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Introduction: Leadership, Democracy, and the Presidency
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14159 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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1 / 1988 |
1,345 Words |
| Author
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Marcus Cunliffe
Marcus Cunliffe is professor of history at George Washington
University. |
Much current writing about the American presidency is distinctly gloomy in tone. Earlier in the century, the received wisdom was that "strong" presidents were good presidents (Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and so on) and that "weak" presidents (Buchanan, Taft, Harding, among others) were bad. This picture began to change with the publication of books like George Reedy's The Twilight of the Presidency (1970). Reedy, former press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, saw the office as a grotesque modern monarchy, with all the sins (bombast, waste, concealment, toadying) that had led the Founding Fathers to cut loose from King George III. The supposedly excessive, indeed unconstitutional, claims for executive privilege were dissected in Arthur Schlesinger's The Imperial Presidency (1973).
Within a few years, criticism had swung in the other direction. What Schlesinger had also called the "runaway presidency" began to be seen as the "nonrunning" or, in Gerald R. Ford's formulation, the "impossible presidency." According to this new theory, the office was actually suffering, not from dictatorial arrogance, but from bureaucratic and political paralysis. In All Things to All Men (1980), the experienced English observer Godfrey Hodgson argued that it was simply impossible for a president, no matter how gifted and diligent, to satisfy more than a fraction of the innumerable and often contradictory demands laid upon him. Americans, he said, had gradually come to expect that the person in the Oval Office must possess a godlike knowledge and wisdom, for whom no problem was too large or too small. The reality described by other pundits, such as Cornell University's Theodore J. Lowi (The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled, 1985), was an absurdly bloated set of expectations, leading inevitably to disenchantment. The closing phase of President Reagan's administration has led not only to cynical jesting (the reiteration of the claim, for example, that every president since FDR has managed to make his predecessor look superior to himself) but to the more detached speculation that the institution itself is at fault when administration after administration loses momentum and support after the brief initial honeymoon period.
Somewhere in between analysis and gossip, a favorite theme for journalists and academics alike is the notion of leadership. Closely related is today's bandying about of the word charisma. Do our leaders have charisma? If not, why not? And if they do, what is their showing on a loftier, "greatness" scale? Measuring presidential greatness is almost a subindustry among political scientists. The candidates of 1987-88 are all expected to be charismatic as well as telegenic,
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