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Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters or Technicians? 1960 to Present
Tevi Troy
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.
$27.95, 256 pages, ISBN 0-7425-825-0.

The Modern American Presidency
Lewis Gould
Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
$29.95, 301 pages, ISBN 0-7006-1252-1.

Romain Huret
Université d’Artois


The industry of writing about American presidents never sleeps. Each year produces its own reams of commentary of the nation’s most important political figures. During the twentieth century, presidents took new governmental roles. Some were the product legislative intent, while others stemmed from the nation’s changing sense of itself, starting with the New Deal, as a community with growing public responsibilities. Two new books try to capture the components of this tremendous institutional change: Tevi Troy’s Intellectuals and the American Presidency pays considerable attention to intellectuals inside the White House; Lewis Gould’s The Modern American Presidency tries to synthesize the rich literature on the modern American presidency.

A former policy director for Senator John Ashcroft and a researcher at the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute, Tevi Troy is currently deputy assistant for policy at the Department of Labor. Intellectuals and the American Presidency explains how intellectuals entered the public sphere in the course of the twentieth century. Relying on the sociological New Class theory, Troy develops a novel argument to explain the “marriage” of intellectuals and presidents in the last decades of the century. Despite the vast body of research on the American presidency, few scholars have treated intellectuals as a serious political force inside the White House. Indeed, the story of Troy’s book revolves around the rising influence of intellectuals on presidents, starting with the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In 1963, the famous journalist Theodore White asked the White House historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. if he was a philosopher, a jester or a technician in the Kennedy administration. With this political chronicle, Tevi Troy hopes to bring a clear answer to White’s question.

From the very opening of the book, Troy’s argument focuses on intellectuals and their attempts to influence the political debate. Yet, Troy offers compelling evidence that liberal intellectuals had missed the action. The story of the book is one of disenchantment for these public intellectuals. Most “intellectuals in residence” became frustrated with their experience of power. This disenchantment dates back to the first president who used intellectuals to promote modernity and efficiency, namely, John F. Kennedy, who, according to his main counselor, Theodore Sorensen, referred to himself as “something of an ivory tower president”. When he chose Arthur Schlesinger, one of the twentieth century’s best-known historians, as intellectual in residence, Kennedy established the model for future intellectuals in the White House. Indeed, Kennedy put him to work in the only appropriate role he could find—that of a generalist intellectual, responsible for cultural exchange and relations with other academics. After Kennedy’s assassination, another historian, Eric Goldman, replaced Arthur Schlesinger. Yet, due to Lyndon Johnson’s disdain for intellectuals, Goldman took on rather innocuous tasks during his three years in the White House. The president’s ambivalence about intellectuals forced him to hire Goldman to appeal to intellectuals while rebuffing intellectuals in order to appeal to the public at large. As far as Goldman was concerned, part of his disenchantment derived from certain embarrassing incidents during his tenure, notably the rising opposition from intellectuals concerning the Vietnam War.

Unsurprisingly, in the next chapters, Troy underlines the central function of intellectuals during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Indeed, they lay the groundwork for the neo-conservative revolution. The best part of the book describes the complex links between Richard Nixon and one of his intellectuals in residence, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. As a liberal antiradical hired by Nixon, Moynihan helped shatter some categories and preconceptions regarding intellectuals in America. In the White house, he encouraged new types of thinking among Nixon’s aides and Moynihan’s friends in the academy and the intellectual world. As Troy concedes, the Nixon-Moynihan alliance helped move disaffected liberal intellectuals to the right and served as an important factor in the creation of a new conservative alternative. Similarly, Troy stresses the crucial role of Bob Goldwin, a Leo Straussian philosopher during the Ford administration. Even though he did not have a strong hand in policy creation, Goldwin brought in Republican intellectuals to consult with the president: many of them were part of the intellectual “counterestablishment”, to use Sydney Blumenthal’s famous notion. Moreover, his decision to opt for a position in the fledgling Washington think tanks community after his departure from the White House was a turning point. Importantly, this alliance between conservative think tanks and Republican presidents was consummated during the Reagan presidency.

