Stephen Graubard - The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama

Europeans often ask, and Americans do not always explain, how it happens that this great office, the greatest in the world, unless we except the Papacy, which anyone can rise by his own merits, is not more frequently filled by great and striking men. In America, which is beyond all other countries the country of a career open to talents, a country, moreover, in which political life is unusually keen and political ambition widely diffused, it might be expected that the highest place would always be won by a man of brilliant gifts. But from the time when the heroes of the Revolution died out with Jefferson and Adams and Madison, no person except General Grant reached the chair whose name would have been remembered had he not been President, and no President except Abraham Lincoln had displayed rare or striking qualities in the chair.

James Bryce,

The American Commonwealth

It is principally in relations with foreigners that the executive power of a nation finds occasion to deploy its skill and force. If the life of the Union were constantly threatened, if its great interests were mixed everyday with those of other powerful peoples, one would see the executive power grow larger in opinion, through what one would expect from it and what it would execute The President of the United States possesses almost royal prerogatives which he has no occasion to make use of, and the rights which, up to now, he can use are very circumscribed: the laws permit him to be strong, circumstances keep him weak.

Alexis de Tocqueville,

Democracy in America

This, the story of the American presidency in the years that began with Theodore Roosevelt, following the assassination of William McKinley, the third president so to be felled, is a tale of major institutional change, created in some measure by those who by accident, good fortune, or design came to hold that executive office, but also, more importantly, by the international circumstances that made the United States a world power. Increasingly seen today as an empire, greater, some insist, than any that has existed since the fall of Rome, The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama emphasizes those factors that have caused this political office to lose many of its most distinctive eighteen- and nineteenth-century features. Wars, hot and cold, fought or feared, led to an unprecedented expansion of presidential power, as prophesied by a remarkable student of Americas political experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville, many decades earlier. Foreign policy assumed an importance in the life of the nation it had never previously claimed, and if those who came to the White House were not, as James Bryce, Europes other great nineteenth-century commentator on the United States, understood, always great or striking men, the nation prospered, and not only in those periods when remarkable leaders came to the fore.

The tale of the twentieth-century presidency, which survives into the twenty-first, if George W. Bush is recognized as the disciple of Ronald Reagan, must dwell on all manner of political and moral restraints that atrophied, but also on weapons and intelligence, defined as the capacity for spying, that made war a very different thing from what it had been earlier in the century. Presidential leadership took many forms in the decades after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the principal tutors of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the centurys incontestably greatest president assumed office, and no less major permutations occurred after the only general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, left the Oval Office. An analysis of the presidency that recognizes three great divides, the first that brought Theodore Roosevelt to the White House, following the assassination of William McKinley, the second that carried John F. Kennedy with a very slight popular majority into the Oval Office, and the third that ended two troubled decades, the 1960s and the 1970s, with the election of Ronald Reagan by a very wide margin cannot be said to follow the more conventional presidential chronologies. Nor, for that matter, does it see the first Roosevelt as simply a warrior and an imperialist, the tragically martyred Kennedy as an accomplished political leader who left the nation an intellectually important legacy, and Reagan, the actor, as someone who had his moment in the sun, without much relevance for the world of the twenty-first century.