THE PRESIDENTIAL DIFFERENCE: Leadership Style from Roosevelt to Clinton.

• Author: Lichtman, Allan J.
• Position: Review

THE PRESIDENTIAL DIFFERENCE: Leadership Style from Roosevelt to Clinton by Fred L Greenstein Free Press, $25.00

FRED GREENSTEIN, WHO HAS written with great insight and creativity about the American presidency, undertakes in this book his most ambitious project. He seeks to lay bare the heart and mind of presidential leadership through systematic historical analysis. Greenstein's project is of great potential significance. The presidency is the pivot point of American government and there is much to be learned from the historical record of presidential leadership. Greenstein also achieves the remarkable feat of assessing recent presidents impartially, without undue bias or partisanship.

Yet the book fails to realize its promise. Instead, Greenstein falls victim to one of the fallacies common to recent presidential assessments, the deconstruction of presidential leadership as the sum of separate parts. The result is analysis according to arbitrarily selected categories, frozen in time, and fraught with unexamined tensions. In the search for objective standards of judgment, Greenstein misses what is perhaps the most crucial element of "presidential difference," the values that presidents represent and implement during their term.

After a brief introduction to the power and influence of recent presidents, Greenstein presents an analytical model for assessing past and future presidents according to six distinct criteria. These include the president's communication skills, his organizational ability, his political expertise, his capacity to develop a vision for the nation, his cognitive style, and his emotional intelligence. He applies this checklist to the experience of the dozen presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Through this analysis, he suggests the American people should be able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of past presidents and to select future presidents "with attributes that serve well in the Oval Office."

For openers, 12 presidents constitute too small a sample from which to develop or test a typology of presidential leadership. For example, Greenstein's examination of a president's "emotional intelligence" would have been greatly enriched by including Abraham Lincoln, who was subject to mood swings and bouts of depression. Did these qualities undermine his presidency, or enhance his compassionate, insightful brand of leadership? Should a candidate with Lincoln's personal traits be excluded from the...