Nevertheless, as it tackles the coming of the Reagan revolution and the end of the New Deal Order, the book becomes quite disappointing. Viewed as part of the liberal establishment, intellectuals lost their power with the development of anti-liberal and anti-statism discourse. Thus, Reagan and Bush refused to have a full time ambassador for intellectuals. Although the economist Martin Anderson was one of the most prominent intellectuals in Reagan’s administration, he quickly resigned. Therefore, at several points in the narrative, readers find themselves wondering if they are reading a book about intellectuals in residence or presidential policy. For instance, the long chapter on George Bush deals mainly with the Bush’s “vision thing”. Conversely, Troy dismisses intellectuals such as Jim Pinkerton who tried to bring in ideas like the New Paradigm and found themselves stymied by bureaucrats such as OMB Director Richard Darman who mocked Pinkerton’s approach, joking “Brother, can you paradigm?”. It is no coincidence that this anti-intellectual discourse should undermine Troy’s demonstration on the impact of intellectuals inside the White House.

In the end, the book fails to answer its central question: were intellectuals philosophers, jesters or technicians? Troy’s story remains a conservative narrative of intellectuals inside the White House. Due to a lack of analysis, Troy frequently downplays exogenous factors and minimizes the weight of political factors. Moreover, he refuses to clearly define “intellectuals” and lumps historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Eric Goldman together with highly ideological economists such as Martin Anderson, thereby blurring the lines between intellectuals and experts. Importantly, Troy fails to integrate the rich political and sociological literature on expertise and intellectuals networks.

With his book, The Modern American Presidency, Lewis Gould avoids such pitfalls. Gould is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a well-known figure in the presidential field: he has already written scholarly biographies of William McKinley (1980) and Theodore Roosevelt (1991) for the American Presidency series of the University Press of Kansas. Very honestly, Gould acknowledges in his Introduction that his book is mainly “ a history of the emergence of the modern presidency in the twentieth century for general readers” (xi). In other words, this book is a narrative of the modern presidency, not a structural and organizational analysis of the rising of presidency and bureaucracy throughout the twentieth century such as Stephen Skowronek’s brilliant studies of presidential organization. Gould’s definition of the modern presidency is rather elusive and includes a wide array of elements: “a significant increase in the size of the White House, a chief of staff to manage the expanded personnel, bureaucratic procedures to handle the interaction with the press, formalized relations with Congress through a White House office, greater power for the president as commander in chief, expanded travel in and out of the United States to build political support, increasing access to and dependence upon both traditional and electronic media, and continuous campaigning to ensure reelection and the success of the president’s party” (xi-xii).

In the first chapter, Gould tries to debunk one of the reigning clichés of presidential scholarship: the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the modern presidency between 1933 and 1945. Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, the president still was “Our Fellow-Citizen of the White House”. Nevertheless, Gould questions the well-ridden stereotype that McKinley was weak and irresolute. Both as McKinley’s chief of staff and press secretary, George B. Courtelyou played a crucial part in modernizing the presidency. Courtelyou helped digging the foundations on which the modern presidency would grow. Indeed, as Gould contends, Courtelyou codified procedures and set the precise duties of the clerks and secretaries and specified the hours and procedures when the White House would be open. Nevertheless, when the concept of the modern presidency is moved back to the early twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt is seen as its embodiment. In his use of publicity and relation with the press, he became a model for future presidential success. His treatment of Congress showed how legislative goals might be achieved. Moreover, as a diplomatist, he pushed the boundaries of the presidential leadership on the world stage. Gould writes some insightful comments on Roosevelt’s famous Tennis cabinet, where the president met with important government players to hammer out policy, politics, and electoral strategy. Conversely, Taft’s one-term presidency came to be regarded as an interregnum. Taft made little use of the practices that Courtelyou had instituted a decade earlier.

