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Research sites for earlier presidents—George Washington through Calvin Coolidge—are distinguished from libraries for Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush, which are administered by the National Archives. Web sites and other information are provided for every president so that researchers can explore this treasure trove themselves. There is an extended discussion of Lincoln sources and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on scholarly editions of the papers of United States presidents. Richard Nixon's call for a thirty-year rule for opening government papers; Conduct of costly worldwide and secret operations without the knowledge of American citizens; Department of Defense's withholding of information related to the military in outer space.

Profiles former United States First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. Personal background of Johnson; Academic background of Lady Bird Johnson; Features of the documents on the private life of the former first lady; Achievements as first lady.

Scholars have long focused on President George Washington's dynamic and quarrelsome cabinet. Yet scholars often assume the cabinet played a static role throughout Washington's presidency. This article demonstrates how Washington gradually created the cabinet to provide advice, not fully embracing weekly meetings until faced with an international crisis in 1793. This article also examines how Washington sidelined the cabinet in the final years of his presidency, returning to individual conferences and correspondence. As a result, Washington ensured the cabinet remained institutionally weak and a tool for the president to use at will—a legacy that survives in the twenty‐first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1936 case of United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that the president is the sole organ of foreign affairs given implicitly through the commander-in-chief clause. With over 10,000 citations (Code of Federal Regulations) and 145 Curtiss-Wright references by attorney generals and the Department of Justice justifying presidential prerogatives, the imperial president is enshrined in law. Even with recent challenges, the Court remains steadfast to unilateral executive decision making. However, few studies identify when the executive branch first adopts the Court's newly constituted constitutional order, and few provide a systematic analysis of how presidents advance the sole-organ doctrine. Building on this scholarship I show that President Truman's cohesive narrative of asserted unilateral powers redirects development for future executives to claim unfettered discretion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the Louisiana State University's 1990 American Studies Fall Forum. Call for papers and participants; Contact information.

Scholars have long noted how President Franklin D. Roosevelt used a network of formal and informal advisors and executive agencies. Few if any, however, have noted the advisory role played by Anna Rosenberg during the war years. Using both personal and presidential papers, this article explores the diverse ways that Rosenberg assisted Roosevelt, including conveying the demands of African American leaders, supervising troubled agencies, and most important, serving as the president's alter ego in labor-management relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various published reports within the issue, including one by Kevin Coe and Michael Reitzes that examines the rhetoric of United States President Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, one by Mary E. Stuckey, Kristina E. Curry and Andrew D. Barnes that explores how a candidate's rhetoric connects them to the public and one by David C. Barker and Christopher Jan Carman that discusses political representation and voter choice.

This paper argues that we should revisit the common assumptions in the administrative presidency literature about political appointments. Specifically, it contests the notions that presidential politicization of the executive branch is intended only to enhance political control of the bureaucracy and is successful at doing so. Instead, the author argues that politicization choices are driven by patronage concerns, and politicization of the bureaucracy ultimately can make it harder for presidents to control the bureaucracy. The paper illustrates how one might theorize more generally about patronage politics in the White House and the impact of appointments on performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cites the international and interdisciplinary conference to be hosted by the Louisiana State University on October 18-21, 2000 which will cover relevant topics related to the United States prospect for the third millennium. Possible topics to be featured; Conference Series.

