The Presidency and Political Science: Two Hundred Years of Constitutional Debate.

By Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas S. Engeman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 288p. $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

The authors seek to present the perspectives on the presidency of roughly 60 classic and modern authors. Their intended audience consists primarily of “those students who enter college and who pursue graduate education in the twenty-first century” (p. xii). They aim to “carry forward” to such readers (and their instructors) a “legacy of learning” on the presidency, represented by the “vagaries of informed opinion” on the subject (p. xii).

The book is organized, for the most part, historically. Hamilton and Jefferson are followed by “Jeffersonians” and “Hamiltonians,” who in turn are succeeded by a large number of other types, including progressives (Chapters 4 and 6), constitutionalists (Chapters 5 and 7), liberal academics, Carter revisionists, and movement conservatives (Chapter 9). By casting a broad net over their subject, Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas Engeman recover for the field some overlooked writers, such as two from the 1880s, George Ticknor Curtis and Henry Clay Lockwood. Similarly, Tatalovich and Engeman's review of Richard Neustadt's contribution to the field is enriched by the attention they give to the less heralded scholarship of Herman Finer. The authors also provide a highly useful review of Edward Corwin's The President: Office and Powers (4th ed., 1957). The famous institutionalist, they argue, was more realistic about both the limits of presidential management and the reality of prerogative than most presidency scholars of his time.

Less positively, the breadth of this book's coverage seems to have been purchased at the price of an unevenness in depth. In the authors' review of the first presidency, for a significant instance, they do not adequately distinguish between the roles and ideas of the president himself and his first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. Washington, from this accounting, consciously set out from 1791 on to lead Congress through his cabinet. This is, to say the least, a bold reading in need of greater elaboration. Similarly, Tatalovich and Engeman have much to say about the “Jeffersonian model,” but little to offer with regard to Jefferson himself. As a generation of scholars has discussed (for a recent example, see Marc Landy and Sidney Milkis, Presidential Greatness, 2000), Jefferson intended his to be a party to end parties in the United States. Without knowing this about Jefferson, it is questionable whether the students whom the authors wish to enlighten will be coming away from this book with a true appreciation of Jefferson's role in founding a system that bears his name.

Tatalovich and Engeman make their most significant contribution in exploring early- to mid-twentieth-century debates over the presidency and the Constitution. This was a period of profound change in government and nation, and it is not surprising that amid such changes, debate on the presidency became endemic. The authors recover for today's readers Calvin Coolidge's idiosyncratic effort in his autobiography to combine prudence with partisanship in his conception of the president's role as public leader, and they devote an entire chapter to the debate of the 1950s and early 1960s between two celebrated political scientists and public intellectuals, Willmoore Kendall and James McGregor Burns, who used constitutional theory as a weapon of partisan and ideological battle.

Tatalovich and Engeman “condemn” (p. 8) the shortsightedness of Kendall and Burns (and many others) because they believe that the stakes in the intellectual history of presidential commentary are high. It is possible, “by looking comprehensively across American political history,” to “separate the fundamental truths about presidential power from the many transient beliefs” about the subject (p. xi). The truth, as the authors see it, is that the “Jeffersonians surely got the message wrong when they repudiated the Washington-Hamilton precedents in favor of a party-based leadership” (p. 106). It is interesting that they credit the relatively obscure Charles C. Thach, Jr., with getting the message largely right.

Thach was the author of a 1929 work that is now, thanks to a 1969 reprint edition (The Creation of the Presidency, 1775–1789), the standard account of the early history of Article II. Thach's historical detective work supports a conception of the presidency as an office of ample power, without need for institutional reconstruction. The presidency, as the Framers crafted it, is an office of powerful prerogative means directed at limited ends. The Constitution's separation of powers, Thach has convinced the authors, was designed to empower the president. “This point,” they write, “needs to be broadcast throughout political science” (p. 106).

Tatalovich and Engeman attempt to provide a common analytical frame of reference for their narrative by repeatedly returning to a set of six questions about the sources and reach of presidential power. The most important question, they believe, is whether presidents rely on prerogative or incumbency. Other questions relate to the influence of personality, party, and rhetoric, and the president's anticipated leadership in the realms of foreign affairs, legislation, and executive branch coordination. Although their use of these questions as a heuristic is at times forced and even perfunctory, they make good use of them in their final chapter. There, the authors simplify their taxonomy of writers on the presidency, settling upon a four-cell table, with three cells occupied. Hamiltonians support a strong presidency within a government of limited powers; Jeffersonians seek formal presidential weakness within a weak government; while progressives champion “strong presidents as essential for an administrative state of almost unlimited ends” (p. 221). It is clear throughout that the authors find the first alternative, which embraces prerogative, to be the most reasonable. Nevertheless, they are unsettled by the difficulties of placing limits on this necessary residuum of discretion, and end The Presidency and Political Science by expressing their fear that in the twenty-first century, the “expansive ends of contemporary government” will push the means of presidential power beyond what “this, or any, generation of admirers of the Founding is willing to bear” (p. 229).