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A political-science classic proves its enduring relevance.
50: The number of years Richard E. Neustadt's Presidential Power has been in print since it was published, in April 1960.
6: The book's rank in how frequently it is still assigned in college courses on the American presidency, according to a recent survey of about 250 syllabi by Grand Valley State University's Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies. That's nothing short of remarkable for a book with a chapter called "The Sixties Come Next."
60: The number of cents my father's mass-market paperback copy of Presidential Power cost when he bought it new, in 1961.
My father was an insurance broker in our suburban New Jersey town, high-school educated and involved part time in local government. He'd read an article when Presidential Power was published the previous year saying that John F. Kennedy liked the book, and it turned out my father liked it, too. So did I when he passed it on to me, a high-school freshman and a budding politics buff, a couple of years later. "It's by a political-science professor, but it's a good read," he said. "Lots of good history about Truman and Ike."
I liked the book for the same reason my father did--its solid, suspenseful accounts of Harry S. Truman's confrontation with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower's mostly maladroit dealings with Congress. But JFK and general readers (enough of them to put the original hardcover version of Presidential Power on The New York Times best-seller list for two weeks) weren't the only ones Neu-stadt's book impressed. Political scientists thought a lot of it, too. "Presidential Power is truly one of the great books of political science," said The Journal of Politics in an early, not atypical review, and the book won the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Award as book of the year.
When I got to college, in 1967, Presidential Power was assigned in the first two poli-sci classes I took--strong evidence of how rapidly the book had come to pervade the grass roots as well as the heights of the discipline. Five years later it was featured in my grad-school seminar on the American presidency as the most important work ever published on the subject.
The reasons...