Chapter 9: Further Reading

The literature on the American presidency is enormous. The works listed below were selected to (1) cover the foundational frameworks the chapter draws on, (2) represent the strongest writers from across the political spectrum, and (3) include both classic and recent scholarship. Each entry includes a short annotation indicating where the work fits and what argument it advances.

Foundational political science

Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (Free Press, 1990 [orig. 1960]). The single most influential book on the modern presidency. Neustadt's "power to persuade" thesis — that the formal powers of the office are insufficient and that the working power is bargaining and persuasion — has shaped presidential studies for sixty years. The 1990 edition adds material on Reagan and reflects on the framework's limits in a more polarized era. Read at least the first three chapters. The discussion of Truman's "do this, do that — and nothing will happen" is the canonical statement of the bargaining presidency.

Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Belknap/Harvard, 1997 [exp. ed.]). The other indispensable framework. Skowronek argues that what presidents can accomplish depends on whether the dominant political regime is robust or vulnerable, and whether the president is affiliated with or opposed to it. The four positions — reconstructive, articulation, preemptive, disjunctive — provide a way to compare presidents across very different historical periods. Dense but rewarding. The introduction and the chapters on Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan are the most cited.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Houghton Mifflin, 1973; updated edition with new introduction, 2004). Written in the wake of Watergate by an FDR partisan, the book named the phenomenon of post-1945 executive expansion and remains the starting point for any honest discussion of the trajectory. The 2004 reissue includes Schlesinger's reflections on how the post-9/11 Bush presidency extended the pattern he had described thirty years earlier. The book is a center-left work; its analysis of expansion has been adopted across the political spectrum.

The constitutional debate

Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2005). A comprehensive constitutional history that treats Article II in chapters of unusual depth. Amar's reading is generally faithful to the original public meaning while remaining attentive to subsequent constitutional development. His treatment of the Vesting Clause, the executive's foreign-affairs role, and the impeachment process is widely cited across ideological lines. The companion volume America's Unwritten Constitution (2012) covers presidential customs and norms.

John Yoo, Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush (Kaplan, 2009). A center-right defense of expansive executive power, written by a former Justice Department official who authored several of the controversial post-9/11 OLC memos. Yoo argues that the Founders contemplated an energetic executive with broad inherent authority in foreign affairs and emergency response. Whether or not one agrees with Yoo's conclusions, the book is the strongest single statement of the unitary-executive position and should be read by anyone trying to steel-man that view.

Jeremy A. Rabkin, Law without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States (Princeton, 2005). A center-right argument for the constitutional independence of the American executive in foreign affairs, with implications for treaties, executive agreements, and the relationship between domestic constitutional law and international institutions. Rabkin is a thoughtful defender of executive prerogative who avoids the more polemical mode of some unitary-executive writing.

Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Belknap/Harvard, 2010). A center-left argument that the modern presidency, especially after 9/11, has accumulated dangerous unilateral capacity. Ackerman's prescription is structural reform: a more institutionalized Office of Legal Counsel, congressional oversight reforms, and changes to the Electoral College. The diagnostic chapters (1–4) are useful even for readers skeptical of the prescriptions.

Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (Oxford, 2010). Two prominent legal scholars (Posner has been associated with both center-left and conservative legal-realist positions; Vermeule was at Harvard before becoming a Catholic-integralist conservative) argue that traditional Madisonian constraints on the executive have largely failed, that the modern administrative state operates on different premises, and that political constraints (elections, public opinion, party competition) do most of the constraining work. The book is provocative; its descriptive claims are more widely accepted than its normative posture.

Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive (Yale, 2015). An originalist case that the executive power as understood in 1789 was substantially broader than later weak-unitarian readings concede. Prakash's research on Founding-era executive practice is exhaustive; his conclusions are contested but his evidence is now part of the canon any constitutional treatment must engage.

The post-9/11 presidency

Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (Norton, 2007). A memoir-cum-analysis by the head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004 — the official who withdrew several of the most expansive Bush-era legal memos. Goldsmith is a center-right legal scholar whose insider account of the legal architecture of the war on terror, and of his own decisions to constrain it, is widely regarded as one of the most honest first-person accounts of executive power in operation.

Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday, 2008). Investigative journalism, center-left in framing, on the construction of the post-9/11 detention and interrogation apparatus. Mayer's reporting on the OLC torture memos, the black-site program, and the internal Bush-administration debates is detailed and primary-source-heavy. Pair with Goldsmith for institutional balance.

Charlie Savage, Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy (Little, Brown, 2015). A New York Times reporter's account of Obama-era national-security legal policy, demonstrating how much of the post-9/11 executive infrastructure was preserved and in some cases extended under a Democratic administration. Savage's reporting is meticulous and his framing is generally non-ideological. The most useful single source on bipartisan continuity in war-on-terror authorities.

The rhetorical and communicative presidency

Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, 1987). Argues that a fundamental shift occurred in the early twentieth century — from a presidency that primarily addressed Congress to one that primarily addresses the public over Congress's head. Tulis traces the consequences: weakened legislative deliberation, plebiscitary leadership tendencies, demagogic risks. The framework anticipated much of what subsequent decades would confirm.

Brandice Canes-Wrone, Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and the Public (Chicago, 2006). A political-science treatment of when presidents lead public opinion and when they follow it. Canes-Wrone's data-driven analysis tempers the more sweeping claims of the rhetorical-presidency literature with empirical findings about the actual conditions under which presidential communication moves the public.

Contemporary cases and controversies

Adam Liptak, "Trump v. United States coverage" (New York Times, 2024–). Liptak's running coverage of the immunity case and its aftermath represents serious mainstream legal journalism. Useful to read alongside academic commentary because the daily coverage tracks the lower-court application of the framework. Search the Times archive for "Liptak Trump immunity" for the relevant articles.

Federalist Society panels and Harvard Law Review Forum essays on Trump v. United States (2024–2025). The Federalist Society's website (fedsoc.org) hosts panel discussions and short essays defending or analyzing the majority's reasoning from generally center-right perspectives; the Harvard Law Review online forum hosts shorter essays from generally center-left academic perspectives. Both sets of materials are open-access and useful for steel-manning the pro- and anti-immunity arguments.

Office of Legal Counsel published opinions (justice.gov/olc/opinions). The OLC's published opinions are the executive branch's internal legal reasoning on questions of constitutional and statutory authority. They are the closest thing to an executive-branch case law and are widely cited in constitutional litigation. Opinions on the recess-appointment power, the Take Care Clause, and AUMF interpretation are especially relevant to this chapter.

Useful databases and primary-source repositories

The American Presidency Project (presidency.ucsb.edu, hosted by UC Santa Barbara). The single most comprehensive online repository of presidential documents — speeches, executive orders, signing statements, press conferences, party platforms. Free and searchable. Indispensable for any serious research.

Federal Register Executive Orders (federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders). The official source for executive orders from 1937 forward.

Office of Legal Counsel Opinions (justice.gov/olc/opinions). Discussed above.

FiveThirtyEight Presidential Approval Tracker (or its successor). Aggregated approval polling, useful for the empirical exercises in this chapter.

Senate Historical Office Vetoes List (senate.gov/legislative/vetoes). Comprehensive list of presidential vetoes with override information.

A reader who works through Neustadt, Skowronek, Schlesinger, one work each from the strong-unitarian (Yoo or Prakash) and anti-unitarian (Ackerman) sides, and Goldsmith on the post-9/11 era will have a serious working knowledge of the major frameworks. From there, the contemporary literature is best approached through specific cases — Trump v. United States, Seila Law, the AUMF debates — rather than through additional general treatments.