The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House Book

Previous books assessing presidents tended to be rankings, best to worst. Barber asked the question, "Best for what?". He established an Aristotelian grid, with active-passive on one axis, positive-negative the other. The resulting four quadrants provided an analytical tool not only for evaluating past presidents, but also for predicting future performance. There is a clear danger of reductionism in this, and Barber concedes that no individual exactly fits a category.

Barber has a clear preference for those he feels fit in the active-positive quadrant (FDR, Truman and JFK). It's not surprising, then, that he feels the active-positives have the greatest chance of success. This flip side of this, passive-negative, are exemplified by two not often grouped together: Coolidge and Eisenhower. One wonders if forty years of historical hindsight might lead to another assessment of how Ike conducted his presidency. More tragic, though, both for the individuals as well as for the nation, are three Barber groups as active-negative: Wilson, Hoover, LBJ. The common pattern he detects in them is "a process of rigidification, a movement from political dexterity to narrow insistence on a failing course of action despite abundant evidence of the failure" (p. 18).

The heuristic value of Barber's analytic tool could be seen when he turned from analyzing the past to predicting the future, in the case of the then-sitting president, Nixon. Here, Barber's analysis led him to group Nixon with active-negatives, and to foresee the strong possibility of reacting rigidly to crisis. Barber admitted that, at the time of writing (late 1971), there was as yet no sign of it happening, but boy did events from 1972-74 bear him out.

Not the last word on presidential performance, but an eye-opener for me when it first appeared that gave me much to think about.