Clinton Rossiter sings in this book (The American Presidency: Harcourt Brace & Company, $2.95), like Virgil, of arms and the man—of the instruments of power concentrated in the White House, and of each President, from Washington to Eisenhower, who has wielded those powers. His mood is one part ecstasy, evoked by the sheer beauty and efficaciousness of those instruments, and one part adulation, which with even-handed justice he confers upon those Presidents who have enriched the White House armory and smitten the enemy hip and thigh. And his song (which here as in his last book, Conservatism in America, frequently echoes the rhetoric and rhythms of the late Harold Laski) is rich in metaphor and gypsy phrase.
Rossiter’s avowed purpose is to examine “coolly at a hot time the powers and limits, the strengths and weaknesses, the past and present and future of the American Presidency.” “Ecstasy” is, nevertheless, the mot juste: the Presidency “unites power, drama, and prestige as does no other office in the world. Its incumbent sits, wherever he sits, at the head of the table.” The power of the Presidency “moves as a mighty host…” ; that power “has not been poison,’ as Henry Adams wrote in scorn; rather, it has elevated often and corrupted never, chiefly because those who held it recognized the true source of the power and were ennobled by the knowledge.” The President enjoys an “aggregate of power that would have made Caesar or Genghis Khan or Napoleon bite his nails with envy.”
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