Richard E. Neustadt, RIP

Neustadt was the greatest public historian of his generation. His work was closer to political science than narrative history, but his clarity of analysis was unsurpassed in any discipline. I wonder what he thought of W? If this be (fair & balanced) speculation, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
November 3, 2003
Richard E. Neustadt, Historian Who Advised Three Presidents, Dies at 84
By THOMAS J. LUECK

Richard E. Neustadt, the White House adviser, historian and authority on presidential power, died on Friday in England. He was 84.

His death was reported by a spokesman for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, for which Mr. Neustadt was a founding faculty member and had served as professor emeritus since 1989, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Neustadt was an adviser to Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and wrote many books on the presidency. His scholarship became a staple of research for several decades for students of government and even some elected officials.

"Professor Neustadt spent a lifetime advancing the public understanding of the American presidency," former President Bill Clinton said in a statement. "I am grateful for the friendship and wise counsel he gave to me."

Mr. Neustadt's most influential work on the presidency was first published in 1960 under the title "Presidential Power," and periodically revised over the years until it was published in 1990 as "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership From Roosevelt to Reagan."

His work was widely celebrated by scholars as a modern version of Machiavelli's Renaissance study of power, "The Prince." Mr. Neustadt said his intent was to explore "the classic problem of the man on the top," that of "how to be on top in fact as well as in name."

"Presidential power is the power to persuade," he said.

As a body of work, his books on the presidency analyzed the decisions of presidents over more than a generation, and explored episodes of political turmoil ranging from Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War to the Iran-Contra affair under President Ronald Reagan.

"Mr. Neustadt's texts are intended to be analyses of exercises in power," Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in 1990 in a review in The New York Times, "and as such they are acute and informative whether comparing Truman's Korea with Johnson's Vietnam, or figuring out why Kennedy was able to overcome the Bay of Pigs fiasco."

Mr. Neustadt was born on June 26, 1919, in New York City. He attended the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard and earned his doctorate from Harvard in 1951.

He was a consultant to several presidents, beginning with Truman in 1950, and also was an adviser to several federal agencies and legislative panels in the 1960's.

He became an associate professor of government at Harvard in 1965, and went on to join three other prominent scholars — the economist Thomas Schelling, the statistician Frederick Mosteller and the decision theorist Howard Raiffa — in a group that was called the "founding fathers" because of their role in transforming the Graduate School of Public Administration at Harvard into the Kennedy School of Government.

"He was certainly one of our most valuable emeritus professors," the Kennedy school dean, Joseph Nye, said.

"He provided students with an understanding of the American presidency, greater than any other faculty member could have, from his direct experience and from his books," Mr. Nye said.

Mr. Neustadt had a home on Cape Cod but lived in England most of the year with his wife, Shirley Williams, the leader of the Social Democratic Party in the British House of Lords, The Associated Press reported.

Information on other survivors was not immediately available.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company