This article introduces two newly available sources of data on presidents' legislative programs. The first consists of administration legislative initiatives cleared by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for submission to Congress. We refer to these records as "OMB logs" because they record OMB's clearance actions on executive‐branch legislative proposals. The second consists of memoranda, officially called Statements of Administration Policy, that OMB sends to floor leaders detailing the president's position on legislation pending floor consideration. We compare these new data on presidents' legislative initiatives and policy preferences with those contained in currently available sources—The Public Papers of the Presidents and Congressional Quarterly's scoring of presidential positions on roll‐call votes—and with a long available but seldom used fifth source, the Congressional Record. Both new data sources list bills and legislative preferences that are not included in the currently available sources. We illustrate the value of these new data by calculating presidents' impressive "legislative effectiveness" in the House when all presidential initiatives are taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increase in digitized content available, new presidential research avails itself to more quantitative analysis. More digitized resources from government agencies and private and university repositories allow presidential scholars access to a broader universe of content. Data for analysis include digitized documents, oral histories, and data sets. Presidential scholars and researchers have the option to collaborate with programmers, computer scientists, and graduate students to become acquainted with current repositories and experiment with new technologies such as text mining and the R programming language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander Hamilton's writings, virtually alone among the framers, were invoked by President George W. Bush and his legal advisors as the cornerstone of the administration's assertions of sweeping executive powers in the areas of war and peace and national security. The Bush administration's conscription of Hamilton to justify its soaring claims of presidential power, however, represents a distortion and abuse of his views of the latter president's views, particularly those expressed in The Federalist Papers. With the loss of Hamilton as an intellectual pillar, President Bush's theory of a plenary executive power finds no support among the framers. Analysis of Hamilton's writings will repair his undeserved reputation as an apologist for expansive executive powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about George Washington as a presidential leader, but little attention has been given to one important aspect of the first president's administration: his role in funding and constructing the nation's new capital city in the District of Columbia. This article highlights Washington's involvement in the creation of the Federal City by focusing on the choices he faced and decisions he made regarding Washington, DC during the last six months he was in office and showing that in terms of this facet of his presidency, he was truly a hands-on leader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though scholars have developed theoretically rich and empirically sophisticated accounts of presidential behavior within the modern era, it is less clear whether these insights shed light on presidents who served in earlier periods of history. In this paper, I sketch an outline of the incentive structures faced by late- nineteenth-century presidents that focuses on their contributions to party building and use county-level data from 1876 to 1896 to show that presidents' core partisan constituencies were disproportionate recipients of federal post offices. While presidential incentives may have differed across history, presidents appeared to be well positioned to act upon them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To secure his reelection, President Richard Nixon tried to dismantle the New Deal coalition and form a new Republican majority; to do so, he attacked the monopoly Democrats had on racial and ethnic votes. Nixon's racial and ethnic politicking represented a rupture with past Republican ignorance of minorities; it was going to be one of his key legacies to his party. This article shows that, driven by consecutively defined electoral goals, his administration systematically favored group-specific measures over universalistic policies addressing common ethnic claims, and that these measures were accompanied by a divisive rhetoric and implemented in an antagonistic fashion. It argues that Nixon broke his promise to reunite the country, and used racial and ethnic politics as an instrument of electoral engineering rather than as a way to correct legacies of past discriminations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harold Koh, David Barron, and Martin Lederman, all legal scholars with a record of emphasizing limits on presidential power, changed their views when they became executive branch lawyers in the Obama administration. Koh found a way to justify President Barack Obama's unilateral use of force in Libya, while Barron and Lederman provided justification for the targeted killing, without judicial hearing, of U. S. citizens identified by the executive branch as senior operational terrorist leaders. This article considers whether these changed approaches can be justified by the scholars' changed roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how presidents use humor, specifically wit, as a leadership tool. It uses a sample of more than 500 exchanges between presidents and reporters covering the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Content analysis using deductive coding based on a typology of humor uses reveals presidents most often used neutral humor to deflect questions from reporters in order to avoid answering directly. This type of humor was used consistently throughout the years covered in the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the guest editors of the journal discuss various reports within the issue on topics including U.S. Supreme Court nominees, use of the presidential veto power, and presidents and divided government.

