Originally claimed by Richard Neustadt, it can be argued that the President's power is in the power to persuade due to the lack of constitutional powers. The constitution gives legislative powers to Congress rather than the President, so the President must use persuasive techniques to pass his legislative agenda. These techniques may include economic perks like funding state projects for Congressmen to gain constituency support, or threats such as giving support for a Congressman's opposition candidate in primary elections. Further persuasion would be made towards the public whereby the President may go on TV shows to use his charisma in order to get the public to support his agenda which leads to constituency pressure upon Congressmen , for example Obama's TV appearances to gain public support for Obamacare.On the other hand, the President's power is not only in persuasion. The constitution provides the President with the power of pardon which can be used for political strategy purposes, e.g. President Ford pardoning Nixon for the Watergate scandal. Further power lies in the President's power to command the US military as commander in chief as well as declare national emergencies.
The presidential power of persuasion, which was first described by Richard Neustadt, is a thoroughly important one. It is by this method that the president politicks to have Bills of his choosing pass in Congress. It is by this method that the president secures his authority in matters such as the running of the federal bureaucracy. But there are those who suggest that, contrary perhaps to the wishes of the Founding Fathers, the president has acquired many powers extra to any persuasive facility.
The president could be seen to employ persuasion in influencing his Cabinet, and those who run the administration’s departments and agencies. He appoints the Cabinet and, since there is no honours system, which might have served as sufficient government patronage to guarantee affection and loyalty, he has to maintain his influence on these individuals. An example of this is the state of US secretaries of defense during the Obama years. Leon Panetta was Obama’s defense secretary in from 2009 to 2011, and it was partially on his orders that the mission to kill Osama bin Laden was undertaken. But he required persuasion from the president to do so (though even if that were not necessary, he could not have ordered the operation entirely without recourse to his superior). Similarly, the administration has often had difficulty with the actions of federal employees and contractors. Since the president has little direct power over these officials, he must rely on persuading his departmental heads to act. In any case, it is certain that loyalty to a president – and the charismatic persuasion this requires to a certain extent – could be seen to keep those employees or contractors with errant impulses in line.
Since the Cabinet is not as central an institution in the US as it is in the United Kingdom, the fact is that the president can ultimately disagree with or even refuse to summon its members; President George W. Bush held 49 full Cabinet meetings in the course of his time in office. With the absence of regular meetings, and a lack of a Cabinet tradition to resemble the British equivalent, the president does not need to persuade his Cabinet as the British Prime Minister might have to do. He can also largely dictate the functions of his Executive Office (EOP), for example.
The president frequently needs to intercede in Congressional matters in order to secure the outcome he favours. He does so by persuasion. Bill Clinton personally phoned Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky in 1993 in order to insist that she vote his way on the budget. Similarly, the existence of this power can also be seen in the instances when it falls through or does not work. When the Senate wishes to filibuster Obama’s judicial appointments, for example, it can take months for the president to get his way. There have been a remarkable number of judicial filibusters in Obama’s time in office. This could be seen to stand testament to his powers being limited to that of persuasion.
The president has many other powers, however; they are greater than persuasion alone and can be especially effective in combination. While he does have to go to Congress in order to declare war (and may have to persuade the legislators to do so), he does have substantial powers in relation to aerial campaigns, for example, which do not require Congressional authorisation because the numbers of soldiers committed are generally low. A current example is Operation Inherent Resolve (the much-criticised aerial campaign against ISIS), which did not require Congressional authorisation.
Other military matters, though, can be seen to have fallen flat when the president in office at the time has been unable to persuade. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, President Bush was held up from sending in the National Guard because to do so he needed the authorisation of governors. He did not receive this authorisation for a time, and was unable to do anything about it; and furthermore, the bureaucratic implements of the governmental bodies associated with deploying the National Guard were slow to act. Similarly, President Obama was unable to enact a no-fly zone over Syria in August 2013 because he was unable to persuade a sufficient number of members of Congress ahead of time; they did not pledge him support, and he withdrew the potential vote (though it must be noted that he did this not only because he worried about losing a potential Congressional vote – in practice the machinery was in place but the president himself was unwilling).
