Rethinking the Basic Models of Presidential Leadership: Eisenhower, Greenstein, and Federal Highway Expansion

Fred Greenstein famously presented Eisenhower's secretive “hidden hand” style as an alternative to Richard Neustadt's model of presidential leadership, which had emphasized the need for overt control over the legislative process. Yet both models assume that the most important component of presidential leadership is the ability to manipulate governing elites. This article shows that the 1956 Highway Act contradicts Greenstein's characterization of Eisenhower as a successful hidden-hand leader. Through archival research, I show that Eisenhower's role in the Highway Act—by far the most ambitious legislative program attempted during his administration—was a decisive leadership failure. This finding does not merely undercut Greenstein's assessment of Eisenhower's distinctive leadership style, however. It exposes problems that result from assuming that presidential success should be defined as the ability to control the political process by denying other political actors substantive input in decision-making and the ability to reach some decisions on their own. Greenstein and Neustadt—the originators of widely shared contemporary assumptions about the presidency—thus incorrectly theorized the presidency's place in the American constitutional system. By empowering independently elected legislators, the separation of powers incentivizes presidents with ambitious legislative agendas to accommodate the agency of other constitutional actors through a degree of transparency and deliberativeness. I conclude by sketching an alternative presidential leadership model to the one offered by Greenstein and Neustadt, one that accommodates rather than resists the Constitution's constraints.