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Presidential Leadership from Presidents Washington To Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2008 Presidential leadership from Presidents Washington to Bush and beyond: assessing presidents within the cycled circumstances of institutional expectations Christopher Halverson Untiet Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the Political Science Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Untiet, Christopher Halverson, "Presidential leadership from Presidents Washington to Bush and beyond: assessing presidents within the cycled circumstances of institutional expectations" (2008). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 15284. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/15284 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Presidential leadership from Presidents Washington to Bush and beyond: assessing presidents within the cycled circumstances of institutional expectations by Christopher Halverson Untiet A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Co-majors: Political Science; History Program of Study Committee: Dirk Deam, Co-major Professor Charles Dobbs, Co-major Professor Kimberly H. Conger Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2008 Copyright © Christopher Halverson Untiet, 2008. All rights reserved. UMI Number: 1453097 Copyright 2008 by Untiet, Christopher Halverson All rights reserved. UMI Microform 1453097 Copyright 2008 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii 1. INTRODUCTION: 1 Toward a Theory of Cycled Leadership Circumstances 2. PRESIENTIAL LEADERSHIP THEORY: 24 Classical, Modern, and Institutional Perspectives 3. PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY FROM 1789 TO 1829: 53 Reconsidering Which President Defined the Era 4. CYCLED STEPS ONE AND TWO: 93 Presidents of Reconstruction and Great-Son Articulation 5. CYCLED STEPS THREE AND FOUR: 127 Presidents of Preemption-One and Grandson Articulation 6. CYCLED STEPS FIVE AND SIX: 163 Presidents of Preemption-Two and Disjunction 7. CONCLUSION: 194 What to Make of Cycled Presidential Circumstances? APPENDIX: 208 Figures BIBLIOGRAPHY 216 iii ABSTRACT A revealing way of assessing Presidential leadership comes through interpreting a President’s time in office within the six-step cycled circumstances of institutional expectations. Using historical biographies and reinterpreting the patterns of Presidential political time from Stephen Skowronek’s The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush, I develop leadership cycles of Reconstructive, Great-Son Articulator, Preemption-One, Grandson Articulator, Preemption-Two, and Disjunctive Presidents. I develop the thesis through a literature review and chapter describing Presidential history from 1789-1829. From here, I use the Presidential leadership types in my Washington, Jackson, Linocln, McKinley/Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Reagan cycles to understand why Presidents make the decisions they do and why we should understand the circumstances Presidents face before labeling them as great, average, or failed Presidents. I also speculate how the cycle offers predictable leadership characteristics for future Presidencies and the elections that have put Presidents into office throughout our history. 1 1. INTRODUCTION Toward a Theory of Cycled Leadership Circumstances “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.” -Abraham Lincoln Speaking about leadership in 18581 As leaders, do Presidents control their time in office or does the institutional time Presidents serve in control the President? Why are some Presidents considered great, others average, and others failures? Trying to answer these questions is central to an understanding of Presidential leadership. The first portion of question one is a variation of the question in Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan and the notion of whether the President is a leader or clerk. Neustadt focused his attention on the extent to which Presidential power is subject to the political circumstances in which Presidents find themselves. Their leadership is demonstrated less by unilateral command than by their mastery of the politics of bargaining or persuasion in the context of the dominant issues and actors of the day.2 The Neustadt approach is revealing and has its place for understanding Presidential leadership as a strategy Presidents use when trying to influence their national constituency. However, “the institutional time the President serves in controls the President” also has a unique place for understanding leadership. Here, Presidents should be assessed based on the 1 Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield,” June 16, 1858, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, ed. Roy Basler, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 461. 2 Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: The Free Press, 1990) 3-90. 2 circumstances they face while in office. For Presidents have different circumstances by which they take the oath within a spectrum of good, average, or bad policy commitments with strong sets of governing ideals constantly trying to counter each other. This makes it more challenging for some Presidents to use persuasion and set visionary agendas than it is for other Presidents. To explain, some Presidents find themselves in periods receptive to revision, where there is ample room for new policy proposals. Some Presidents find themselves in periods where the most prudent course is to simply follow the policies of their predecessors. Some Presidents find themselves in times where the policies of their predecessors are in need of marginal adjustment. And some Presidents find themselves in periods where mere adjustments to past policies can no longer gain enough political consensus to sustain effective governance. This much is clear from the history of individual Presidencies. The question I seek to address is whether these leadership circumstances of our various Presidencies can be formulated into a defined cycle. I will argue, here, that indeed they can. I will argue that not only do such leadership cycles exist, they exhibit six distinct recurring phases or steps, each with its own distinct complex of circumstances defining the relationship of the President to the institutional expectations for governing. Let’s begin by defining the six phases of circumstances I propose. The first phase is a revolutionary period of sweeping new policy changes based on a dominant set of ideals originating in the political circumstances of the time. This is followed by a second phase in which the same policy commitments are implemented and furthered using similar ideals. 3 Though the revolutionary policies continue to be implemented in phase three of the cycle, they are now challenged by a set of opposing policies that begin resisting the established revolutionary ways. By phase four, the revolutionary policy commitments continue to be implemented using the same set of ideals by which the revolution began, but in somewhat different forms due to the changing times. A second resistance phase then follows in phase five, again having opposing ideals to the revolutionary policy commitments. Finally, phase six completes the cycle with the original set of revolutionary ideals falling apart and another set rising to begin the cycle all over again in phase one of the cycle. To illustrate the cycle of circumstances, let us look at how the sequence played out from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt through Jimmy Carter. President Roosevelt entered the cycle during its revolutionary phase and used it to create cycle-defining policy commitments through the New Deal and foreign policies associated with World War Two. President Truman then implemented these policy commitments during phase two or the first implementation phase of the cycle. This was followed by President Eisenhower in phase three who used opposing ideals to resist the revolutionary policies that had started with Roosevelt. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (after Kennedy’s assassination) led within phase four of the cycle where they again implemented the revolutionary policy commitments of Roosevelt in different ways through the Great Society and the Vietnam War. Presidents Nixon and Ford (after Nixon’s resignation) led during phase five when the revolutionary policy commitments were again resisted. President Carter completed the cycle in a period where the governing policy commitments of FDR fell apart and a new set of revolutionary policy commitments arose Those new commitments can be identified with President Reagan 4 and the beginning of our current cycle. However with its completion, the FDR cycle, as we will see, became the fifth in what are now almost six complete cycles
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