Reviews for The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House

The average rating for The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-19 00:00:00 Janet Kusch I feel like I should go easier on this book because it was conceptualized and written before the field of psychology decided to stop playing philosophical games and actually work on becoming a real science, but I won't because this book is another wonderful example of the pseudo-intellectualism that used to dominate the "soft" sciences. (And does, in fact, still dominate much of political science, with the maybe-exception of the quantitative methods that are slowly being adopted.) Drawing conclusions from observations and analysis is all well and good, but far, far too often the theorist lets his or her own biases significantly affect the theory. Barber's pejorative chapter on Reagan is a very, very good example. I was left with the impression that Barber had found every way possible to tell us that he thought Reagan was an incompetent idiot without actually outright saying the sentence, Reagan was an incompetent idiot. Overall, much of this book felt intuitive. Confident people that like to work make better leaders! People with self-esteem problems make terrible leaders! The evidence is questionable simply because much of it came from the recollections and memoirs of each President or the people near him, and a good portion of it after the fact. There always remains the question of how much of it is completely true and not just said to bolster (or slander) an image. That said, I doubt he would have been able to find any "perfect" evidence, and finding similarities in the various descriptions is about as close to decent evidence as one is likely to get in this kind of work. While not perfect, and certainly using a (mild form of) psychoanalysis is a bit on the antiquated side, the book does paint accurate portraits of broad personality types that can end up in leadership positions. If nothing else, it gives you something to consider about yourself and those around you.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-19 00:00:00 Kurt Schels 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.