3.6 The President as an Individual
Our discussion up to this point has focused on the constitutional origins of the presidency as an institution and how the actions of individual presidents have over time expanded the foreign policy powers of the office in relation to the other branches of government. What is now required is an analysis of the president as an individual in an attempt to establish what, if any, personal power sources are available to the president. We do so in the attempt to establish that who occupies the office of president has an important impact on the formulation and direction of US foreign policy. Each president brings to the office a unique combination of ideology, worldview, management style and political skill and it is necessary to analyse these as important determinants of US foreign policy.
87 in ibid., p132
88 in Hastdet, G. P. (2003) American Foreign Policy: Past, Present, Future (London: Pearson Education Ltd), p173
89 In Dumbrell, J. (1997) The Making of U.S. Foreign Policy (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p132
90 Javits, J. K. (1985) ‘War Powers Reconsidered’, Foreign Affairs 64, p135
3.6.1 Informal Powers
One of the earliest attempts to draw attention to the president as an individual was Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power.91 He was concerned with the idea of the president as an individual amongst many in a set of institutions. Neustadt was responsible for emphasising that the US system was one of separated institutions sharing power. As a result of this, Neustadt made the rather revolutionary claim that the president may have been granted significant formal powers by the constitution, but these formal powers were almost negated by the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances. Thus the president found himself with limited opportunity to exercise these powers in full, and that the office was reduced to that of a clerk. For Neustadt, the president cannot rely on his authority and mere commands to achieve results, instead the president must maximise his personal informal power. In doing so he will find that presidential power is in fact the power to persuade. To do so, a president must be able to demonstrate political skill in order to win the support of fellow policymakers in Washington and the American people. More importantly, it is not about demonstrating skill in one particular instance, but being able to create a reputation that will maximise his personal power resources in all future instances. The problem for Neustadt, though, is very clear: “Effective personal power is a risky thing – hard to consolidate, easy to dissipate, rarely assured.”92 The overriding theme of his analysis therefore is one of presidential weakness.93
The rest of Neustadt’s book focuses on trying to demonstrate how a president can maximise his personal power resources. He highlights the complex relationship between decision-making, producing and assessing quality-information, and timing. A president must be aware of how his current choices affect his future power resources. In order to do this he must be equipped with the required information and have enough time to analyse the information in order to make the decision. The president must also possess confidence in himself to make such decisions and he must be able to organise his staff and the executive in such a way to maximise his personal power resources.94 This theme will be discussed in more detail in the next section, but for our purposes at the moment it is enough to acknowledge the
91 Neustadt, R. (1990) Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. (Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International)
92 Ibid., pix
93 Ibid., pix
94 Ibid., pp1-9
contribution made by Neustadt in allowing us to locate the influence of the president as an individual.
3.6.2 Presidential Character
The second major contribution to the study of the president as an individual was made by David Barber in his work, The Presidential Character.95 The purpose of his analysis is to establish criteria that will help American citizens choose an effective president. In order to do so, Barber argues that “the first need is to see the man whole – not as some abstract embodiment of civic virtue, some scorecard of issue stands, or some reflection of a faction, but as a human being like the rest of us, a person trying to cope with a difficult environment.”96 By focusing on the president as a human, Barber is able to develop the thesis that the personality of the president influences his behaviour and that presidential personality is patterned and can thus be studied from a social scientific perspective. In order to do so, Barber focuses on three key concepts, style, worldview and character. Style is defined as “the President’s habitual way of performing his three political roles”, his worldview “consists of his primary, politically relevant beliefs” and character is “the way the President orients himself toward life – not for the moment, but enduringly.”97 As the title of his book suggests, character is the most important variable for Barber, but it does not necessarily determine worldview and style.
From these assumptions Barber develops two baselines which define Presidential “types”.
The first is activity-passivity, how much energy the man puts into the job of being president.
The second is how much personal satisfaction and enjoyment they get out of being president.
This is the positive-negative effect. From these two baselines Barber is able to deduce a typology of character types.98
The first is active-positive. These presidents are goal orientated and are willing to exert a tremendous degree of effort in order to achieve their goals. They are willing to adapt to different situations and often exhibit personal growth. In doing so they derive great
95 Barber, J. D. (1985) The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House (London:
Prentice-Hall International, Inc.)