By contrast, as Gould demonstrates in the next chapter, Woodrow Wilson was a major actor in the development of the modern presidency. His domestic programs foreshadowed aspects of the New Deal. His institutional breakthroughs such as addressing Congress in person and regular press conferences became staples of future presidencies. Then, Gould examines the legacy of the famous Republican triumvirat of the 1920s: Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, who have traditionally been regarded as conservatives presidents who failed to use the powers of the institution. According to Gould, lumping these presidents together obscures their actual contribution to the evolution of the modern presidency before 1933. Indeed, Gould rehabilitates the rising of the budget function under Harding, the development of communication tools under Coolidge and the efficient reforms under Hoover.

Importantly, Gould shows that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency was the major breakthrough in the history of the modern presidency. Roosevelt reshaped the public expectations for presidential leadership, both inside and outside the country. As a successful war leader, Roosevelt took the presidency onto the world stage and ended the nation’s isolation from foreign affairs. It was now commonly held that the president had to ensure that international threats did not imperil national security, both with a strong military response and with a sound economic policy. Moreover, the Roosevelt administration became a model for future commentators: journalists are wont to track the first hundred days of each new president; programs are assessed by measuring the extent to which they resemble or depart from the New Deal and its legacy point. Even First Ladies are now judged according to the standards of accomplishment set by of Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s successors, Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, took the chief executive beyond his personalized style. The main contribution that Eisenhower made to the growth of the modern presidency was to make it acceptable for Republicans.

In the shaping of the modern presidency, the 1960s marked a turning point. After two decades of uninterrupted growth in the power of the modern presidency, the 1960s saw the first signs of popular questioning about the increasing authority of the American Executive. During the last two years of Johnson’s administration a series of shocks rocked the presidency, which subsequently lost some of its power and prestige. Once skepticism about the legitimacy of the modern presidency was introduced into the American political system, it proved impossible to restore the credibility that had once been attached to the office.

Nixon’s presidency deepened the gap between public opinion and presidents. Indeed, as Gould demonstrates, Nixon had a double impact on the evolution of the modern presidency. First and foremost, his involvement in the Watergate produced serious restrictions on the power and autonomy of future chief executives. The president also pushed for continuous campaign and violated the notion that the president should govern in a style that subordinated partisan considerations to the national interest. Conversely, in the evolution of the modern presidency, the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter seem to have been a six-year pause between Nixon and Reagan. Today, nobody questions Carter’s lack of political skills and his inability to deal with Congress and his party. Indeed, his presidency staggered from crisis to crisis, with a worsening economy and a deterioration in the nation’s position in the world.

Paradoxically, according to Gould, the presidency of Ronald Reagan may be viewed as an attempt to restore confidence in the modern presidency. Indeed, at the end of the Reagan administration, talk of the revival of the presidency during his eight years was commonplace. Yet, the spell that Reagan had cast was temporary, and his revival of respect for the modern presidency proved transient and did not brush off on subsequent presidents. As Gould argues, George Bush was lacking two main components of the modern presidency: the will to campaign continuously and the use of political celebrity. In trying to separate governance from campaigning, Bush only emphasized how interwoven these twin forces had become by the early 1990s. Even though Clinton’s presidency achieved some striking substantive achievements in the domestic sphere and some creditable results overseas, it ended as a “presidential soap opera of international proportions” (213) which was more harmful to the modern presidency than to the remainder of Bill Clinton’s second term.

The Modern American Presidency is perfectly tailored for general readers who wish to read a clear synthesis on the American presidency. Scholars may think that the analysis could have been stronger and they may question the methodological approach. In describing the rising of the modern presidency throughout the twentieth century, Gould pushes some of his arguments a little bit too far. At certain moments, the narrative overestimates political celebrity as a central component of the modern presidency, especially during the first decades of the twentieth century. More generally speaking, the concept of the modern presidency is more asserted than demonstrated and analyzed. Moreover, Gould downplays the relevance of exogenous forces in defining the power and limits of the modern presidents. There are several points in the book where the political and ideological factors appear to be somewhat secondary in comparison to the “character” of the presidents. This is a missed opportunity given the rich bibliography of the book. Nevertheless, in the tumultuous days following September 11, Gould offers us a clear synthesis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of modern American presidents.

 


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