The Modern American Presidency: Second Edition, Revised and Updated

By Lewis L. Gould

Book Overview

When the first edition of this book appeared in 2003, it was chosen as a Main Selection of both the Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club and quickly became the standard work on the modern American presidency--from William McKinley through William Jefferson Clinton. In that original edition, Lewis L. Gould argued that, while the president may be the most powerful man in the world, most presidents have fallen well short of the daunting challenges that confronted them while in office.

During George W. Bush's two administrations, as Gould discusses in a substantial new chapter, those challenges grew in scope and ferocity, encompassing two intractable wars, natural disaster on an inconceivable scale, and a near-meltdown of the national and global economies. Unfortunately, Gould argues, President Bush was woefully unprepared for those challenges, failed spectacularly as a leader, and ultimately lost the public's trust. His failures further reinforce and underscore Gould's previous conclusions.

This new edition, like the first, offers a lively interpretive synthesis filled with intriguing insights into the presidency's evolution during America's rise to global prominence. Gould traces the decline of the party system, the increasing importance of the media and its role in creating the president-as-celebrity, and the growth of the White House staff and executive bureaucracy. He also shows us a succession of chief executives who increasingly have known less and less about the business of governing the country, observing that most would have had a better historical reputation if they had contented themselves with a single term.

Gould's sharply critical new chapter on George W. Bush's presidency notes how he and his associates extended the troubling trends of continuous campaigning, media manipulation, celebrity politics, and inattention to governance so characteristic of the modern presidential office. Gould also amplifies his commentary on the Clinton presidency and lays out the treacherous terrain that President Obama must now traverse.

Engagingly written for general readers and students in the classroom, but rigorous enough for the most demanding scholars, this book remains a must-read for everyone who cares about the future of our nation and the presidents who lead it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0700616845
• ISBN13: 9780700616848
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

solid starting point

This is a briskly paced overview of one hundred years' worth of presidents, from McKinley to Clinton (with a very brief mention of George W. Bush). That Gould starts with McKinley is notable, for historians have tended to place the origins of the modern presidency with his successor, Theodore Roosevelt. In tracing the development of the presidency as an institution, Gould follows a handful of key themes: (1) the rise of mass media and its effects on the presidency; (2) the rise of continual campaigning; (3) problem-ridden second terms; and (4) the decline of parties and its consequences. Only the fourth receives unsatisfactory treatment: Gould mentions it as a theme and never really follows up on it, and while parties as nominating and institutional forces may have declined with the spread of primaries, they surely play a larger role in today's polarized political atmosphere. Each president is assessed, and except for the somewhat unique argument for McKinley, the analyses are not surprising. Gould, for the most part, agrees with other historians' assessments. Not enough time has lapsed since Clinton, and the chapter he gets is weak; Gould opted to focus on the scandals and controversies. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is Gould's conclusion that the modern presidency is ill-equipped to deal with the problems of this century. Overall, a solid overview of the presidency.

Excellent overview of Presidency from McKinley to GW Bush

This book is both erudite and accessible, and it's an excellent survey of the modern Presidency, which Gould, a respected University of Texas historian, points out has been transformed in roughly the past hundred years from an intimate, folksy, at times nearly one-man operation into an unwieldy, unworkable, and dangerously out-of-touch apparatus that has far less to do with running the country than it does with raising cash, making meaningless appearances and feeding the media, and getting re-elected to a Constitutionally-allowed (and historically-mandated) second term that in most cases is a failure compared with the first term. (Can you think of a President since Franklin Roosevelt whose second term was more successful than the first?) Other reviewers of this book have pointed out that Gould's position on the evolution of the presidency is a paradox, since in order to be effective, the modern president must be a master of the perpetual campaign, and yet the perpetual campaign is what Gould believes is the bane of the presidency, transforming it into a position of celebrity and spectacle rather than one of leadership and policy. However, that is a paradox that needs to be examined more deeply in a philosophical context; this book is a survey, not a political science text, and Gould gets points for raising the paradox, which is a provocative one, in the first place.The book is full of anecdotes and lucid detail about the modern presidents, along with Gould's snappy and precise evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses of each, and the factors in the broader political culture of each man's term in office that changed the presidency forever. He is not particularly partisan in his political stance; he has good and bad to say about each president. There are many surprises in this short but rewarding book, and there are excellent suggestions for further reading at the back.