96 Ibid., p3-4
97 Ibid., p8-9
98 Ibid., p11
satisfaction from the application of rational thought to achieve desired ends. However, they may run into trouble as they fail to understand that not everyone shares the same goals.99 The second is active-negative. These presidents exert similar amounts of effort, but they feel relatively low emotional reward in return. This stems from feelings of low-self esteem and the activities they engage in often become compulsive. As a result, they often seek to exert power over others to overcome what they perceive to be their own shortcomings.100 The third is passive-positive. These presidents are other-directed who seek affection in order to compensate for low self-esteem. They hide this behind superficial optimism. They seek, and often get, encouragement from others, but are likely to face disappointment in their political career.101
The fourth is passive-negative. These presidents put little into their job and get even less enjoyment. They suffer from low self-esteem and compensate for this by viewing politics as their civic duty, as something they ought to do. They make poor political leaders as they lack experience and flexibility.102
The work of Neustadt and Barber has produced a significant volume of literature. The main criticisms of Neustadt are that he fails to discuss the ends to which presidential power should be put. Cronin and Genovese raise the issue of where ethical boundaries lie in relation to the personal power of the president.103 Sperlich raises two further criticisms of Neustadt.
The first is that he overstates the significance of presidential bargaining and does not emphasise nonreciprocal sources of influence. The second is that Neustadt’s recommendation that presidents should try as much as possible to run their own White Houses by relying less on personal advisers would invariably overburden most presidents.104
Barber has been criticised for publishing a theoretically and methodologically underdeveloped thesis.105 He has also been accused of excessive reductionism by paying
“insufficient attention to the full range of possible psychological and non-psychological determinants of behaviour” and attempting to explain too much with his theory.106
99 Ibid., p12
100 Ibid., p12
101 Ibid., p13
102 Ibid., p13
103 Cronin, T.E. and Genovese, M.A. (2004) The Paradoxes of the American Presidency (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p111
104 Sperlich, P.W. (1975) ‘Bargaining and Overload: An Essay on Presidential Power’ in A. Wildavsky eds Perspectives on the Presidency (Boston: Little, Brown & Co), pp406-430
105 George, A.L. (1974) ‘Assessing Presidential Character” in World Politics 26 p234-282
106 Greenstein, F. (1975) Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference and Conceptualization (New York: Norton)
However, what is important for our analysis is not to engage with the criticisms of Neustadt and Barber in any detail but to acknowledge the fact that they have laid the foundations for the study of individuals in political science. They allow us to separate the individual from the office and in doing so attempt to analyse what impact they are able to make on politics. Neustadt is quite clear that in the case of the president of the United States, his potential for influence is limited to that of a clerk by the system of separated powers.
Barber, on the other hand, argues that who the president is can make a profound difference to national politics and that “the man himself weighs heavily among other historical factors.”107 As there is only one president at a time it is not possible to prove this by comparison, but
“only someone mesmerised by the lures of historical inevitability can suppose it would have made little or no difference to government policy had Alf Landon replaced FDR in 1936, had Dewey beaten Truman in 1948, or Adalai Stevenson reigned through the 1950s.” 108
3.6.3 Presidential Leadership
The extent to which an individual can influence policymaking is often described in terms of leadership. The concept of leadership is complex in that it recognises differences exist between people in terms of their conception of interests and goals, and that in order to overcome these differences a leader must be able to exert influence in order to convince others to adopt his interests and goals, or to at least push others in a direction he requires in order for his goals to be attained. Greenstein has argued that in order for a president to exert successful leadership in a system of separated powers he must possess six qualities. First, he must be a skilled public communicator. Second, he must be able to organise his office in order to structure the activities of his aides effectively. We will discuss this in detail in the next section. Third, he must possess political skill in order to assert the powers of his office.
Fourth, political skill must be harnessed to a vision of public policy that will provide both inspiration and a political strategy that will produce consistency in policy making. Fifth is his cognitive style, how the president attempts to process the mass of information he must contend with in his role as president. Sixth, is the president’s emotional intelligence. How the
107 Barber, J. D. (1985) The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House (London:
Prentice-Hall International, Inc.), p5
108 Ibid., p6
president is able to cope with the intensity and pressures generated by the office will, according to Greenstein, determine how effective he will be as a leader.109
However, even if a president is able to maximise his own personal skill set of leadership qualities, this does not guarantee him control over the policy making process. Leadership does not exist in a vacuum. Like any other social activity it takes place within a historical context, and different contexts present individual presidents with varying degrees of freedom to exert their powers. Some presidents find themselves with many opportunities to lead whilst others are more restricted. However, the argument at the heart of this thesis is that although contextual factors may set the boundaries for political action, there is a strong potential for political agency. It is the combination of individual skill and contextual opportunities that determine whether a leader will be successful or not. It is the individual who decides whether he will take the opportunity or not. If the individual has the required skills, an opportunity to act, and the will to act, then they will have the maximum potential to achieve their goal. By acknowledging the fact that presidential agency is linked to context we avoid the charge of psychological reductionism but in stressing the potential of different individuals to exert leadership we also refute arguments in favour of historical and systemic determinism.