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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]

Most political scientists assume that American presidents seek to optimize their chances of reelection and to maximize their policy preferences in strategic negotiations with their rivals. Presidents, however, have also been pressed throughout history to restrain their self-aggrandizing aims when confronted with what they take to be exigencies of governance. This article examines the governing challenges met by presidents of the early national and antebellum periods, and argues that the distinctive conditions of governance that defined the pre-Civil War polity motivated a pattern of unionist presidential restraint, prompting presidents to refrain from direct applications of federal coercion and to balance the interests of geographic sections of the Union. Presidents' preoccupation with unionism, this article argues, was ever present in this period. The article examines a diverse set of case studies to make this argument and concludes with a discussion of how changes wrought by the Civil War led to the emergence of new patterns of restraint exercised by subsequent generations of American presidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a theoretically informed and historically grounded perspective on ideology and ideologues is developed to address a paradox: while presidents play a central role in articulating socially diffuse ideologies, such as the soft-Statism of the New Deal or the anti-Statism championed by today's Republican Party, few administrations have been hospitable to ideologues, the True Believers who develop ideologies in the first place and are dedicated to their implementation. While institutional inducements to the presidential employment of ideologues have grown throughout the modern presidential era, differential inducements to their influence have been critical in explaining when, and how, both ideologues and ideology have intersected with the modern presidency. These differential inducements are exogenous crises, the regime characteristics of each presidency, and the personal traits of presidents. The interplay of these factors is charted from Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or FDR) through the Obama administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]