Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders.

• Author: Hayward, Steven

THE TROUBLED PUBLIC MIND IS INcreasingly fixed on the idea of "leadership." The decline of religious and other mediating institutions has consequently magnified the political dimension of leadership well beyond its reasonable limits, especially for the person and office of the American president. The apotheosis--and nadir--of this phenomenon was reached in the campaign of 1992, in the form of the Ross Perot movement, and especially in the three-way debate in Richmond that resembled a Donahue show. This was the episode where President George Bush was stymied by a young questioner who wondered whether Bush could empathize with his "needs."

Having replaced a patrician president with one who says he "feels our pain," we are now watching this self-styled empathic chief executive get hoist by his own petard. But Bill Clinton is merely an egregious example of the now-typical practice in American politics of inflating the people's expectations about the capabilities of political leadership. This trend has been unfolding for many years, and could yet prove to be the undoing of the presidency regardless of the occupant. Such is one of the sober conclusions suggested by Forrest McDonald's magisterial intellectual history of the presidency.

McDonald's book should be regarded as the third in a trilogy of indispensable books about executive power, the other two being Harvey Mansfield's Taming the Prince (1990) and Jeffrey Tulis's overlooked 1987 masterpiece, The Rhetorical Presidency. Where Mansfield argued that executive power paradoxically secures free government by adopting some characteristics of tyranny, Tulis traced the way changes in presidential rhetorical practice over the decades have corrupted our constitutional order.

For his pan, McDonald, long regarded as at least a libertarian fellow traveler, thinks that "the presidency has been responsible for less harm and more good, in the nation and in the world, than perhaps any other secular institution in the world." But McDonald's researches leave him "not sanguine" about the future of the presidency and our republic, and he "does not see how anyone who lived through the 1992 presidential election could be."

McDonald, professor of history at the University of Alabama, is the ideal person to shed light on the irony that prompted him to write this book in the first place: the ideological split over "whether the enormous growth of the responsibilities vested in the American presidency has been...