Presidential Studies Quarterly

In The Education (1918), Henry Adams, perhaps our most astute observer of American history, confessed that had his life hung in the balance regarding his first judgment of President Lincoln, he would have lost it. Happily for Adams, historical judgments...

The study of presidential decision making strikes an uneasy balance between the parsimony of a particular presidential decision and the complexity of the organizational dynamics and political environment that shape that decision. Given this fundamental...

There has been an extensive body of research that investigates the organizational aspects of the American presidency (Buchanan 1990; Burke 1992, 25; George 1980; Hart 1995; Henderson 1988; Hess 1988; Johnson 1974; Porter [1980] 1988; Thompson 1992;...

In the fall of 1997, I learned that Harvard University Press was about to publish The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, complete transcripts of the tape-recorded missile crisis conversations between President Kennedy...

The complex dance between the president and Congress is perhaps one of the most misunderstood relationships in American government. Translating citizen preference into law and policy is at the very core of American representative democracy. The interaction...

Several recent scholars have suggested that federal courts have rarely decided cases involving the war power and that when they do, they invariably support the president. In a study on judicial review and the war power, Christopher May (1989) offered...