Richard E. Neustadt's Intellectual Contributions

Richard Neustadt made many contributions to the study of the presidency during his distinguished and prolific career. He began his own observations through total immersion in the institution itself. From 1946 until 1953, he worked first for the Bureau of the Budget and then as a member of President Truman's White House Staff. Among other opportunities, he learned from the wisdom of Roger Jones and the political insights of Charles Murphy. He dealt with high policy at very close range, managing somehow to complete a Harvard Ph.D. at the same time. The insights Neustadt acquired first began to appear in a 1954 American Political Science Review article, "Presidency and Legislation: The Growth of Central Clearance." This detailed account traced institutional development from first steps by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 through the Truman administration nearly two decades later. In 1955 another APSR piece, "Planning the President's Program," was published. This first discussed Dwight Eisenhower's 1954 legislative program, then showed how its preparation followed earlier precedents. Neustadt was interested in the survival of these legislative routines across the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations. "What gives this legislative staff work its vitality and staying power," Neustadt wrote, "year after year, administration after administration, is its orientation toward one of the cardinal decision-and-action-forcing processes in contemporary government." In a 1956 analysis, "The President at Mid-Century," Neustadt moved in a slightly different direction. Here he carefully distinguished between what presidents did and what the presidency did, arguing there were two tasks presidents could not delegate to anyone else. The president's first responsibility is as "maker of the residual choices no one else will make." The president's second personal chore is "as persuader of those otherwise indifferent or unmoved" (emphases in originals). These personal activities are crucial for two reasons. Obviously, they tell us what the president spends his time doing. Less obviously, but equally important, the needs of the president establish fundamental processes of the presidency. Choice requires information. Persuasion requires influence. Therefore the presidency is characterized by flows of information to the points of decision, decisions being made, and flows of influence outward in support of the decisions that have been made. Three major articles in three years marked Richard Neustadt as a rising star. But quite beyond that, they exhibited a way of thinking that Neustadt was to employ in virtually all his major contributions. Involved in high-level bureaucratic politics again and again, he was reflective enough to grasp the workings of institutions in which he was taking part, and gifted enough to discern crucial characteristics that shaped the larger institution. Having done so, he then shared his understanding in articles and books. In 1958, Richard Neustadt began writing his presidency book. He had read the existing literature and found that the presidency as he knew it was missing. In particular, there was nothing on what the president could do for himself. His private title for the book was "Primer for Presidents." As he wrote in the preface, "My interest is in what a president can do to make his own will felt within his own administration; what he can do, as one man among many, to carry his own choices through that maze of personalities and institutions called the government of the United States." Presidential Power was at once narrow and very complex. It was narrow because it focused on only one slice of the presidency. Presidential power was certainly a vital component, but there was much about presidency that lay beyond that topic. The complexity arose from what Neustadt said the president had to do to acquire power, to protect power, and to exercise power. In his explication of Neustadt's logic, Peter Sperlich showed that presidential power was a function of no less than twenty-six other variables. …