Tough Times for the President: Political Adversity and the Sour ...

First, the “Power to Persuade” Is Overstated

Neustadt assumed, rather than demonstrated, that any use of what he called “command” is a sign of the president’s failure and so politically costly as to be essentially self-defeating. But is that really the case? Consider the three “cases of command” that he used to demonstrate his thesis: Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur, Eisenhower’s 1957 use of federal troops to carry out racial integration at Little Rock Central High School, and Truman’s 1949 seizure of the steel mills. Not only did he mischaracterize these actions as “self-executing” (a peculiar designation, given that at least two of these cases required action beyond just the announcement of a presidential decision), but underlying each case study is the assumption that persuasion was a better option and that it would have worked.

Neustadt’s account of Truman’s dismissal of MacArthur is particularly problematic. His discussion of the case tends to emphasize that the general could and should have been fired sooner.¹⁰ How would that have been persuasion? Why would firing the general a year earlier have been any less public or messy? Truman, like Lincoln with General McClellan, endured bad behavior from a senior military officer because that commander had a reputation for success (and, in MacArthur’s case, some record of success). Given MacArthur’s personality, there is no good evidence that any amount of persuasive effort would have changed his mind or that earlier dismissal would have been less politically costly to Truman. But dismissing MacArthur sent a message to all military personnel—even beyond Truman’s day—about the power of the commander in chief and the control of the military by civilian authorities.

Consider now Eisenhower’s dispatch of federal troops to Little Rock. Neustadt asserted that taking this action was costly to Eisenhower,¹¹ but he implied rather than demonstrated what that cost was. Nor did he show that Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas was open to persuasion on the question of ending segregation. Given the subsequent violence that was employed by segregationists trying to stop implementation of desegregation court orders over the next decade, it is not clear how Eisenhower’s