Presidential Power

When Neustadt began teaching courses on the presidency in the mid-1950s, he found the literature remote from what he had witnessed from his vantage points in the White House and at the Bureau of the Budget. Presidential Power, published in 1960, was an effort to fill the gap between his personal experience of the presidency and the academic literature. Interestingly, four publishers rejected the manuscript before David Truman persuaded John Wiley and Sons to publish it.

The book was a masterpiece and an immediate success. In 1961, Neustadt won the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in 1960 on government, politics, or international affairs. Perhaps more significantly, President-elect John F. Kennedy read it. Since then, Presidential Power has sold over one million copies, has been reissued four times (with additional chapters), and has been translated into several languages. It remains today a commonly assigned book in both undergraduate and graduate courses on the presidency.

What is the source of its popularity over two generations of scholars, students, and presidents? First, Neustadt was a masterful writer. His writing style, in Charles O. Jones' words, is “forthright, certain, and clear.” The book is immediately accessible to a wide range of audiences. Neustadt was not preoccupied with method but with clarifying and illustrating his insights. He was at first bewildered, and later amused, that in 1960 the book was hailed as cutting-edge behavioralism.

Perhaps the best known dictum regarding the American presidency is that “presidential power is the power to persuade.” This wonderfully felicitous phrase captures the essence of Neustadt's argument in Presidential Power and provided scholars with a new orientation to the study of the presidency. The framework was strikingly different from those of Edward S. Corwin and Clinton Rossiter that had dominated presidential scholarship. These differences were to have important consequences for how many scholars would examine the presidency over the next four decades.

Neustadt saw the president operating in a pluralistic environment in which there are numerous actors with independent power bases and perspectives different from his. In most instances the president could not act alone because he shared powers with others. Thus, the president must marshal resources to persuade others to do as he wishes (the operational problem). A president cannot rely on expanding the institution's legal authority or adjusting its support mechanisms.

The emphasis on persuasion encouraged moving beyond Corwin and Rossiter. In Neustadt's words, “‘powers’ are no guarantee of power” and “the probabilities of power do not derive from the literary theory of the Constitution.” Power, then, is a function of personal politics rather than of formal authority or position. Neustadt placed people and politics in the center of research.

Following Neustadt's lead, scholars have been encouraged to focus on the people within institutions and their relationships with each other rather than to focus primarily on the institutions themselves and their formalities. It is not the roles of the president but the performance of those roles that matters. It is not the boundaries of behavior but the actions within those boundaries that warrant the attention of scholars.

The president's need to exercise influence in several arenas led those who followed Neustadt's perspective to adopt an expansive view of presidential politics that includes both governmental institutions and actors, such as the Congress, bureaucracy, and White House staff, and those outside of government, such as the public, the press, and interest groups. Thus, what has to be explained in studying presidential interactions include not only presidential decisions themselves but also congressional and public support for the president, press coverage of the White House, bureaucratic policy implementation, and sets of policy options prepared by the bureaucracy for the president.

Because Neustadt's approach does not assume presidential success or the smooth functioning of the presidency, the influence of bureaucratic politics and other organizational factors in the executive branch is as important to investigate as behavior in more openly adversarial institutions such as Congress.

Power is a concept that involves relationships between people. By focusing on relationships and suggesting why people respond to the president as they do, Neustadt forced us into a more analytical mode. To understand relationships, we must explain behavior. Describing it is not enough, nor is story-telling about interesting but unrepresentative incidents—a temptation that is only natural when writing about the presidency. Neustadt, however, was concerned with the strategic level of power:

Neustadt, then, is less interested in what causes something to happen in one instance than in what affects the probabilities of something happening in every instance. To think strategically about power, we must search for generalizations and calculate probabilities. Although he employed neither the language nor the methods of modern social science, Neustadt was clearly a forerunner. His emphasis on reaching generalizations about presidential power may have been his greatest contribution of all.

Whether we are interested in explaining the consequences of efforts at persuasion or prescribing a strategy to obtain or maintain resources useful in persuasion, the critical questions are, “What is the potential of persuasion”— with Congress, the public, or others? And specifically, “what is the potential of various persuasive resources with those whose support the president needs?” Seeking answers to these questions inevitably leads to explanations and generalizations.

In encouraging a new look at the presidency, Neustadt's approach did not supplant—indeed, it may have provoked—more traditional orientations to the study of the presidency: there continue to be important legal studies of presidential powers, and innumerable institutional histories, for example. Neustadt had no interest in supplanting this more traditional work.