This military state of affairs exists largely by convention, however. The US president has already been granted the power to deploy forces of indeterminate size to deal with any potential future threat to the United States. This was the power which was invoked in the run up to the Iraq War in 2003, and it is the same one Obama used to back up his airstrikes on the Islamic State in September 2014. The existence of this power gives the lie to the notion that the president’s only power is that of persuasion.
The president is limited, however, in how he acts on many matters; he must secure the support of the Senate when ratifying treaties, for example, and cannot indefinitely delay legislation. His ‘line veto’ was declared unconstitutional in the 1990s, and a Congressional supermajority would override any veto on a piece of legislation. In this respect, he is limited by the powers allotted to him, and the political operator must resort to persuasion in order to have his way. The Kyoto Protocol was never put before the Senate, despite the intentions of Bill Clinton. The president in this case had no power to enforce his will on an unhappy Congress; the only tool he had was persuasion, and it did not work.
It must be seen, however, that the president still has a significant number of other powers in the realm of legislation. His power is in no way limited to persuasion when he can kill bills with his pocket veto – provided they reach his desk in the last ten days of a Congressional session. The use of the pocket veto is falling – Franklin D. Roosevelt used over 100 to Obama’s 30 – but it still represents a power beyond that of mere persuasion.
It seems clear that the president’s powers are not limited to persuasion alone. He has a federal bureaucracy behind him; the ability – as The Nation might have it – to make war, sometimes on grounds which Congress might disagree with, or find suspect; the continuing power of veto; and the ability to dismiss or clip the wings of his departmental heads. These are not insignificant, and they amount to far more in the realm of powers than mere persuasion.
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Few observers have had a more intimate view of life in the Oval Office than David Gergen. An adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, Gergen played a critical role in how these leaders honed and delivered their messages. In his best-selling book Eyewitness to Power, Gergen describes the leadership gifts and deficiencies that each brought to the White House, and he reflects on how the best leaders rally their troops. Gergen is a professor of public service at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he directs the Center for Public Leadership. In this edited e-mail interview with HBR’s Gardiner Morse, Gergen explores the roles of trust, transparency, and theatrics in the leader’s inspirational craft.
In Eyewitness to Power, you argue that it takes more than honesty and integrity to earn people’s trust, as Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter learned. How do leaders establish trust?
“Trust is the coin of the realm.” That’s an old saying, but it’s even more relevant for leaders now than it used to be. People these days are less willing to defer to authority than they were, say, a half-century ago, partly because they’re better educated and partly because in so many realms—politics, business, and religion come instantly to mind—they have been lied to and manipulated. So, leaders today can’t presume they have people’s trust at the outset. Often it’s the opposite. First, leaders have to earn people’s trust. Then they can mobilize them.
Personal integrity is obviously the bedrock. Few things can sabotage a leader more effectively than being perceived as a liar, as President Nixon and, to a lesser degree, President Clinton discovered. But we have also seen plenty of examples in politics and elsewhere of honest leaders who were surprisingly ineffectual. Jimmy Carter is a saint but fell short as president because the public wasn’t sure he could get the job done. To have faith in a leader, people must also believe in his or her competence and steadiness. That’s why it’s so important that leaders have both character and capacity. Each is essential to earning people’s trust.
What qualities make the best leaders so persuasive?
We tend to think of persuasion as the art of communicating well, and our best leaders have usually been great orators. One remembers Martin Luther King, Jr., or among twentieth-century presidents, the two Roosevelts, Kennedy, and Reagan. But great leaders need to do more than speak well. As Reagan said in his farewell address as president, “I won a nickname, the Great Communicator. But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things.”
