PRESIDENTIAL PERSONALITY

PRESIDENTIAL PERSONALITY

This was written as a school paper for a 9-hour credit course titled "The American Experience" at The University of Texas at Austin in the Spring 1974 semester. This course consisted of 3 hours Government, 3 hours History and 3 hours English and had what today would be described as a heavily revisionist approach to history. The paper received an "A" grade. In lookng back from a perspective of more than 30 years, I find little in 2005 that I would change in what I wrote in 1974. The primary purpose in including it in my portfolio is simply storage but I have left it open to ratings if any reader feels so inclined.



There are a number of factors that determine how the President of the United States performs the duties of his office. Depending upon the viewpoint of the observer, the President’s individual personality may be seen as the most important of these factors, or as having little significance, or as falling somewhere between these two extremes. The first extreme is the attitude taken by James David Barber, and provides the theoretical basis for his book The Presidential Character.
Thomas R. Dye and L. Harmon Ziegler have adopted the opposite extreme as their focal point, and argue in favor of this view in their book The Irony of Democracy.

Barber says, “... a President’s personality is an important shaper of his Presidential behavior on non-trivial matters.” (1) According to Barber, “a President’s personality interacts with the power situation he faces and the national ‘climate of expectations’ dominant at the time he serves.” (P. 6), and thus the physical and psychological framework within which the President must operate is formed. Character, one of the three components that Barber says constitute personality (the other two components being world view and style), and defined as “the way the President orients himself toward life” (p. 8) is perceived as being the most important element in any analysis of Presidential behavior. In the concluding chapter of his book, Barber writes:

After a President has left office and there has been time to see his rulership in perspective,
the connection between his character and his Presidential actions emerges as paramount.
Then it becomes clear that the kind of man he was stamped out the shape of his performance (p. 445).

Dye and Zeigler, however, argue that:

The president functions within an established elite system, and he can only exercise power
Within the framework of the elite system. The choices available to the President are limited to those alternatives for which he can mobilize elite support. He cannot act outside existing elite consensus, outside of the “rules of the game.” (2)

Although at the surface level these two theories appear to be very dissimilar views, and perhaps even contain contradictory elements, further study reveals that the actual difference between the theories is one of emphasis. Both arguments concede that the President as an individual can, in fact, exercise a tremendous amount of power, but both also agree that the actual options available to the President are indeed limited by an elite power structure. Further, both theories hypothesize that the real power of the President rests in his ability to persuade, certainly a function of personality.

But Dye and Zeigler perceive the constraints imposed on the President by the elites as being much more severely limiting than Barber understands those same constraints to be. “The President does not command American elites, but he stands in a central position in the elite structure” (p. 247), is the stance taken by Dye and Zeigler. In this view, the President, from the center of the power structure, is an extremely effective tool for overseeing the enforcement of the will of the elite, and the only alternatives that may be exercised by the President are those that clearly fall within the boundaries of elite consensus.

Barber, on the other hand, contends that there is a great deal of freedom within the elite constraints placed on the President, and suggests that the individual personality of the President is the most significant factor in determining which of the choices open to the President will be selected. There is enough play in the system, Barber theorizes, that, at least for a while, the man at the center of power - the President - by the force of his personality can manipulate the power structure so that his administration becomes an extension of himself.

“Pluralistic ignorance” is the name given by Barber to what he considers to be one of the most important phenomena in making it possible for a man such as the President, at the top of a pyramidal power structure to effectively control those below him in that structure. Barber describes this concept in the following terms:

Divisions of labor create barriers to communication across specialties; the man at the top
can develop a certain amount of play in the system by varying his message as he relates to one segmented subdivision after another. (p. 83).

Describing how an individual takes advantage of this situation, Barber continues:

He places himself at the center of the information process, interpreting reality for officials only loosely linked to one another. They learn to come to him because he is the man who knows, and he in turn fosters this dependence and works to inhibit any extraneous horizontal communication (p. 83).

In support of his argument, Barber cites the example of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who perhaps more than any other President, was able to use this technique to acquire the power necessary to enable him to formulate policy that stemmed from the demands of his own personality. In the classification scheme devised by Barber, Johnson is labeled as an “active-negative” personality type, meaning that he invested a great deal of energy in the performance of his duties as President, but received little emotional reward for that effort. According to Barber, there are a number of significant characteristics common to the individuals contained within any given personality type, and these characteristics provide a psychological structure for the individual in which, to the greatest extent possible, he creates his own Presidency, setting the tone and providing a general direction for the making of policy. If this is actually what happens, the process should become apparent in any historical evaluation of the performance of a President.

