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Presidential Lightning Rods: The Politics of Blame Avoidance. By Richard J. Ellis. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994. 262p. $29.95.
This book resurrects, and builds on, Pendleton Herring's more-than-50-year-old argument about the limits of presidential responsibility. Herring believed that presidents ought not to carry the full burden of accumulated grievances that follow from minor defeats and that effective presidential leadership depended, in part, on making lesser officials accountable for particular policies in order to protect the capacity and authority of the president. Richard Ellis firmly adheres to this view and uses it as the normative base for an empirical study of the conditions under which a president can deflect blame onto subordinates, or "lightning rods" (as he labels them).
Ellis's search for presidential lightning rods is painstaking, conscientious, thoughtful, and well crafted. He seeks them from among vice presidents, White House chiefs-of-staff, secretaries of state, other cabinet members, and even presidential spouses; and his search constitutes an interesting and original exploration of a phenomenon that has hitherto been taken for granted, rather than studied systematically. For this reason, Presidential Lightning Rods is a welcome contribution to the literature on the presidency. It points the way to further and necessary empirical research on the politics of blame avoidance and may possibly reopen a neglected but now very relevant debate about presidential accountability.
Unfortunately, Ellis's search for lightning rods yields few really solid examples. Of all the cases he analyses, only two--Ezra Taft Benson and Vice President Richard Nixon--fully conform to the author's strict definition of a lightning rod, that is, a presidential subordinate who not merely attracts criticism but deflects it away from the president.
The shortage of true lightning...