Reagan recognized that to stir people, you must give voice to their own deep desires, inspiring them to believe they can climb mountains they always thought were too high. The leader and followers must unite around a shared vision. If there is a misalignment, a speech won’t work. Jerry Ford could’ve spoken with Lincoln’s eloquence and still wouldn’t have won people over with his pardon of Nixon; he believed in his heart that it was the best way to move forward, but he failed to get buy-in in advance, to build a shared vision. On the other hand, King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 wasn’t historic because he was so lyrical, though he was certainly that. It was the best of modern American speeches because he beautifully gave voice to people’s own dreams.
“Reagan recognized that to stir people, you must give voice to their own deep desires, inspiring them to believe they can climb mountains they always thought were too high.”
How do leaders use stagecraft without it being perceived as a type of deception?
Stagecraft has been a part of leadership throughout history, and when it’s done right, it’s an important tool. FDR told Orson Welles that the two of them were the best actors in America. Reagan once commented, “There have been times when I’ve wondered in this office how you could do this job if you hadn’t been an actor.” Even George Washington put theatrics to good use.
When the Revolutionary War ended, the British didn’t just pick up and go home, so American troops couldn’t either. When Congress wouldn’t pay them, officers in Newburgh, New York, stirred up a near rebellion. In a famous incident, General Washington strode before the officers, started to read a statement, then fumbled in his pockets and pulled out reading glasses. The men had never seen him wear glasses before. Washington said, “I have already grown gray in the service of my country, and now I am going blind.” The officers were so moved by his speech that they rallied around him and abandoned the rebellion. Some historians will tell you Washington didn’t really need those glasses—he was acting. And it was very effective theater.
Washington’s stagecraft worked because it came from an authentic core. Similarly, when Reagan pulled letters written by ordinary people out of his pocket and read them on national television, it was theatrics, but it was honest. He really did share the writers’ concerns, and the audience sensed that. On the other hand, phony stagecraft, which isn’t tied to truth or to an uplifting vision, will nearly always backfire, especially in today’s media-savvy world. When the Monica Lewinsky story broke, Clinton regrettably asked Dick Morris to take a poll about what he should say, and Harry Thomason rushed in from Hollywood to coach the president on wagging his finger into the camera, denying all. It blew up in Clinton’s face, and one of the most gifted presidents in recent times paid a huge price.
Humility in a leader can be a double-edged sword. When can it motivate followers?
President Eisenhower gained enormous self-confidence as he went through life. In fact, by the time he was talked into running for the White House, he believed he was the best man for the job. But Eisenhower never fell into the trap that some CEOs and politicians do, of believing the rules no longer applied to him or that he was any better than anyone else in the eyes of God. He was never arrogant or condescending, and he was thoroughly honest. That’s the kind of humility people respond to—not the kind we see in a Uriah Heep, which makes your skin crawl.
The public wants leaders who have inner steel. I believe Jerry Ford was one of the most underrated of modern presidents. But when he told the country early on, “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln,” people misread that as a lack of self-confidence and didn’t fully unite behind him. Humility like Ike’s, which conveys absolute assurance but at the same time acknowledges a leader’s equality with followers, can be truly inspiring.
Can a leader recover from a lapse in moral leadership?
Columnist Mark Shields says that everyone now knows that when you do something terribly wrong and are caught at it, the first rule of damage control is to get the truth out as soon as possible. Yet when trouble hits, he says, people always seem to embrace a second rule: Forget rule number one. And so we have had a continuing string of revelations and cover-ups that have been even more damaging: Nixon, Clinton, Enron, WorldCom, Tyco. . . .
It takes nerve for leaders caught in a lie to tell the truth and ask for forgiveness. It’s not just that they fear embarrassment; they fear destruction. But Americans are enormously forgiving: The Gennifer Flowers episode almost sank Clinton when he was running for president, but after he and Hillary appeared on 60 Minutes and he acknowledged his transgressions, the American people voted him in. Contrary to what Clinton’s advisers told him at the time, I believe that if he had admitted his mistakes with Monica Lewinsky and offered to resign, a majority would have rallied behind him. And we would have been spared those awful months of impeachment proceedings. Corporate executives might consider this the next time someone blows the whistle.
A version of this article appeared in the January 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.