Foreign policy decision making during presidential transitions is an inherently difficult challenge. By examining the 1960-1961 presidential transition and resulting Bay of Pigs fiasco, this article demonstrates that there are six independent, causal variables that best determine the success or failure of foreign policy decision making during presidential transitions: national security decision-making structure, availability of information relevant to the substance and history of the crisis and its policy responses; focus of time and resources; relevant campaign commitments; 'newness' of the incoming administration; and 'inheritedness' of the policy. Three of President John F. Kennedy's most important Bay of Pigs decisions are explained using this six-variable framework. Drawing from the lessons of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, recommendations are offered for how to improve future national security transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President John F. Kennedy launched the most successful censorship campaign of the past half century. Its target was the Radio Right, an informal network of conservative broadcasters who reached millions of listeners across the country by the early 1960s. With Kennedy's encouragement, the Internal Revenue Service audited conservative broadcasters to impair their ability to raise money while the Federal Communications Commission discouraged radio stations from airing their programs. The success of the counter–Radio Right campaign contradicts postrevisionist interpretations of Kennedy as a president who grew toward greatness while in office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite very different historical and constitutional bases for how we nominate presidential candidates and elect presidents to office, as well as very different political processes (sequential versus simultaneous voting), both the presidential nominating process and the Electoral College are rooted in state elections, not a national election, and both create state winners and losers. Previous research has not explored the role of state influence or state self-interest in presidential elections. States that vote early in the nomination process benefit, as do battleground states in the general election, especially small-population states. Given the fundamentally different types of elections examined in this paper, it is surprising that very similar forces shape efforts to nationalize presidential elections. Popular reform options of both the nomination process (national primary) and the general election (national popular vote) focus on a single national election in which the nation's interests, rather than state interests, are paramount. This analysis of 2008 panel survey data shows that citizen opinions on nationalizing presidential elections through a national primary or national popular vote for president are based on strategic decisions defined by short-term electoral politics and long-term self-interest rooted in an individual's state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the manner and extent to which citizens' preferences regarding styles of political representation influence electoral choices, at both the nominating and the general election stages. Using unique survey data gathered for the purpose of examining this question, the authors focus on the 2008 presidential election cycle as an analytical case. They find considerable evidence that Democratic voters are more likely than Republicans to prefer a president who follows the wishes of the American public when it comes to making policy. Republicans, by contrast, are more inclined to expect a president to ignore public opinion, listening instead to his or her internal conscience. The authors speculate that this pattern helped John McCain capture the Republican presidential nomination, but diminished his chances of defeating Barack Obama in the fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars disagree about whether and how much campaigns persuade voters, they increasingly agree that campaigns inform voters about the candidates and help voters bring their votes in line with their interests. Some argue that campaigns serve mostly to help voters bring their choices in line with preexisting political predispositions. This paper examines the crystallization of voter preferences during the 2008 presidential election campaign. The authors rely on polls from each month of the election year campaign to assess whether and how the structure of vote choice changed. The results show that certain election day predictors of the vote—especially party identification—became increasingly important predictors of preferences during the election cycle. Even the increase in party effects is mostly confined to the period leading up to the party conventions, well before the general election campaign even began. The structure of preferences evolved over the course of the long campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the operation of the presidential advisory system during the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina crises in order to explain the marked differences in presidential crisis leadership performance during the acute phase of both crises. It first presents a conceptual framework for the systematic study of “crisis advisory configurations” around presidents, based on an integrated review of the advisory systems and crisis management literatures. Second, the framework is applied to George W. Bush's performance in three crucial crisis leadership task domains—sense making, decision making, and meaning making. The article concludes by identifying key challenges of building crisis management capacity around heads of government such as the U.S. president. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars attempting a positive reappraisal of Warren G. Harding's presidency claim that his political beliefs changed markedly during his short administration. This article concurs but suggests that revisionist writers underestimate the crucial part played in this metamorphosis by the president's clashes with Congress over cash compensation for war veterans. These confrontations shattered Harding's belief that the presidency and Congress could return to a cooperative working relationship after the tensions of the Roosevelt-Wilson era. The bonus clashes are, therefore, the defining moments of Harding's administration—eroding his partisan loyalty and forcing him to adopt the assertive, interventionist executive posture he had once criticized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon leaving office in 1976, Henry Kissinger donated the records of his telephone diplomacy with foreign leaders to the Library of Congress as his private property under restrictive terms that sealed them until after his death. Against claims that the materials were public documents or Nixon historical materials, Kissinger fought a legal battle to monopolize the history of his deeds. After almost thirty years, Kissinger unexpectedly agreed to release the documents to the National Archives, leading to their public availability for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports descriptive research concerning past presidents’ rhetorical leadership of the economy. Using the PERL logical text language, every presidential remark on the economy, unemployment, inflation, and the federal deficit is extracted from Public Papers of the Presidents from the Truman administration through April 2002. These data are coded for the frequency and relative optimism of presidential remarks on the economy. Statistical analysis shows that through time presidents have increasingly discussed the economy, and in more optimistic tones. Additionally, after controlling for actual economic performance and election year effects, some presidents spoke more often and more optimistically about the economy than others. The study also reports case studies of the president's economic rhetoric during the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations that illustrate the nature of presidential rhetoric during economic crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the duties of the United States Office of the Secretary. Main tasks of the staff secretary; Key contacts of the office; Conclusion.

