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| Inventing the Job of President: Leadership Style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson
ISBN: 9781400831364
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
How the early presidents shaped America's highest office
From George Washington's decision to buy time for the new nation by signing the less-than-ideal Jay Treaty with Great Britain in 1795 to George W. Bush's order of a military intervention in Iraq in 2003, the matter of who is president of the United States is of the utmost importance. In this book, Fred Greenstein examines the leadership styles of the earliest presidents, men who served at a time when it was by no means certain that the American experiment in free government would succeed.
In his groundbreaking book The Presidential Difference , Greenstein evaluated the personal strengths and weaknesses of the modern presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Here, he takes us back to the very founding of the republic to apply the same yardsticks to the first seven presidents from Washington to Andrew Jackson, giving his no-nonsense assessment of the qualities that did and did not serve them well in office. For each president, Greenstein provides a concise history of his life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Washington, for example, used his organizational prowess--honed as a military commander and plantation owner--to lead an orderly administration. In contrast, John Adams was erudite but emotionally volatile, and his presidency was an organizational disaster.
Inventing the Job of President explains how these early presidents and their successors shaped the American presidency we know today and helped the new republic prosper despite profound challenges at home and abroad.
Fred Irwin Greenstein was born on September 1, 1930 in the Bronx, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from Antioch College in 1953. He spent two years in the Army, before receiving a doctorate in political science from Yale University in 1960. He taught at Yale and Wesleyan University before moving to Princeton University in 1973. He was chairman of the politics department from 1986 to 1990 and retired in 2001. He devised a checklist of six qualities used to evaluate the leadership styles of American presidents: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. He wrote or co-wrote nine books including The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader and The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton. He died from complications of Parkinson's disease on December 3, 2018 at the age of 88. (Bowker Author Biography) |
