The president's bully pulpit

President Biden spoke yesterday. He was doing the bedrock job of an American president. 

He was trying to persuade.

He urged Americans to come together and agree that democracy itself is worth preserving. 

“We’re facing a defining moment. We must with one overwhelming, unified voice speak, as a country, and say there’s no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America.”

Back in 1967 I heard a professor tell me that presidents have less power than most Americans think. Power is divided between branches of government. Just because a president tells an executive department to do something doesn't mean it gets done. Things only happen, Professor Richard Neustadt told us, when the president persuades people to do it. 

As Barack Obama put it, the president's job is "to explain stuff." Presidents meet the challenges of their moment by explaining the moment to a skeptical Congress and public. Lyndon Johnson persuaded a majority of Americans that laws that brought equality for Black Americans were overdue. Ronald Reagan persuaded a majority of Americans in 1984 that it was "Morning in America," and time to be optimistic again.

I want Biden to be good at the job of persuasion, especially now, amid the open flouting of democracy. Candidates proudly say they won't abide by the results of an election if they don't win--and they get more popular after saying it. We face a defining moment.

Lawrence DiCara attended that same class by Professor Neustadt. He has had a brilliant, and early, career in politics. He was elected to the Boston City Council shortly after finishing college and served on it for ten years. As a City Councilor he helped shape the development of Quincy Market, Copley Place, and the Charlestown Navy Yard. Boston is a very different and better place than it was back in the 1970s. DiCara has been intimately involved with development that shaped Boston's restoration into one of America's great and successful cities.

Guest Post by Lawrence DiCara

“The power of the president is the power to persuade.” That sentence was added to the lexicon of American political science by Richard Neustadt, a diminutive fun-loving professor; some of us dared to take his course as Harvard freshmen!

His head section person, Doris Kearns Goodwin, had just gone to Washington to work for Lyndon Johnson. His student Graham Allison was all but finished with his doctoral dissertation on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Neustadt had watched Roosevelt as a young man, worked in the Truman White House, and then he put together a bible for the Kennedy administration. The book has a position of honor in my bookcase at home. I believe that what he wrote over 60 years ago is as true today as it was then.

The president doesn’t act alone. The president’s power comes from the ability to persuade the people he needs to cooperate and act. These include the House, the Senate, the bureaucracy, and ultimately the American people. Is that not what Theodore Roosevelt spoke of as the bully pulpit? The President is not a glorified clerk. It is a position of true leadership and Dick Neustadt was in the background giving guidance to many political leaders over a period of decades with that in mind.

John Kennedy’s famous speech at the commencement at American University in June of 1963, the so called Pax Americana Speech, set the stage for the passage of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty a few months later. The treaty was supported by Republicans and Democrats. He was able to persuade each of them, and the American people, that we had to take a step back from the nuclear brinksmanship we had seen the fall prior.

Not only did I take Gov 154 in the fall of 1967, I later took a course at the Kennedy School when I was a graduate student. As part of that class Richard Neustadt dissected our writing. I still write the way he taught me. He was emphatic that Truman, for whom he had worked, would nearly exclusively use words with Teutonic origins. Kennedy – who was educated at some of the nation’s best schools - used words which had Greek and Latin origins.

Neustadt persuaded me to shorten my sentences. His lessons on presidential leadership persuaded thousands of people who became leaders in our nation and our world.

 

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