A Presidency Upstaged: The Public Leadership of George H.W. Bush.

Powell, Richard J.

A Presidency Upstaged: The Public Leadership of George H.W, Bush. By Lori Cox Han. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2011. 242 pp.

The presidency of George H. W. Bush provided an intriguing test of the major scholarly works on the public presidency of the last several decades. Starting with Richard Neustadt, and continuing through Samuel Kernell, Jeffrey Tulis, and many others, it became a well-established maxim that success in the modern presidency depends heavily on a president's public communication skills. A litany of the most heralded twentieth-century presidents tends to coincide with the most skilled communicators. Indeed, it has been increasingly hard to imagine a successful president with poor, or even mediocre, communications skills.

In A Presidency Upstaged, Lori Cox Han offers a fascinating and useful look at the White House communications operation of George H. W. Bush. Normally, a book about the failed communications efforts of a president with a middling reputation would be of minor interest, but Bush's approach to communications was so divergent from other recent presidents that it provides us with a rare opportunity to examine a speculative question that has often crossed the minds of presidency scholars: Could a nonrhetorical approach to presidential leadership be successful in the modern era?

As Han argues in her opening and concluding chapters, the verdict, based on Bush's presidency, is likely to be "no." However, this conclusion largely stems from Bush's failure to win reelection to a second term and overlooks his overwhelming popularity during the first two-thirds of his presidency. The generally negative assessment of Bush's presidency is also largely based on the argument that he failed to establish a coherent vision of leadership in domestic policy, although this does not sufficiently account for Bush's apparent Madisonian view of deference to congressional initiative in domestic affairs.

Han provides us with a compelling portrait of Bush's approach to public rhetoric by drawing upon extensive archival materials from the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, most of which have just become recently available. (A minor nitpick: the book could have benefitted from more extensive interviews with former Bush advisors.) These materials show us a president with a deep aversion to the extensively stage-managed (and widely heralded) communications style of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. Bush sought to prove the case that a modern president could be successful through low-key managerial competence, rather than dramatic, rhetorical leadership. As such, presidential scholars were treated to a compelling (and rare) experiment.

Indeed, Han's research suggests that Bush was driven by a deep, inner desire to distinguish himself stylistically from Reagan, showing us a president with a patrician aversion to the Hollywood glitz of the Reagan presidency, accompanied by a fear of not being able to measure up to the Great Communicator. Since the Bush era was characterized by a rapidly changing media landscape and the emergence of the twenty-four hour news cycle, Han portrays Bush as serving in office at a transitional time, sandwiched between Reagan's mastery of the golden age of presidential news and Clinton's savvy use of the fragmented media environment that emerged. We see Bush as a president who fails to accept the demands of this new media landscape. Numerous detailed case studies of the Bush White House's approach to his most significant addresses lend further support for these findings.

For presidency scholars, the public side of George H. W. Bush's presidency remains an enigma. Bush had a deep disdain for the press, a view that intensified as his presidency progressed, but he provided more frequent and open access to reporters than perhaps any other recent president. Similarly, Bush disliked the public aspects of presidential leadership but spoke in public more than any other president to that point in history. Bush seemed to be offering an implicit deal to reporters--that he would provide them with extensive access and would reduce the overly scripted nature of presidential appearances in return for more positive, respectful coverage. While potentially honorable, this bargain proved naive in the end because it failed to account for the media's incentive structures.

Han's work fits nicely in a long tradition of detailed case studies in the presidency literature. Although she does not make this argument in A Presidency Upstaged, this book challenges the dominant paradigm in modern studies of presidential communications. The bulk of recent research in this field has sought to explain how presidential communications are shaped in understandable ways by the constraints and opportunities presented by the broader political environment--represented in the work of Jeffrey Cohen, Matt Eshbaugh-Soha, Jeffrey Peake, as well my own and many others--or by the institutional arrangements in the White House, explored by scholars such as Karen Hult, Charles Walcott, and Martha Joynt Kumar. A Presidency Upstaged reminds us how important the personal proclivities of individual presidents can be in shaping behavior in the White House.

--Richard J. Powell

University of Maine