And this process is in fact readily evident in the presidential behavior of Lyndon Johnson, who ultimately found the constraints of his own personality to be much more restrictive than those imposed on him by any elite structure.

Style is an extremely important element in the active-negative personality. Barber defines style as “... the President’s habitual way of performing his three political roles: rhetoric, personal relations, and homework.” (p. 7). With reference to the active-negative, Barber says his “political style is persistent and emphatic.” (p. 97). Further, continues Barber, “he is likely to extend his primary stylistic emphasis into his total style, to treat all occasions as if they were amenable to mastery by means of his main political habit pattern.” (p. 97).

Lyndon Johnson did exactly that. His stylistic emphasis was that of interpersonal relations, and he was a master manipulator of individuals, always acting in just the right manner to convince an individual to take the action Johnson desired. Barber describes how Johnson played the supplicant to those people he could not directly control, completely dominated and bullied those he did control, and belittled and condemned those who escaped his control by resigning. Johnson did extend this stylistic emphasis into his total style, attempting to use these same tactics to control the public. Quoting from another source, Barber says that “To Johnson, a crowd was to be breathed on, shouted at a bit, probed, amused, overwhelmed,” and “each assemblage became like a single person seated across his desk” (p.86). But when applied on such a large scale, this tactic failed him, as by varying his message to crowds who did have the means to communicate horizontally, he seemed to be inconsistent and actually lying, and lost the confidence of those he sought to control by gaining their confidence.

In keeping with his active-negative character, Johnson viewed his Presidency in very personal terms. Barber comments, “ His initial commitment to the war was in personal terms: ‘I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went’ “ (p.51). Barber goes on to cite a number of quotes that indicate Johnson considered military attacks against U.S. Armed Forces in Vietnam as attacks against his person, and perceived U.S. military responses to those attacks as his own personal response.

This type of self-concern on the part of an active-negative President, says Barber, is “primarily evaluative with respect to power.” (p. 96). The struggle for power is a matter of vital concern to a man like Johnson, who through the use of power is able to establish a sense of his own worth, compensating for an actual lack of self-esteem and confidence, which is one of the distinguishing traits of the active-negative personality type. Johnson’s “manipulative maneuvering, his penchant for secrecy, his lying, his avid interest in himself, his sense of being surrounded by hostile forces, and his immense anger all indicate, I think, a profound insecurity.” (Barber, p. 94).

Secondarily, says Barber, the self-concern of the active-negative President is “evaluative with respect to virtue.” (p. 96). It is in this element, expressed in a perfectionistic conscience, which provides the basis for the process of rigidification that must ultimately defeat the active-negative President. Unable to see new options that become acceptable as conditions change, the active-negative President, with his pre-packaged solution to a problem that no longer exists in the manner he perceives, becomes an anachronism.

For Lyndon Baines Johnson, this curse was the Vietnam was. By taking a course of strong military action and, as Johnson, being a victim of the very personal nature of his Presidency, understood having thus placed his own prestige, his sense of himself as a worthy being, on the line, he was committed to win or lose. There could be no middle ground. To reinforce this all-or-nothing quality, a moral flavor was given to the war by proclaiming that its purpose was to free the people of South Vietnam to control their own lives. But as it became increasingly apparent that the United States had made a colossal blunder in Vietnam, Johnson, true to his active-negative character, stood firm, and refused to recognize changing reality. He persisted to the end in following his failing line of policy, even though this action was to eventually force him to, in effect, resign from the office of the Presidency. So much of Lyndon Johnson the man had been invested in his policy that to admit its error would have severely threatened his sense of himself as worthy and competent, and that is a threat that cannot be faced by an active-negative character.

Barber has made a convincing presentation of his argument that the personality of a President profoundly affects his performance in that office, even though he is in fact limited by his role in the elite structure. There appear, however, to be many options available within that structure, and the President’s personality has ample room for expression. And Lyndon Johnson serves as an excellent example of the extent to which Presidential personality can and does affect Presidential performance.



(1) James David Barber, The Presidential Character, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), p. 6. Page numbers given refer to this edition whenever Barber is quoted.

(2) Thomas R. Dye and L. Harmon Zeigler, The Irony of Democracy, (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1972), p. 250. Page numbers given refer to this edition when Dye and Zeigler are quoted.