Presidential Power has remained the most influential, and most admired, book on the American presidency for good reason. Its focus on the influence relationships of presidents operating within the presidency was a critical intellectual breakthrough. It forced us to broaden and clarify our thinking and encouraged us to emphasize explanation and generalization in our research. This is the legacy of Presidential Power into the 21st century.

The Kennedy School

There is an important a prescriptive element in Presidential Power. Neustadt's central motivation for writing the book was to offer advice to presidents to help them help themselves with their strategic problem of power, and he remained interested in the challenges of governing. His framework highlighted the president's operational problem of self-help in thinking about influence strategically. Neustadt's fundamental question is how best to think about the possible effects of the president's own choices on his own prospects for personal influence within the institutional setting of the presidency.

Neustadt never drew a distinction between policy and process, and was more interested in training public servants than in doing political science. He felt tying scholarship to governing was important, because governing is the primary reason we study politics. Given his interest in the applied mission of political science, he moved to Harvard in 1965 to help transform the Graduate School of Public Administration into the Kennedy School of Government. He was the School's associate dean and the first director of its Institute of Politics. Among other things, he developed the Institute's Fellows program that has brought many top political minds to Harvard.

Equally important, Neustadt was one of the principal architects of the Kennedy School's early development. He was active in articulating the School's mission, hiring its faculty, developing its curriculum, establishing a research agenda for the School, and designing and building the new graduate school campus. He forged relationships with academics, administrators, political figures, and students and developed scholarship and teaching that would be useful to men and women involved in governing.

Continued Public Service

Throughout his career, Neustadt served as consultant to presidents, including Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton, federal agencies, commissions, and legislative committees. During the 1960s, he was on the Democrats' platform committees and was a consultant to the Bureau of the Budget, the State Department, the Defense Department, the Rand Corporation, and the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1972, he was the chair of the Democratic National Convention's platform committee, and in 1977–1978 he was a consultant to the president's reorganization project in the Office of Management and Budget. In 1988, 1992, and 1996, Neus-tadt chaired the Advisory Committee to the Commission for Presidential Debates.

He studied U.S. and British decision making regarding the Skybolt missile system at the request of President Kennedy and published a book entitled Alliance Politics on the issue in 1970. In 1999 he published the declassified report to the president as Report to JFK: The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective. The Epidemic That Never Was (1983), written with Harvey V. Fineberg, focused on the Ford administration's policymaking regarding the effort to immunize the population against the swine flu. Thinking in Time (1986), co-authored with Ernest May, offered a widely-heralded primer on how to use history in making decisions and won the Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Contributing to World Order. He also wrote transition memos for the Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton administrations. Collected in one volume by Charles O. Jones (Preparing to be President), the memos (plus a new essay by Neustadt) provide key insights for understanding the critical process of launching a new administration.

An Exceptional Individual

There was much more to Neustadt than his many professional accomplishments. He was an energetic man with a delightful sense of humor. Above all he was a warm and caring human being. His home on Cape Cod bordered a pond, and he liked to paddle a canoe silently over to sunbathing turtles and count them before they sensed his presence. He held strong opinions, but expressed them gently. He was a devoted teacher, and two generations of students adored him for both his brilliance and his personal warmth.

He had an extraordinary willingness to help others—colleagues, young scholars, and students. He read whatever he was asked to read and was a masterfully constructive critic. Neustadt remained actively engaged in presidential studies, lecturing and writing until the very end of his life. While living in Britain, he was a frequent lecturer at universities and professional meetings, always willing to accept invitations and be helpful.

Neustadt had the good fortune to be married to two exceptional and loving women, to whom he was a devoted husband. After “Bert” Neustadt died of MS, he married Baroness Shirley Williams, the Liberal Democratic Leader in the House of Lords, in 1987. He kept a home at Wellfleet on Cape Cod, but the couple lived most of the time in England.

A Lasting Legacy

Neustadt received many honors in appreciation for his contribution to understanding the presidency. In 2002, the Smithsonian Institution awarded him the Paul Peck Presidential Award for distinguished service to the presidency. The Presidency Research Section of the American Political Science Association named its award for the best book on the presidency for him. He also received the Association's Charles E. Merriam Award, given to a person whose published work and career represents a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research, and its Hubert H. Humphrey Award in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist.

As a scholar, Neustadt wanted his research and writing to be useful to practitioners, while contributing to political science. As a teacher, he wanted to train others for public service. There can be no doubt that he achieved all these goals. The most influential figure in the study of the presidency for more than four decades, his insights about governing, his dedication to public service, his extraordinary decency, and his personal example provide a lasting legacy. Richard Neustadt enriched our lives and our profession, and we are much the worse for losing him.