Jimmy Carter's presidency lasted only one term before Ronald Reagan defeated him in 1980. Since then, scholars have debated—and many have maligned—Carter's legacy, especially his foreign policy efforts. The criticism of Jimmy Carter's foreign policies seems particularly mistaken when it comes to the Cold War. With the counsel of his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter exposed Soviet weaknesses, which included their global influence, economy, and record on human rights. Declassified government documents, census data, and the reflections of former policymakers and government insiders support a revised view of Carter's Cold War policies. The president's Soviet policies helped exacerbate the Soviets' domestic and international troubles, and were far more effective than earlier critics claimed in helping to end the Cold War and contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine stock market reactions to public company visits and the public comments made therein by five presidents (George H. W. Bush through Donald J. Trump) over three decades (from 1989 to 2019). We find striking evidence that investors value these visits during periods of unified government or when the president announces favorable policy. However, a president's praise during the visit and his popularity at the time of the visit do not appear to have an impact on investors' reactions. Our findings suggest that investors value affiliation with the president only when they perceive opportunities to obtain substantive policy benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American Indians are among the most underrepresented, yet heavily regulated, groups in national politics. While Indian nations maintain statuses as sovereign nations, they, and their people, remain affected by national policies addressing their treaty, land, resource, and civil and political rights. Theories of American Indian political incorporation suggest that Indian nations thus deploy interest group tactics to maintain or achieve favorable policy outcomes. We argue that coalition building, a ubiquitous lobbying strategy, enhances tribal policy advocacy and that "Native‐dominant" coalitions—those in which Native interests constitute a majority of members—are more influential than their non‐Native‐dominant counterparts. We test these claims using data from administrative rulemaking and find support for our hypotheses. We conclude that the unique particularities of tribal advocacy distinguish Native coalitions from those of other groups, and that their strategic lobbying choices may help to mediate representational disparities in policymaking by the executive branch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the prospects for executive branch coordination affect legislatures' willingness to expand or contract budgets for public agencies? A theory is advanced stating the conditions whereby Congress expands and contracts the budgets of U.S. federal executive agencies based upon the type of presidential loyalty displayed by agency heads, as well as whether Congress's policy interests are aligned with or opposed by presidents. One aspect of the theory posits that executive agencies' budgets exhibit relatively lower volatility in response to unreliable executive agency heads when Congress is controlled by a different party than the president compared to instances of unified party government. The evidence offers compelling, albeit mixed, support for the theory's testable predictions while gleaning novel empirical insights for understanding how the prospects for executive branch coordination via leadership appointees affect the contingent nature of Congress's decisions in shaping the funding of U.S. federal executive agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Campbell and Jamieson and Medhurst's foundational works on presidential farewell addresses assert that the form creates a sense of continuity, progressive perfection, and pedagogical affirmation and adapts to personal and situational exigencies to define a personal and administrative legacy for the outgoing president, as evidenced by the oft‐celebrated addresses of Washington and Eisenhower. However, at times these constraints are difficult to manage, particularly in the case of incumbents who were soundly denied a second term because of questionable administrative choices. In such cases, rhetors often turn to generic hybrids, combining forms and functions of different addresses to attend to complicated exigencies and audiences. The cases considered here infused the farewell's form with apologia, a speech of self‐defense, resulting in an inward‐focused address that failed to resolve important legacies. Examining the farewell addresses of three of the biggest electoral losers in history provides insight into the impacts these choices have on presidential legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends the analysis of how presidents influence popular beliefs and feelings about their parties to include Donald Trump's full term and the first 2 years of Joe Biden's presidency. The results from examination of hundreds of surveys confirm that both presidents, like their predecessors, have strongly influenced evaluations of their parties generally and of their congressional wings specifically. They have also had a powerful impact on assessments of their party's competence in dealing with the COVID‐19 pandemic and on voters' preferences in their midterm election. For the most part, Trump's impact has been notably greater than Biden's, whose influence generally matches that of earlier presidents. Trump also stands out as having a larger and more consistent impact on opinions of the opposition, and he is exceptional in continuing to influence his party's reputation and standing after leaving office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines documents that shed light on the presidency of Richard Nixon. Special or abuse of power papers; Congressional policy on presidential papers; Private-political-association standard; White House tapes.

