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

action failed. Indeed, David A. Nichols argued persuasively that Eisenhower was resolute in dealing with the incident at Little Rock and that his dispatch of federal troops was a careful and constructive use of presidential power that was “smoothly executed” and contributed to the end of segregation in the South.¹² It made clear that the White House would be on the side of enforcing Supreme Court decisions. Had Eisenhower allowed Faubus to halt integration at the schoolhouse door, what good would that have done?

Finally, there is the case of Truman’s seizure of the steel mills. This is the only one of the three cases in which Neustadt’s argument that the president’s action was mistaken and a failure holds up without alternative interpretations. Perhaps Truman did overreact to the steel strike, and seizing the steel mills did him little good. But one case—or even three—does not establish that presidential power is only the power to persuade. Neustadt proceeded from an assumption and read his evidence to support the assumption he had already made.

Second, Defining Presidential Power Only as Persuasion Is Self-Contradictory

Neustadt prescribed presidential influence by making reference to the “vantage points” that the president possesses. He implied the precise nature of these vantage points, but they consist of three key elements: formal constitutional and legal powers of the president, presidential prestige (public approval), and the president’s professional reputation (among the political elites in Washington). The constitutional and legal powers of the president are precisely the sorts of “command” measures that Neustadt criticized: the veto, executive orders, military and emergency powers of the commander in chief, and so on. One might interpret Neustadt to say that some of these powers (such as the veto) can be used as instruments of persuasion when they remain as a threat rather than being explicitly used, but it is the willingness to actually use formal presidential powers when needed that makes them formidable.