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In the United States we like to “rate” a President. We measure him as “weak” or “strong” and call what we are measuring his “leadership”. Yet, we cannot measure him as he were the whole government. Government includes thousands of man and woman. The President is only one of them.

His cabinet officers, his legislative leaders, his party, his political allies, all of them have their jobs to do. As they perceive their duty, they may find it right to follow him, in fact, or they may not.

In the early summer of 1952, before the heat of the campaign, President Truman used to contemplate the problems of the general-becoming-President should Eisenhower win the forthcoming election. “He’ll sit here,” Truman would remark (tapping his desk for emphasis), “and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

Eisenhower evidently found it so. “The President still feels,” an Eisenhower aide remarked in 1958, “that when he’s decided something, that ought to be the end of it … and when it bounces back undone or done wrong, he tends to react with shocked surprise”.

Truman knew whereof he spoke. With “resignation” in the place of “shocked surprise”, the aide’s description would have fitted Truman as well. He was no less subjected to that painful and repetitive experience: “Do this, do that, and nothing will happen”.

Long before he came to talk of Eisenhower he had put his own experience in other words: “I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them… That’s all the powers of the President amount to.”

His strength or weakness, then, turns on his personal capacity to influence the conduct of the men who make up government. But what is the nature of his influence and what are its sources?

Now that’s the problem before us: “powers” are no guarantee of power. The President of the United States has an extraordinary range of formal powers, of authority in statute law and in the Constitution. Here is testimony that despite his “powers” he does not obtain results by giving orders – or not, at any rate, merely by giving orders.

He also has extraordinary status, ex officio, according to the customs of our government and politics. Here is testimony that despite his status he does not get action merely by asking for it.

The constitutional convention of 1787 is supposed to have created a government of “separated powers.” It did nothing of the sort. Rather, it created a government of separated institutions sharing powers. And the separateness of institution and sharing of authority prescribe the terms on which a President persuades.

A former Roosevelt aide once wrote of cabinet officers:
“Half of a President’s suggestions, which theoretically carry the weight of orders, can be safely forgotten by a Cabinet member. And if the President asks about a suggestion a second time, he can be told that it is being investigated. If he asks a third time, a wise Cabinet officer will give him at least part of what he suggest. But occasionally, except about the most important matters, do Presidents ever get around to asking three times.”

There is a widely held belief in the United States that were it not for folly or for knavery a reasonable President would need no power other than the logic of his argument. But faulty reasoning and bad intentions do not cause all quarrels to Presidents. The best of reasoning and of intent cannot accomplish all. The task is bound to be more like collective bargaining than like a reasoned argument among philosopher kings.

Most who share in governing have interests of their own beyond the realm of policy objectives. The sponsorship of policy, the form it takes, the conduct of it, and the credit for it separate the interest of man in government despite their agreement on the end in view. In political government the means can matter quite as much as ends; they often matter more. And there are always differences of interest in the means.

So the President’s persuasiveness depends on something more than his arguments, his status and his formal powers, all of which we can summarize by his bargaining advantages.

The men he would persuade must be convinced in their own minds that he has skill and will enough to use his advantages. Their judgment of him is a factor in his influence on them.

The man who share governing in this country are inveterate observers of a President. They have the doing of whatever he wants done. They are the objects of his personal persuasion. They also are the most attentive members of his audience. These doers comprise what in spirit, not geography, might be termed as the “Washington community”. Members of Congress and of his Administration, governors of states, military commanders, leading politiciais in both parties, representatives of private organizations, newsmen of assorted types and sizes, foreign diplomats – all these are “Washingtonians” no matter what their physical location.

No matter how heterogeneous this community might be, all of them, though, are in one respect tightly knit indeed: they are all compelled to watch the President for reasons not of pleasure but vocation. They need him in their business just as he needs them. Their own works thus requires that they keep an eye on him.

Therefore, in influencing Washingtonians, the most important law at a President’s disposal is the law of anticipated reactions. The individuals who share in governing do what they think they must. A President’s effect on them is heightened or diminished by their thoughts about his probable reaction to their doing. And they base their expectations on what they can see of him. And they are watching all the time. Looking at him, at the immediate event, and towards the future, they may think that what he might do in theory, he would not dare to do in fact.

What such men think may or may not be true, but it is the reality on which they act, at least until their calculations turn out wrong. So what other men expect of him becomes a cardinal factor in the President’s own power to persuade.

When people in government consider their relationships with him it does little good to scan the Constitution and remind themselves that Presidents possess potential vantage points in excess of enumerated powers. Their problem is never what abstract Presidents could do in theory, but what an actual incumbent will try in fact. They must anticipate, as best they can, his ability and will to make use of the bargaining advantages he has. Out of what others think of him emerge his opportunities for influence with them. If he would maximize his prospects for effectiveness, he must concern himself with what they think.

In every move a President may make there are bound to be numerous aspects beyond his immediate control. So many things can go wrong that almost always some things do. The Washingtonians who watch a President professionally cannot afford to ground their expectations on the slippages and errors in his every effort. But these accumulate, and as they do men seek for the appearance of a pattern. Lacking a better base, they tend to rest their forecasts of the future on such patterns as they find. The greatest danger to a President’s potential influence with them is not the show if incapacity he makes todays, but its apparent relationship to what happened yesterday, last month, last year. For if his failures seem to form a pattern, the consequence is bound to be a loss of faith in his effectiveness next time.
As people can’t see everything he does all the time, the President need not to be concerned with every flaw in his day-by-day performance. But he has every reason for concern with the residual impressions of tenacity and skill accumulating in the minds of Washingtionians-at-large (and key particulars). If he cannot make men think he bound to win, his need is to keep them from thinking they can cross him without risk.

[From "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents" - Richard E. Neustadt]