Fighting the last war lays out the contours of a theoretical framework that explains U.S. presidential decisions to cut losses or double down on major post‐Vietnam military conflicts. The archival sources and principal interviews give readers an insider's look into presidents' conflict decision making. The article explains how the Vietnam War catastrophe shaped Presidents Reagan and Clinton's attempts to avoid a similar quagmire in Lebanon in 1983–1984 and Somalia in 1993, respectively. It then shows how new lessons from 9/11 and beyond shaped Presidents Bush and Obama's decisions to surge troops and employ counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq (2007) and Afghanistan (2009). While Vietnam‐era lessons remained important to all these presidents, pre‐9/11 they believed entrapment risks from incremental escalation were worse than de‐escalation risks. After 9/11, the logic flipped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past six decades, the presidential transition scholarship has grown increasingly rich, yet little systematic attention has been paid to the foreign policy activities of the president‐elect. The idea that the United States has "one president at a time" may be a constitutional reality, but it is also a political fiction, more honored in the breach than in the observance. This article demonstrates how U.S. foreign policy operates along several simultaneous tracks during the formal transition period between the election and inauguration. We develop and illustrate a new framework for understanding the underexplored role and significance of the president‐elect as a foreign policy actor during the era of the "modern presidency." By refuting the notion that the president‐elect is a nonentity, this article lays the foundation for more active exploration of the foreign activities of presidents‐elect and their impact on U.S. foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature examines the motivations and outcomes of high‐level public diplomacy, the international visits of top‐level leaders. That literature looks primarily at the impact of visits from major leaders, like U.S. presidents, on their approval from voters in the host country. This article asks, instead, whether visits to and from the United States can affect the approval of the foreign leader among their voters back home. Using monthly data from the Executive Approval Project for 32 nations from 1991 to 2020, results suggest that foreign leader travel to the United States improves their approval, but neither presidential nor secretary of state visits impact foreign leader approval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presidential cabinet has long been neglected by political scientists and political historians. The former tend to dismiss the cabinet as a noninstitution that has never transcended its lack of constitutional foundation; the latter have generally ignored it. Focusing on the progressive era, and upon one of Woodrow Wilson's most prominent cabinet secretaries, this article argues for a reconsideration of the presidential cabinet and its individual members as important policy and political actors during a time of increasing federal government competency but as yet unformed White House executive agencies and staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States' national security establishment lacks an integrated strategic planning capability. The current National Security Council ( NSC) system relies heavily on part-time committees that lack the clout and time to execute strategic planning. The president could overcome this difficulty by looking to President Eisenhower's NSC system. Eisenhower's NSC relied on a Planning Board-which was neither a part-time committee nor fulltime staff-to get realistic planning that was not captive to parochial interests and to foster a national, strategic mindset without falling prey to an ivory-tower mind-set divorced from reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article raises questions about the database of major presidential speeches proposed by Kevin Coe and Rico Neumann. Specifically, I argue that the rationale for the database is weak, the underlying philosophical problems are substantial, and the methodological flaws are serious, including a failure to follow their own criteria in the compilation of the database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of presidential-congressional relations is well studied, with scholars identifying party control as a strong predictor of presidential success in Congress. Although the research recognizes the importance of policy variation to explaining political processes, few have examined its impact on presidential success in Congress. This article holds that policy scope is important to explaining presidential success in Congress in that different policies engender different levels of conflict and participation in the legislative process. Using data on individual policy proposals from 1949 to 2006, I demonstrate that the policy scope of the president's legislative agenda not only affects the likelihood of presidential success, it also conditions the impact of expected effects on presidential success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeffrey Tulis based his book “The Rhetorical Presidency” on the empirical assertion that pre-twentieth-century presidents avoided communicating with the public on policy matters and instead directed their policy-oriented communications to Congress, in writing. Subsequent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that many of these presidents actually did communicate extensively with the American people on policy