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 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Presidential Power”
Chapter 4 Summary: “Professional Reputation”
Chapter 4 emphasizes the importance of the president’s reputation and articulates the means by which a president should attend to it. Essentially, Neustadt argues, the concept of “reputation” expresses the reality that the president’s ability to persuade is affected not only by his skill and position but also by what the person sought to be persuaded thinks about the president and what that person thinks others think about him. In particular, the president’s reputation is important for informing others’ perception as to what the president may or may not do if they fail to go along with his agenda when he attempts to persuade them. The ingredients of reputation that Neustadt emphasizes are tenacity and skill.
Franklin D. Roosevelt is presented as having set the ideal for establishing a professional reputation for skill and tenacity at the outset of his presidency. However, as much of what made Roosevelt’s early efforts ideal resulted from the fortune of the times and his pre-presidency experience, Neustadt reasons that other presidents should seek to sow uncertainty about the consequences of ignoring their wishes among those who must be persuaded.
As the president’s term continues, however, Neustadt maintains that only the individual himself is responsible for his reputation. To make this point, he discusses President Eisenhower’s ability to change his reputation toward the end of his presidency after highlighting Eisenhower’s squandering of initial reputational advantages.
The story first illustrates the risks attendant to a president’s role in shaping his reputation. Eisenhower initially made the reward of supporting him equivocal and the risk of opposing him slight, according to Neustadt. Between 1957 and 1959, however, Eisenhower used the opportunity presented by his opposition to legislative actions (a negative but strong position) to rehabilitate his reputation through the consistency and firmness of his policy goals.
In closing the chapter, Neustadt emphasizes that while circumstances are necessarily important, the president’s own choices are the key determinate of his reputation.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Public Prestige”
Chapter 5 shifts from the president’s reputation among others in government to the public’s view of the president. The public’s regard, Neustadt argues, serves as a background factor that informs (rather than determines) how others in government will react to his requests and actions.
Neustadt explains that the president’s interaction with the public involves many features outside of his control as well as his own actions. To some degree, the president teaches the public by educating them on issues and courses of action. However, the risk is always in events turning out differently than the president led the public to expect. On the other hand, external events can also make the educative task easier, as was dramatically illustrated by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942. Ultimately, Neustadt emphasizes the importance of this teaching function and of giving meaning to the president’s actions that the public can understand and accept. This, he reminds the reader, relates again to the theme of a president’s choices defining the extent and effect of his power.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Two Matters of Choice”
Chapter 6 begins with a discussion of a January 1957 event in which President Eisenhower’s treasury secretary, acting as the president’s spokesperson, made strong and worrying comments to the press that revealed his concerns about the president’s budget. In allowing this event, perhaps even causing it, Eisenhower illustrated (through his negative actions) Neustadt’s point about the president’s choices shaping his power. Specifically, the chapter examines how a president protects (or squanders) his influence through the choices he makes in exercising it.
The first of the “two matters” referenced in the chapter title is a discussion of Eisenhower’s ineffectual handling of budget matters in 1957. Neustadt’s background was in working with Truman’s budgets, so it is not surprising that he engages in an extended discussion of budget-related developments to make his point. These topics were fresh and timely in 1960. The point, however, remains salient: Eisenhower did not understand the nature of the power he was working with and, therefore, allowed a member of his cabinet to make statements that undermined that power and caused significant embarrassment.
Neustadt maintains that advisors and even knowledge of the issues are no substitute for “sensitivity to power” by the president himself. The Eisenhower budget matter illustrates the failure of a president to demonstrate such sensitivity.
The second matter referenced in the chapter title returns to the Korean War example. Prior to his decision to fire General MacArthur, President Truman allowed his advisors and others to lead him into choices that cast him urging a “victory” that became undesirable (if not impossible) because of China’s entry into the war once MacArthur crossed into North Korea. Truman delayed in changing MacArthur’s orders because, according to Neustadt, he did not recognize how his own power (especially in terms of public prestige) was at stake.
These examples show that presidents may miss opportunities to conserve and build power through their choices. Moreover, they show that no one but the president can truly be expected to perceive the nature of the power at stake in such choices.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These three chapters lay out the core of Neustadt’s theory insofar as they define the sources of presidential power and articulate the basic means of cultivating and maintaining it (albeit through negative examples). They follow the chapters that laid out the broad aim of the book and the specific nature of the power at issue.
Chapter 4 identifies the several categories of people with whom the president must utilize his power to persuade and explains the role of professional reputation in enhancing or undermining that effort. It relates to the president’s ability to cultivate a reputation that leads others in government (or other influential positions) to accede to his wishes and work toward his goals.
Chapter 5 then articulates the indirect but significant role that the public’s perception of and regard for the president plays in either increasing or reducing his power to direct policy. In this respect Neustadt notes that public perception tends to make it more or less likely that others in government will perceive their agendas as tied to the president’s. That is, the extent of the prestige afforded the president by the public can influence whether others in government perceive a specific stance toward him as helpful or damaging to their own policy objectives and career prospects.
In Chapter 6 Neustadt applies the ideas he has developed to examples in which Presidents Truman and Eisenhower not only failed to enhance their power but actively diminished it in ways that Neustadt suggests they could have foreseen and adjusted for. The chapter essentially asks why they made those mistakes and how they might have been avoided.
The answer is relatively clear for Neustadt and constitutes his central thesis: The president will be more successful if he pays more attention to developing his persuasive power prospectively by attending to matters like reputation and prestige.
