Leadership in the Modern Presidency

Capa
Fred I. Greenstein
Harvard University Press, 1988 - 430 páginas

"A lively collection. Leuchtenburg on FDR is the best thing going in short form. Muir on Reagan is sure to cause a controversy. Greenstein is helpful and original as usual. And there's still more " --Richard E. Neustadt

In this presidential year the leadership qualities of occupants of the Oval Office have become yardsticks for aspiring candidates. What profile of qualities, both positive and negative, helps explain the performance of chief executives? In this book about the White House, nine eminent political scientists and historians present their assessments of the leadership styles and organizational talents of presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

Filled with anecdote and insight, this is an unprecedented opportunity to observe how the running of the office of President has been changed, subtly and not so subtly, by the management and personal styles of the various incumbents within their historical contexts.

The book vividly depicts each president. There is Roosevelt, "a real artist in government"; Truman, a strong executive who always managed to appear weak; Eisenhower, who cultivated the image of being "above the fray" of politics but was actually fully occupied with getting political results; Kennedy, who successfully projected the symbolic grandeur of his office; Johnson, a figure from classical tragedy; Nixon, who preferred a corporate to a political mode of operation; Ford, who placed healing the nation's wounds from Vietnam and Watergate above his personal political future; Carter, whose fall was as stunning as his rise was meteoric. The chapter on Reagan, whose own last chapter as president cannot yet be written, is an impassioned encomium of the president as a folk philosopher that is bound to be controversial.

These accounts of leadership by modem presidents are acute studies of how the presidency has become the first among equals in our tripartite system of government. This book will be important to political scientists, historians, and government officials, and the liveliness of its presentation and the quotidian impact of the men it describes will make it attractive to everyone interested in how we are governed and who is doing the governing.

 

Conteúdo

Toward a Modern Presidency
1
The First Modern President
7
Insecurity and Responsibility
41
Leadership Theorist in the White House
76
The Endurance of Inspirational Leadership
108
Paths Chosen and Opportunities Lost
134
The Corporate Presidency
164
A Healing Presidency
199
The Politics of Public Goods
228
The Primacy of Rhetoric
260
Nine Presidents in Search of a Modern Presidency
296
Contributors
353
Acknowledgments
419
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Sobre o autor (1988)

Fred Irwin Greenstein was born on September 1, 1930 in the Bronx, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from Antioch College in 1953. He spent two years in the Army, before receiving a doctorate in political science from Yale University in 1960. He taught at Yale and Wesleyan University before moving to Princeton University in 1973. He was chairman of the politics department from 1986 to 1990 and retired in 2001. He devised a checklist of six qualities used to evaluate the leadership styles of American presidents: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. He wrote or co-wrote nine books including The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader and The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton. He died from complications of Parkinson's disease on December 3, 2018 at the age of 88.

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