Why Are Some Presidents More Powerful Than Others?

Each president has had the same set of constitutional powers bestowed upon him yet presidents today are in general more powerful than their earlier predecessors and some presidents can certainly be described as being more powerful than those that came directly before or after them. While it is true that in practice the powers conveyed to the executive branch by the constitution are not the full extent of a president’ s powers, this paper will attempt to address why one president’ s power seems to be greater than another’ s.

Persuasion, Prestige and Reputation

According to Richard E. Neustadt in “Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents a president’ s source of power is derived by his ability to persuade which is rooted in his public prestige and professional reputation,

“The essence of a president’s persuasive task, with congressmen and everybody else, is to induce them to believe that what he wants of them is what their own appraisal of their own responsibilities requires them to do in their interest, not his… Persuasion deals in the coin of self-interest with men who have some freedom to reject what they find counterfeit. (Neustadt 40)

Neustadt goes on to describe Washington as an “incestuous community where opinions of a president’ s professional reputation (and hence his power) are shaped from the inside,

“In consequence, their outlook on a president at any given moment will be affected by impressions of his will and skill then currently in vogue among observers like themselves. If he wants influence, therefore, he must concern himself with more than a tête-à -têtes in person or by proxy; his problem is no less than what all Washington may think of him. He has to be concerned with his professional reputation as a governor among all those who share in governing. (Neustadt 53)

Neustadt reasons that “What other men expect of him becomes a cardinal factor in the president’ s own power to persuade. (Neustadt 52) Neustadt offers direction at how the “incestuous community of powerful Washingtonian insiders assesses how the public perceives a president’ s prestige,

“They talk to one another and to taxi drivers. They read the columnists and polls and news reports. They sample the opinions of their visitors and friends. They travel in the country and they listen as they go. Above all, they watch Congress Congressional sentiment tends to be officialdom’ s pragmatic substitute for public opinion because it is on Congress, not the general public, that officials must depend, day after day, for legislation and for funds to keep programs and personnel alive. (Neustadt 75)

Evolution of Increasing Presidential Power

The modern incarnation of presidential power did not come about overnight nor is it as some contend strictly a phenomenon born after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’ s presidency. According to David K. Nichols in “The Myth of the Modern Presidency” the roots of the powerful modern presidents were being formed from the very beginning,

“Abraham Lincoln demonstrated the power and influence of the office on a scale unimagined by most twentieth-century presidents, and Andrew Jackson showed that a powerful modern presidency was possible, even necessary, in the context of a limited government. Indeed, it was the first presidency - the presidency of George Washington - that was the first to exhibit the elements of the modern presidency. The modern presidency was born not in the middle of the twentieth century but at the end of the eighteenth century. (Nichols 13)

Arthur Schlesinger saw the roots of what he called “The Imperial Presidency in the malleable interpretations of the Commander in Chief clause of the Constitution,

“The war power flowed into the presidency most particularly, as Lincoln saw it, in the presidential role as Commander in Chief. This marked the beginning of a fateful evolution. The Founding Fathers had held a limited and technical conception of the president’ s power as Commander in Chief. (Schlesinger 61)

Historically, presidential power in many respects can be illustrated by comparing it to the air that fills a balloon. The amount of power a future president can potentially wield is influenced by how far his predecessor was successfully able to push presidential power, without check, in his time. As the air in the balloon increases it becomes very difficult to contract, just as presidential power increases it becomes difficult to reign in. The exercise of these newly created boundaries of power are checked not only by congress but with the abilities and prerogatives of the office holder. He too can choose to push the boundaries of presidential power past their previous point.

However, the founders did not intend for the president to have unlimited power and as is often the case with law, the intention and the practice have radically diverged as the political scientist and President, Woodrow Wilson, points out in “Constitutional Government in the United States,

“Greatly as the practice and influence of presidents [have] varied, there can be no mistaking the fact that we have grown more and more inclined from generation to generation to look to the president as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader of both his party and the nation.” (Wilson Chap 3)

While “it is difficult to describe any single part of a great governmental system without describing the whole of it, “governments are living things and operate as organic wholes. (Wilson Chap 3) The Congress, being the constitutionally more powerful branch of government and the courts can choose to reign in the power of the president at any given time and indeed they have, though rarely. Just as the Supreme Court reigned in Lincoln’ s powers in ex parte Milligan in 1866 with the ruling that,

“No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of [the Constitution' s] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence, (Schlesinger 69)

Congress was able to pass the War Powers Resolution with similar intentions of reigning in presidential powers. In what has become a seemingly ever-increasing expansion of de facto presidential power as related to undeclared wars, the resolution was an attempt by congress to hold the president to account for military actions unilaterally taken without a congressional declaration of war.

Events: The Impetus for Increasing Presidential Power

As the then political scientist Woodrow Wilson deftly pointed out, what distinguishes or makes the president uniquely situated for a leadership role is his singularity and his visibility. It is the leadership of the president in this respect as a “unifying force that Wilson contends is “not inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention. (Wilson Chap 3) What is lacking in Neustadt’ s otherwise adroit tome is his failure to recognize the supreme importance that an event can play as this “unifying force in manufacturing presidential prestige and power.

Fundamentally speaking, both contemporaneous events and historical ones inside and outside of a president’ s control can make it easier, or more difficult, for a president to increase his power. While Neustadt discusses events to illustrate examples of presidential power in practice he doesn’ t give historical events the attention that they deserve in shaping perception of not only the president but also of public opinion. At times the potential targets of persuasion will have already been convinced by events or history outside of a president’ s control or abilities of persuasion. What these “constituents lack in their conviction, whether they be members of the public or Congress, is direction and presidents can enhance their power through leadership. The distinction may be subtle or non-existent to some but it is important to note that the difference between persuasion and leadership in this case is that the event opens up an opportunity for a potential exhibition of presidential power. In this respect it is impossible to separate the event from the perception of presidential leadership. The more significant the event historically, the greater the potential exists for a president to acquire power. However, keeping it is up to him.

Ronald Reagan may have had more power than his antecessor Jimmy Carter or his predecessor George H.W. Bush because of his ability to persuade but one cannot deny that his prestige and professional reputation were tied, erroneously or otherwise, to major events surrounding his presidency including but not limited to the Iranian hostage crisis, an assassination attempt, the Cold War and the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the end of stagflation and for some, a prospering economy. This is not a phenomenon unique to Ronald Reagan’ s presidency. Can one imagine the words of FDR in his inaugural address, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, without the backdrop of the Great Depression? FDR will certainly be remembered for the “New Deal but would he have been as powerful without the attack on Pearl Harbor or World War II? Would Lyndon Johnson have met with the same successes or even had the same policies and agendas without the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Would Franklin Pierce have wielded more power or been remembered more favorably had the attempted secession of the south taken place a few years earlier?

History is clear in that beyond persuasion, reputation or prestige, events will continue to shape and expand the powers of the presidency.