Presidential Studies Quarterly articles from December 2002

Presidential Studies Quarterly archives from December 2002

From the editor.
December 1, 2002... A wide range of approaches characterizes research on the presidency. I have always viewed diversity as a positive feature of presidential scholarship, but I am concerned that we too often dismiss the work of those employing approaches with...

Knowing what really happened. (Articles).
December 1, 2002... Any historian of the presidency searches for evidence of motivation and causation. The historian of the modern presidency, therefore, is facing a problem that is growing more and more severe. Increasingly worried about such political...

Studying the polarized presidency.
December 1, 2002... Presidents are at the center of American politics. So to ask, "What do you want to know about the presidency?" is very close to asking, "What do you want to know about American politics?" For me, answering the latter question is easy, and my...

Who are these people?
December 1, 2002... Ever since the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, scholars have been in a quandary over how much they know about presidents. Nixon, we now have to say, was unstable in personality. The signs appeared well before discovery of the tapes, the latter...

A dose of law and realism for presidential studies.
December 1, 2002... Three decades ago, Thomas Cronin (1974) urged us to understand the presidency as it is and not through the lens of what he called the "textbook presidency." Nonetheless, there is still too much glorification of presidential power in the...

Why do they talk that way? A research agenda for the presidency.
December 1, 2002... I begin with two quotations and two facts. The quotations are elliptical and the facts curious. Their meanings are curiouser still. That seems to be the state of the art for the American presidency at the dawn of the millennium. Theodore...

Knowing what we want to know about the presidency.
December 1, 2002... The editor, George C. Edwards III, has asked an important question of presidential scholars: "What do we want to know about the presidency and why do we want to know it?" Acknowledging the centrality of the issue for our work, however, does not...

Presidential power and the research agenda.
December 1, 2002... This responds to George C. Edwards III's question, "What do we want to know about the presidency and why do we want to know it?" Let me begin with a top-of-the-head summary of lingering concerns on my part regarding further research...

Why do presidents fail?
December 1, 2002... What do we want to know about the presidency? As part of the future research agenda for presidency scholars, I would suggest two distinct but related issues: the first involves failed presidential decision making, particularly in the employment...

Presidency and American Political Development: a third look.
December 1, 2002... The past century dawned with hope that the presidency might advance the cause of progressive democracy. As first articulated by Henry Jones Ford in The Rise and Growth of American Politics ([1898] 1967), the idea was that American political...

The contemporary presidency: the permanence of the "permanent campaign": George W. Bush's public presidency. (Features).
December 1, 2002... One of the most conspicuous trends in the development of the modern American presidency is the emergence and growth of the plebiscitary presidency. Unlike their institutional forbearers who typically transmitted policy preferences directly to...

The law: the impact of antiterrorism policies on separation of powers: assessing John Ashcroft's role.
December 1, 2002... One predictable outcome of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, has been the expansion of presidential power. Political scientists have long noted how national crises serve to centralize power in the White House, and this moment in the...

The polls: policy-specific presidential approval, part 2.
December 1, 2002... In an earlier article for "The Polls" feature (Cohen 2002), I introduced a methodology to create monthly indices of foreign and economic policy presidential approval. I also described the trends in those series in that article. The advantage of...

Source material: Nixon's ghost haunts the presidential records act: the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.
December 1, 2002... On November 1, 2001, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13233, which instituted new barriers to obtaining access to former presidents' White House materials. If left to stand, the executive order would effectively nullify the 1978...

The Kennedy tapes.(The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, the Great Crises)(Sound Recording Review)
December 1, 2002... The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, the Great Crises. 3 vols. Edited by Ernest R. May, Timothy Naftali, and Philip D. Zelikow. New York: Norton, 2001. 1,882 pages, plus CD-ROM. Recordings of presidential meetings and telephone...

American Political Mythology from Kennedy to Nixon.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... By Richard Bradley. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 267 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238712 Richard Bradley's American Political Mythology from Kennedy to Nixon is an attempt to understand the political and cultural linkages between the...

The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... Edited by Leroy G. Dorsey. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. 270 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238713 Inspired by a conference on presidential rhetoric held at Texas A&M University in March 1999, this book contains ten...

Political Leadership for the New Century: Personality and Behavior among American Leaders.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... Edited by Linda O. Valenty and Ofer Feldman. New York: Praeger, 2002. 271 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238714 For decades, the use of presidential personality as an analytic tool has been an uneasy fit for presidential studies and for...

Power, the Presidency, and the Preamble: Interpretive Essays on Selected Presidents of the United States.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... By Robert M. Saunders. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. 155 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238715 The preamble to the U.S. Constitution offers in a single sentence a succinct synopsis of what the Constitution's framers hoped the new American...

Meanings of War and Peace.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... By Francis A. Beer et al. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. 215 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238716 In Meanings of War and Peace, Francis Beer investigates the foreign policy argument emergent at the end of the cold war,...

Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... By Steven Casey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 302 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238717 In Cautious Crusade, Steven Casey provides a well-documented examination of the evolution of Franklin D. Roosevelt's thinking and decision...

The Pueblo Incident: a Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... By Mitchell B. Lerner. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. 336 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238718 On January 23, 1968, the USS Pueblo, a lightly armed U.S. trawler outfitted with sophisticated electronic espionage equipment and...

The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy since Vietnam: Constraining the Colossus.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... By Richard Sobel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 241 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238719 The primary objective of The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy since Vietnam is to examine the relationship between public...

Vicious Cycle: Presidential Decision Making in the American Political Economy.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... By Constantine J. Spiliotes. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. 212 + xv pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238720 The goal of Vicious Cycle is to bridge the gap between political economy and political reality. We know that...

The Anarchist: a Novel.(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... By Daniel A. Coleman. Chapel Hill, NC: Willowbrook, 2001. 282 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0360491802238721 Few Americans are as well known as Theodore Roosevelt. On the other hand, few Americans have been as mysterious as Leon Czolgocz, whose...

Best article award for 2001. (Announcements).
December 1, 2002... A committee chaired by Professor Lyn Ragsdale of the University of Illinois at Chicago and including Professor Henry Graft of Columbia University and Professor Martin Medhurst of Texas A&M University selected an article by Professor William...