Ever since politics professor Fred Greenstein was a teenager during World War II, both politics and politicians have fascinated him. Now, after more than 25 years at the University, and 30 studying politics and leadership, Greenstein is putting the finishing touches on his latest book, "The Presidential Difference." The book is a study of leadership styles of presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton and will be published this spring by The Free Press.
"I was an early teenager in World War II," Greenstein said, explaining his life-long interest in politics. "Everybody was swept into the emotion of the war effort. Politics were, at least for some people, very salient."
Originally planning to become a newspaper reporter, Greenstein attended college and spent two years serving in the Korean War. "I wanted to get out and see [politics] up close, and the best way to do that I thought was to be a newspaper reporter," he said.
When he returned from the war, however, he didn't feel he had enough background political knowledge to properly understand the intricacies of what he saw happening. "I didn't really have the depth to understand what fascinated me most," he said.
To gain a better understanding of politics, Greenstein decided to enroll in graduate school in politics and was accepted to a Ph.D. program at Yale University.
"My notion was that I would finish and come back to be a newspaper reporter," he said. "But by the time the dissertation came out, I was a scholar and a teacher."
Yale years
During his time at Yale, Greenstein studied with three of the leaders in political psychology — Robert E. Lane, Harold Dwight Lasswell and Nathan Leites.
After receiving his Ph.D. in 1960, Greenstein remained at Yale until 1962, while also completing postdoctoral work at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. It was during this period that he focused his interest on the psychology behind politics, trying to learn what sculpted people as political creatures.
"I was part of a Cold War generation," he said. "It was in that context that I was fascinated and appalled and puzzled by what seemed to make people go off the tracks psychologically."
Greenstein explained that he was never good with numbers. "I wanted to study in a more humanistic, interpretive fashion, than in a quantitative approach," he said. "The perfect thing for me was the [the study of the] presidency."
Greenstein left Yale in 1962 and went to Wesleyan University, where he stayed until 1973. In the fall of 1973, he came to Princeton with plans to focus his research on the presidency.
"What led me to really dig in was the Nixon experience," he said. "Nixon had been through an astonishing but very messy first term," Greenstein said. He explained that the president had accomplished three objectives that he promised: pulling American soldiers out of Vietnam, opening relations with China and easing the risk of war with the Soviet Union through an arms-control pact.
"During the time that I began to teach here, he destroyed his own presidency," Greenstein said.
Since coming to Princeton, Greenstein has become a leading scholar in political psychology and in presidential decision-making and leadership. His newest book attempts to understand how a president's personality determines the way he leads the nation.
"I tried to present something which is not unlike something a journalist would do, but more rigorous," he said. "I asked who are these people, how did they emerge and what are their strengths and weaknesses."
In his study of Clinton, Greenstein labeled the president a "talented underachiever." "It may be that five or 10 years from now, people will say, 'You've underestimated him,' " Greenstein said. "He's a person of enormous talent, and very unusual resources. He could have made a lot more of his presidency."
In the book, Greenstein calls Ronald Reagan "more dependent than any other modern president on others to accomplish his aims."
Of Lyndon Johnson, he writes, "If a president's ability to fulfill his responsibilities depended only on his command of the rules of Washington politics and ability to use them to good effect, the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson would have been an unqualified success."
Presidential past
Greenstein says that the presidency has changed in the past century. "It's become a tougher time for presidents," he said. "It's not just Watergate — it's Vietnam, too."
He hopes that his book will help people to better evaluate the presidents. "History as a field has become preoccupied with social history," Greenstein said. "There is a lot of criticism of approaches to history in which the president is the central figure. My view is that leaders are like circuit breakers or trigger mechanisms. I want people to focus on the trigger."
One of his goals in the book is to "establish a useful presidential past," Greenstein said. "I think I'm offering some criteria that could help people cut through the complexities and ask some simple, direct questions."
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