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Smartly and appealingly positioned at the intersection of theory and practice, Joseph Cerami's book is an essential resource for students and researchers in search for a coherent picture of policy innovation and leadership of U.S. and U.N. efforts to design and implement Weapons of Mass Destruction policy initiatives.
Author Roman Popadiuk served in the Bush White House from 1989 to 1992 as deputy assistant to the president and deputy press secretary for foreign affairs. In that capacity, he was closely involved with many of the day-to-day decisions of the administration during a momentous period that saw the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the rise of a new global coalition, the curbing of a dictator’s expansionist policies in the Middle East, and shifting domestic, economic, and political currents. In this important volume, Popadiuk examines the ways in which the personal leadership style of George Bush influenced the formation and execution of policy. Popadiuk composes a mosaic of events, quotations, and observations that yield a broad view of the ways in which a president’s personal qualities and philosophies impinge upon leadership options. General readers and public service professionals will find The Leadership of George Bush informative and enlightening, and scholars of the presidency and public policy will discover new avenues for research on both the Bush administration and executive leadership and policy.
This book examines how presidents from Nixon to Obama have faced the challenges of global leadership in a dramatically changing world—one with more limited resources and an increasing number of threatening challengers. The immediate post-World War II era was undeniably a period of American power and influence. Even during the Cold War, the United States was the leader of the West, exerting wide-ranging power internationally. But beginning with the Vietnam War, America began experiencing a series of setbacks and challenges to its power. The Post-Heroic Presidency: Leveraged Leadership in an Age of Limits examines how U.S. presidents have attempted to reverse or contend with this new era of limited power in which presidential leadership is hamstrung due to an increasingly globalized and interdependent world—one where power is more diffuse and the system of checks and balances bind a president in an age of hyper-partisanship. The book examines presidents of the 20th and 21st centuries, explaining how the first U.S. president to confront this new age was Richard Nixon, who—along with Henry Kissinger—developed a sophisticated approach to deal with the recalibration of American power. It documents how other recent presidents have either tried to make peace with limited power (Jimmy Carter), reverse the decline (Ronald Reagan), ignore the implications of limits (George W. Bush), or find ways to lead that were less ambitious, more prudent, and less unilateral (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama). In the cases of Clinton and Obama, this shift to using "soft power," persuasion, and multilateralism earned them criticism that they are "weak," thereby undermining their efforts to lead—both at home and abroad.
As the controversial presidency of George W. Bush draws to a close, this work provides the first dispassionate, even-handed assessment of Bush's years in office. Widely respected scholar and author Steven E. Schier goes beyond the perspective of contemporary political commentary, and draws on wide-ranging literature about presidential history and strategy to carefully identify both the unique and the familiar aspects of George W. Bush's presidency. "Panorama of a Presidency" examines Bush's innovative electoral and governing strategies, ambitious foreign and domestic policy initiatives, and the bitterly divisive consequences of his mode of governance. As the first analysis to place the George W. Bush presidency in a broad historical and theoretical context, the book will be an essential foundation for any future studies on the topic.
The research objectives of this book are to analyze the leadership of three presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as well as to examine the impact of the presidents’ leadership on the leadership characteristics of the advisers they worked with during their presidencies.
This book uses hundreds of hours of newly opened interviews and other sources to illuminate the life and times of the nation’s forty-second president, Bill Clinton. Combining the authoritative perspective of these inside accounts with the analytic powers of some of America’s most distinguished presidential scholars, the essays assembled here offer a major advance in our collective understanding of the Clinton White House. Included are path-breaking chapters on the major domestic and foreign policy initiatives of the Clinton years, as well as objective discussions of political success and failure. 42 is the first book to make extensive use of previously closed interviews collected for the Clinton Presidential History Project, conducted by the Presidential Oral History Program of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. These interviews, recorded by teams of scholars working under a veil of strict confidentiality, explored officials’ memories of their service with President Clinton and their careers prior to joining the administration. Interviewees also offered political and leadership lessons they had gleaned as eyewitnesses to and shapers of history. Their spoken recollections provide invaluable detail about the inner history of the presidency in an age when personal diaries and discursive letters are seldom written. The authors producing this volume had first access to more than fifty of these cleared interviews, including sessions with White House chiefs of staff Mack McLarty and Leon Panetta, Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, National Security Advisors Anthony Lake and Sandy Berger, and a host of political advisors who guided Clinton into the White House and helped keep him there. This book thus provides a multidimensional portrait of Bill Clinton's administration, drawing largely on the observations of those who knew it best.
In this expanded third edition, renowned scholar Stephen Skowronek, addresses Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Skowronek’s insights have fundamentally altered our understanding of the American presidency. His “political time” thesis has been particularly influential, revealing how presidents reckon with the work of their predecessors, situate their power within recent political events, and assert their authority in the service of change. A classic widely used in courses on the presidency, Skowronek’s book has greatly expanded our understanding of and debates over the politics of leadership. It clarifies the typical political problems that presidents confront in political time, as well as the likely effects of their working through them, and considers contemporary innovations in our political system that bear on the leadership patterns from the more distant past. Drawing out parallels in the politics of leadership between Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt and between James Polk and John Kennedy, it develops a new and revealing perspective on the presidential leadership of Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump. In this third edition Skowronek carefully examines the impact of recent developments in government and politics on traditional leadership postures and their enactment, given the current divided state of the American polity, the impact of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, of a more disciplined and homogeneous Republican party, of conservative advocacy of the “unitary theory” of the executive, and of progressive disillusionment with the presidency as an institution. A provocative review of presidential history, Skowronek’s book brims with fresh insights and opens a window on the institution of the executive office and the workings of the American political system as a whole. Intellectually satisfying for scholars, it also provides an accessible volume for students and general readers interested in the American presidency.
In this study, which highlights a renewed emphasis in international affairs on regional studies, the co-authors provide an assessment of the revolutionary changes in the politics and security of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
