from being a powerful office, the presidency is essentially an empty vessel—a glorified "clerkship"—that at any given moment takes the shape of the person who fills it. Whether it is filled ineptly or skillfully was, for him, the vital question. What marked successful modern (that is, post-Franklin D. Roosevelt) presidents was their understanding that "presidential power is the power to persuade," not command. Appealing to reason, to duty, or to loyalty was not what Neustadt meant by persuasion. Instead, "the power to persuade is the power to bargain"—to trade favors or the promise of favors—so that other powerful Washington figures become convinced that "what he wants of them is what their own appraisal of their own responsibilities requires them to do in their own interest, not his." The emphasis was Neustadt's—he really meant it....
Nonetheless, Presidential Power attracted its share of critics. The first to go into print was the political philosopher William T. Bluhm, who complained in his 1965 book, Theories of the Political System, that Neustadt, like Machiavelli, prescribed a "politics of manipulation" divorced from any "conception of the desirable—of the good." Bluhm wrote this not knowing what Neustadt later revealed in a 1985 article: that his preferred title for the book, until his wife talked him out of it, was "Primer for Presidents" because "I wished their aides and friends to read it and to trickle its message up." Not surprisingly, Neustadt reported being jarred when two disgraced former Nixon aides, Jeb Magruder and Gordon Strachan, told him that Presidential Power had been required reading in the Nixon White House. Kennedy-style liberals, it turned out, weren't the only presidents capable of using Neustadt's advice to enhance their power.
A second early line of scholarly criticism was that Neustadt wildly overestimated the amount of persuading and bargaining that a president either could do (an "immense and consistent overloading of his physical and mental apparatus will produce a breakdown in short order," wrote Peter Sperlich in 1969) or needed to do. Far from being Neustadt's "lonely fighter against all others," Sperlich argued, any president can count on support from legions of officeholders based on personal or professional loyalty, shared identification with his party or ideology, and respect for the office's command authority....
Neustadt stopped revising Presidential Power in 1990, and he died in 2003, but political scientists still read and in various ways honor his book. One way they honor it is by continuing to take it seriously enough to criticize. For example, Neustadt's name pops up 40 times in The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency, a mammoth new volume edited by George C. Edwards III and William G. Howell, and much of the time it's because a contributing scholar is praising Presidential Power for being pathbreaking before criticizing it as in some important respect wrong....
But criticizing Presidential Power, as sincere a form of flattery as it is, isn't the only way contemporary scholars pay tribute to Neustadt. There's got to be a reason political scientists keep reading, citing, and assigning Presidential Power and why, as Charles O. Jones points out—uncontroversially—it has had "greater effect than any other book about a political institution."...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education
50: The number of years Richard E. Neustadt's Presidential Power has been in print since it was published, in April 1960.
6: The book's rank in how frequently it is still assigned in college courses on the American presidency, according to a recent survey of about 250 syllabi by Grand Valley State University's Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies. That's nothing short of remarkable for a book with a chapter called "The Sixties Come Next."
60: The number of cents my father's mass-market paperback copy of Presidential Power cost when he bought it new, in 1961....
I liked the book for the same reason my father did—its solid, suspenseful accounts of Harry S. Truman's confrontation with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower's mostly maladroit dealings with Congress. But JFK and general readers (enough of them to put the original hardcover version of Presidential Power on The New York Times best-seller list for two weeks) weren't the only ones Neustadt's book impressed. Political scientists thought a lot of it, too. "Presidential Power is truly one of the great books of political science," said The Journal of Politics in an early, not atypical review, and the book won the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Award as book of the year....
Neustadt worked for seven years in the Truman administration and then "was 'turfed' out of the White House" after Ike was elected. He started teaching at Columbia University in 1954, and discovered that scholarship on the presidency "seemed to be very remote from what I had experienced." One reason he wrote Presidential Power was "to fill the gap between the academic literature that existed in the middle 50s on the presidency and my experience of it," which was much different from what he disdainfully referred to as the "literary theory of the Constitution" embodied in the book he hoped to topple from the pinnacle of presidential studies: Edward S. Corwin's The President: Office and Powers (1940, and in its fourth edition by 1957).
In particular, Neustadt argued that far from being a powerful office, the presidency is essentially an empty vessel—a glorified "clerkship"—that at any given moment takes the shape of the person who fills it. Whether it is filled ineptly or skillfully was, for him, the vital question. What marked successful modern (that is, post-Franklin D. Roosevelt) presidents was their understanding that "presidential power is the power to persuade," not command. Appealing to reason, to duty, or to loyalty was not what Neustadt meant by persuasion. Instead, "the power to persuade is the power to bargain"—to trade favors or the promise of favors—so that other powerful Washington figures become convinced that "what he wants of them is what their own appraisal of their own responsibilities requires them to do in their own interest, not his." The emphasis was Neustadt's—he really meant it....
Nonetheless, Presidential Power attracted its share of critics. The first to go into print was the political philosopher William T. Bluhm, who complained in his 1965 book, Theories of the Political System, that Neustadt, like Machiavelli, prescribed a "politics of manipulation" divorced from any "conception of the desirable—of the good." Bluhm wrote this not knowing what Neustadt later revealed in a 1985 article: that his preferred title for the book, until his wife talked him out of it, was "Primer for Presidents" because "I wished their aides and friends to read it and to trickle its message up." Not surprisingly, Neustadt reported being jarred when two disgraced former Nixon aides, Jeb Magruder and Gordon Strachan, told him that Presidential Power had been required reading in the Nixon White House. Kennedy-style liberals, it turned out, weren't the only presidents capable of using Neustadt's advice to enhance their power.
A second early line of scholarly criticism was that Neustadt wildly overestimated the amount of persuading and bargaining that a president either could do (an "immense and consistent overloading of his physical and mental apparatus will produce a breakdown in short order," wrote Peter Sperlich in 1969) or needed to do. Far from being Neustadt's "lonely fighter against all others," Sperlich argued, any president can count on support from legions of officeholders based on personal or professional loyalty, shared identification with his party or ideology, and respect for the office's command authority....
Neustadt stopped revising Presidential Power in 1990, and he died in 2003, but political scientists still read and in various ways honor his book. One way they honor it is by continuing to take it seriously enough to criticize. For example, Neustadt's name pops up 40 times in The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency, a mammoth new volume edited by George C. Edwards III and William G. Howell, and much of the time it's because a contributing scholar is praising Presidential Power for being pathbreaking before criticizing it as in some important respect wrong....
But criticizing Presidential Power, as sincere a form of flattery as it is, isn't the only way contemporary scholars pay tribute to Neustadt. There's got to be a reason political scientists keep reading, citing, and assigning Presidential Power and why, as Charles O. Jones points out—uncontroversially—it has had "greater effect than any other book about a political institution."...