matters, rather than going through Congress. Some gave speeches or wrote public letters, while others utilized the façade of a presidential newspaper that featured commentaries widely understood to reflect the president's views. Presidential communications behavior during this era was much more variable, and far less influenced by one constitutional norm, than Tulis portrays in “The Rhetorical Presidency.” The variability is due to presidents attempting to accommodate conflicting views of their appropriate role in the constitutional order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a president's time is perhaps his scarcest resource, the strategic choices that determine its allocation are some of the most significant that a president and his aides will make. When and where a president chooses to travel, and what he does while he is there, can reveal a great deal about his priorities. This essay analyzes patterns of both international and domestic travel over the past five presidential administrations in order to provide the incoming president and his aides with information that will assist them as they decide when, where, and for what the next president should travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long a pilloried office, the vice presidency has become a significant government institution especially since the service of Walter F. Mondale (1977–81). Mondale and President Jimmy Carter elevated the office to a position of ongoing significance through a carefully designed and executed effort that required the confluence of a number of factors. Mondale's service provided his successors a more robust institution with new resources, enhanced expectations, and a successful model for vice presidential service. Subsequent vice presidents have benefited from Mondale's legacy but have exercised the office in different ways depending, to some degree, on the way in which the factors that shaped Mondale's term have played out for each new incumbent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role and impact of the vice-president in the U.S. federal government and the changing selection criteria for vice-presidential candidates. The changes in the vice-presidency dating from the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale are investigated. Details about the 2008 Presidential election and the vice-presidency of Dick Cheney are also included.

In this article, I extend the empirical discussion of the instrumental value of public opinion by exploring the uses of public opinion mail to advance the political goals of the Nixon White House, in particular in their rhetorical construction of public opinion. I draw on internal archival material from the Nixon White House demonstrating the Nixon administration's desire to use public opinion mail for rhetorical purposes and combine this archival analysis with a collected data set of public presidential statements referencing public opinion mail. I find that President Richard Nixon referred to public opinion mail to demonstrate the harmony of his position with the public interest, especially on salient issues, including the Vietnam War and the wage and price freeze, and to humanize his policy positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency (1987) is among the most influential accounts of the historical development of the American presidency. According to Tulis, the nineteenth-century presidency embodied the founders' proscriptions against the rhetorical presidency in several ways. Chief among these were that “unofficial” speeches were generally few in number and limited to vague, innocuous utterances that avoided specific policies or partisan debates. In this article we test Tulis's portrayal of the nineteenth-century “Old Way” by focusing on the presidential tour taken by Zachary Taylor in the summer of 1849. Taylor's speeches on tour, according to Tulis, were limited to the purpose of acknowledging greetings and expressing thanks for a town's welcome. Taylor's speaking tour was thus an archetype of the “laconic” style characteristic of the nineteenth-century Old Way. Our research indicates that Tulis's characterization of Taylor's tour is mistaken. We find that not only did Taylor discuss public policy throughout his tour but that the issue positions he staked out were harnessed to a strategic partisan agenda. These findings raise larger questions about the accuracy of Tulis's portrayal of a nineteenth-century Old Way governed by settled norms or an agreed upon rhetorical doctrine. Our research suggests instead that mid-nineteenth-century presidents were buffeted by competing expectations. On the one hand were the expectations and constraints that stemmed from the founders' plan for a president above party, and on the other hand were the expectations and demands that stemmed from the president's role as a party leader. Taylor's speeches reveal a president trying to navigate between these colliding expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1976 presidential campaign brought televised presidential debates back to the presidential campaign after a 16-year absence. Like every presidential campaign debate, the 1976 debates were carefully planned and negotiated before they aired in the fall. The negotiators, much like the negotiators in 1960, gained control of the negotiations as well as the debates. This article culls together information from many sources to reveal how the 1976 debates were negotiated between the Ford and Carter campaigns as well as the League of Women Voters. This article is part of a larger project to develop a theory of presidential debate negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]