The Presidency: Job Specs for the Oval Office

(2 of 11)
govern seems to be growing. No American under 40 has any adult experience of a reasonably successful and "normal" presidency. The country and the world have changed profoundly since the successful presidencies of the 1940s and 1950s. The job has surely grown more difficult and more important, even as the quality of the incumbents has fallen off. Since the mid-'60s, the U.S. has declined in relative military power, drastically. We have declined in political and economic muscle vis-a-vis our allies. We have lost some cohesiveness and social discipline within the U.S. We have lost, at least for the time being, the economic momentum that produced steadily higher living standards and steadily growing tax-funded entitlements. We are still, all in all, the strongest nation and society, but it is a very tough time to be President.

Yet our democracy cannot allow the failed presidencies of the 1960s and 1970s to foster the view that the job has become impossible. It hasn't. It isn't. If we can arrive at a better understanding of what the job requires today, and what it does not, we may arrive at ways of finding better candidates.

Lion or Prisoner? The abiding paradox of the U.S. presidency is that it is the most powerful political office hi the world—hedged about by a mighty host of contending powers: Congress, the bureaucracy, the press, business, the courts, lobbies, the great American electorate and then all the other countries on earth, at last count 167. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter could both be excused for feeling that checks and balances can be overdone.

Students of the modern presidency have tended to stress either its powers or its limitations. The living, changing amalgam of authority and constraints is perhaps too subtle to capture in any theoretical model. Bryce Harlow, a wise counselor to all the recent Republican Presidents, saw the powers of the office as so great, even in the hands of the prudent Ike, as to leave Harlow hi "almost fearful awe." The late Clinton Rossiter of Cornell took an equally sweeping view of the power, but rejoiced in it with a romantic fervor. He saw the President as "a kind of magnificent lion who can roam widely and do great deeds so long as he does not try to break loose from his broad reservation."

The heroic view of the presidency is powerfully fortified by modern U.S. journalism, with its insatiable demand for personalities, action and movement, and its versatile technology. TV, in particular, gives new dimensions and intensities of exposure that are a priceless opportunity, and ever present danger, to a President. The heroic view of the presidency of course includes the possibility of failure on a grand scale.

Richard Neustadt of Harvard, in his classic Presidential Power, stressed the limitations. The most concise presidential summary of the "limited" view came from Truman, a strong President who didn't always get his way: "The principal power that the President has is to bring people in and try to persuade them to do what they ought to do without persuasion." Truman affected a view of the presidency as a kind of martyrdom and called the White House "a prison." In fact, he relished the job and, aside from his intense partisanship and flashes of pettiness, performed well at it. Lyndon Johnson, when the self-pity was running strong,