36 pages • 1 hour read
Richard E. NeustadtPresidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Presidential Power”
Chapter 1 Summary: “Leader or Clerk?”
Neustadt’s first chapter answers its titular question by showing the president is necessarily both a leader and a clerk. The clerkship functions have grown over time, necessitating the growth of presidential staff who make the presidency far more than a single individual.
The president is both the head of the executive branch of government and an individual, Neustadt emphasizes. Thus, he seeks to measure the individuals who have filled the presidency in a manner that reflects their ability to muster power to achieve policy results. Such individually wielded power is different in Neustadt’s treatment from the formal “powers” held by the president attendant to the office.
Neustadt identifies five constituencies that interact with the president to both affect and reflect the extent of his power: the officials of the executive branch, Congress, his partisans, the citizenry, and foreign nations. Examining the means by, and extent to, which the president interacts with these constituencies to create, maintain, and exercise power is the core task of the book.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Three Cases of Command”
Chapter 2 develops Neustadt’s theory by examining three examples of crises that required action by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. The core thesis of the chapter is succinctly stated as, “[p]residential power is the power to persuade” (11).
In choosing examples to test the thesis, Neustadt selects ones that may seem contrary to the thesis and explains how they actually support it. The examples examined in this chapter are:
- President Truman’s order to General Douglas MacArthur to relinquish his command in 1951;
- President Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills for seven weeks in 1952; and
- President Eisenhower’s order that sent military troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to facilitate the racial integration of public schools despite a hostile mob threatening the black children.
Each of the examples is discussed in some detail, showing that several factors came together to give the appearance of a self-executing presidential command. Specifically, Neustadt maintains that each example included an unambiguous command from a determined president implemented by individuals who accepted presidential authority and responded promptly.
The appearance of self-execution, however, belies the need for presidential persuasion that remains a constant in the mid-century presidencies, according to Neustadt. Further, the three examples are outliers because the combination necessary to create an appearance of self-execution rarely occurs. Thus, Neustadt concludes by echoing the words of President Truman that presidential power is the power to persuade.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Power to Persuade”
Chapter 3 digs deeper into the concept of the presidency as “the power to persuade” that was introduced in Chapter 2. Primarily, Neustadt explains that the power to persuade is a function of the separation of powers in the federal government and of the various other constituencies relevant to the exercise of presidential power over policy.
The chapter draws on the examples from the prior chapter to establish that the power to persuade is the power to bargain. Whether the setting is a mediation between the steel titans and the steel workers’ unions or a negotiation with foreign heads of state, the president acquires only bargaining advantages from his position; the work of bargaining must still be carried out.
While intra-executive-branch relations are something of an exception to the need for bargaining, the business of governing the country and overseeing foreign policy generally requires the president to use the ebb and flow of events to maximize influence and achieve policy results.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The first three chapters, constituting approximately one-third of Presidential Power as published in 1960, lay out a conception of the presidency that very much requires the person in office to remain active in acquiring, maintaining, and utilizing the power attendant to it. As Neustadt explains it, the formal “powers” of the president do not guarantee that the individual in the presidency will have the power to see favored policy goals realized. In that sense, the presidency creates a clerk with government functions, but it is the individual in office who must use that position to be an effective leader.
By discussing three examples that might appear to flow automatically from the president’s wishes, Neustadt demonstrates that even in those instances there were crucial factors favoring the president’s use of persuasion to achieve a desired policy objective. By highlighting the various factors that had to be aligned in the two examples from the Truman presidency (MacArthur and the steel mills) and the very well-known example from Eisenhower’s presidency (integration in Little Rock), Neustadt puts together a practically undeniable argument that, indeed, the president must carefully attend to sources and stocks of persuasive power that grow from the office, the president’s experience, and his interaction with the several constituencies.
By Chapter 3, Neustadt has established the basic situation of the presidency among the constituencies of the executive branch, the larger federal government, the public, and the nations of the world. Thus, he begins to interrogate how presidential power emerges and develops according to what the president does in interacting with these constituencies. Later chapters will make even more explicit this implicit point running through the third chapter: The president’s choices can have a large (albeit not complete) influence on the extent and utility of power he wields going forward. This is a primary theme of Neustadt’s 1960 book—that the president can and should consider what he does today to develop power that he may use tomorrow.
