Leadership in the Modern Presidency.

• Author: Barber, James David

Leadership in the Modern Presidency. Fred I. Greenstein ed., Harvard University Press, $29.95. Greenstein, one of the most industrious and insightful political scientists, recruited essay writers to portray presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. He thinks the presidency "has become firmly institutionalized and is undergoing its own evolution '"By institutionalized, he means that the office is more likely to determine a president's performance than is the occupant's personality.

Greenstein sees the modern presidency as triggered by FDR in 1933. Since then, four major changes hue evolved: "increased unilateral policy-making capacity" (presidents give orders), "centrality in national agenda setting" (pushing, not reacting), "far greater visibility" (via media), and "acquisition of a presidential bureaucracy" (a big corporation, not a shoe shop).

That the presidency has got itself institutionalized-fixed beyond the person in the Oval Office-is questionable. Sure enough, the above four factors are standing at attention as each new president takes office. But some grab them and go, while others slack back. And even if a president can command those instituted factors, they point in no direction. For example, Greenstein is right when he sees the bureaucracy as available for presidents "to use, to abuse, or lose control aver discretionary policy making."

As for the evolution, doubts arise as well. The Roosevelt-TrumanEisenhower serial looks evolutionary as the welfare state stepped forward first beyond Roosevelt and then beyond Democrats. But thereafter the Darwinism begins to scatter, as when "Kennedy's Executive Office operating methods departed most dramatically from Eisenhower's in the area of foreign affairs" and as when "Johnson left office, American politics was becoming even more intractable for presidential leadership than it had been in the 1940s and 1950s," as well as the Carter to Reagan bump, which illustrates character and style more than instittional evolution.

More convincing than the theory are the bits of wisdom this book offers. Like King Solomon, Greenstein does not hesitate to pronounce straightforward lessons. Should the power of the White House be raised and firmed? It depends on what will be done with that power. If we get a punk president, he needs reigning in, not turning loose.

The collected...