Group Book Review: The President as Leader, Appealing to the Better Angles of Our Nature

Molly Sharp, Sarah Rubenstein

The President as Leader is written by Erwin C. Hargrove in 1998. The book is 240 pages long and is very informative. Although there is a lot of interesting information, we found it to be a bit repetitive and monotonous. We understand Hargrove’s ideal of the best president. He feels that a president should combine their intellectual strength with their morals and common sense. With these factors combined, he feels that the President should take insight on what the people want. Rather than be a blind and controlling leader the President should use rhetoric, like FDR, to relate to people. However he should not base his policies on ideas like Ronald Reagan, instead a leader must verify the facts before making an informed decision.

Hargrove often looks back to the political ideas of Machiavelli and Aristotle. He shows that presidents can and should lead morally and intelligently without leaving behind reality. Hargrove wisely integrates many scholars’ opinions to form the view of an ideal president. He greatly analyses the presidency’s of FDR, LBJ, and Ronald Reagan. While he likes many of their techniques, he also disagrees with many. He likes how FDR seems to care about the people, but did not like how he misled the country into war. Hargrove feels that LBJ should never have been president, and never would have been elected if he ran. He was only president because JFK died, and LBJ was clearly unprepared to take on the position of president. He was not a great leader, and was much better as an assistant leader; he simply tried to carryout the plans that JFK started. Reagan’s greatest flaw, according to Hargrove was his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. Hargrove feels that Reagan would have been a much better leader if he was initially honest about his involvement. Reagan is an example of how it is bad for a president to mislead the people.

Hargrove feels that “the presidency is a seat of power and an engine for policy making, but it is also a moral agent for the articulation of the ideals of American democracy” (178). We completely agree. Along with making policies to better the country, a president needs to uphold morals. We feel that Hargrove should have organized the book in a different manner so it did not sound so repetitive. He beings the book describing the characteristics of various leaders, then does specifics. He could have synthesized the information in a more effective manner. We feel that the chapters about the Presidents were not efficiently chronologically organized. He kept describing a quality and then jumping around the years to explain it. Chapter 1, we found, was very difficult to read because it was extremely boring. Although the book was informative, we would not recommend anyone to read it. The characteristics he described about a president were basically common sense. The other half of the book described certain presidencies, which you can just learn about in a history book. The book included more history than we expected, which was probably why it was so boring to us.