The replacements.

• Author: May, Ernest R.
• Position: 'Difficult Transitions: Foreign Policy Troubles at the Outset of Presidential Power', 'Preparing to be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neustadt', 'Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush' - Book review

Kurt M. Campbell and James B. Steinberg, Difficult Transitions: Foreign Policy Troubles at the Outset of Presidential Power (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 204 pp., $26.95.

Richard E. Neustadt, Preparing to be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neustadt, edited by Charles O. Jones (Washington, De: AEI Press, 2000), 250 pp., $25.00.

Peter W. Rodman, Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 368 pp., $27.95.

A successful presidential candidate has about eleven weeks to prepare for actually becoming president. This is when presidents--some at least--visibly struggle to learn from history, hoping to avoid repeating mistakes and to copy past successes.

The results have usually been mixed. Not paying much attention to earlier practices contributed to Jimmy Carter's stumbling through most of his single term. It marred the first terms of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But, then again, trying hard to take account of past failures and successes did not protect Harry Truman, John E Kennedy or Ronald Reagan from missteps that they later rued. (Among other things, all three concluded that they had appointed the wrong person as secretary of state--and for the wrong reasons.)

In recent decades, scholars and others of a studious bent have offered help. Two contrasting examples date back to 1960. One came from the Brookings Institution, which commissioned Laurin L. Henry to describe past handoffs from William Howard Taft to Woodrow Wilson in 1912-13 to Truman to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952-53. Heavy in every sense (755 pages), Henry's book, Presidential Transitions, was--and remains--an indispensable reference work, but it leaves it to the reader to search out any practical applications of its stories.

Entirely different in character were memoranda prepared for Kennedy in the same year by the great presidential scholar Richard Neustadt. Long known only by reputation or from snippets in works such as Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, these memoranda were finally published in 2000 by the American Enterprise Institute as Preparing to be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neustadt. Though Neustadt offered lively detail on past presidents, particularly ;DR and Truman, all his words were chosen to highlight the pros and cons of choices he knew Kennedy to be mulling.

Commenting to Kennedy, "You are the only person you can count on to be thinking about what helps you," Neustadt described FDR'S practices in terms exactly matching what he knew to be Kennedy's natural preferences. FDR, he wrote, had a strong sense of a cardinal fact in government: That Presidents don't act on policies, programs, or personnel in the abstract; they act in the concrete as they meet deadlines.... He also had a strong sense of another fact in government: That persons close to Presidents are under constant pressure--and temptation--to go into business for themselves ....

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Accordingly, he gave a minimum of fixed assignments to the members of his personal staff.

Of the two models provided by Henry and Neustadt, the former has been the one most often and most successfully imitated. Steinberg and Campbell's Difficult Transitions, the newest entry, has an appendix summarizing more than two-dozen books and articles published since 1960 on transition problems and approaches. Most are straightforward histories or reminiscences by transition veterans. None matches Neustadt, for, as Charles Jones writes in his introduction to the collected Neustadt memoranda, Neustadt in 1960 was a "governing insider." Even Neustadt, when asked for counsel by later presidents-in-waiting, could respond only as a "contemplative outsider." And that is the best description for most writers who have tried not only to report the history but to say what it might mean in practice.

There is one major exception. In 1968 Henry Kissinger was a member of a Harvard study group that prepared memoranda for Richard Nixon were he to be elected.

The chair was Professor Philip Areeda of Harvard Law School, and the memoranda can be found among his papers in the school's archives. When surprised after the election by being named Nixon's national-security adviser, Kissinger became able not only to offer advice but to put in practice recommendations that Nixon accepted. He became in the very fullest sense a "governing insider."

Now, in the authors of Difficult Transitions, we have writers who combine, as Neustadt did, both academic understanding of the...