James David Barber (1930–2004)

Previous books assessing presidents tended to be rankings, best to worst. Barber asked the question, "Best for what?". He established an Aristotelian grid, with active-passive on one axis, positive-negative the other. The resulting four quadrants provided an analytical tool not only for evaluating past presidents, but also for predicting future performance. There is a clear danger of reductionism in this, and Barber concedes that no individual exactly fits a category.

Barber has a clear preference for those he feels fit in the active-positive quadrant (FDR, Truman and JFK). It's not surprising, then, that he feels the active-positives have the greatest chance of success. This flip side of this, passive-negative, are exemplified by two not often grouped together: Coolidge and Eisenhower. One wonders if forty years of historical hindsight might lead to another assessment of how Ike conducted his presidency. More tragic, though, both for the individuals as well as for the nation, are three Barber groups as active-negative: Wilson, Hoover, LBJ. The common pattern he detects in them is "a process of rigidification, a movement from political dexterity to narrow insistence on a failing course of action despite abundant evidence of the failure" (p. 18).

The heuristic value of Barber's analytic tool could be seen when he turned from analyzing the past to predicting the future, in the case of the then-sitting president, Nixon. Here, Barber's analysis led him to group Nixon with active-negatives, and to foresee the strong possibility of reacting rigidly to crisis. Barber admitted that, at the time of writing (late 1971), there was as yet no sign of it happening, but boy did events from 1972-74 bear him out.

Not the last word on presidential performance, but an eye-opener for me when it first appeared that gave me much to think about.… (more)

This was required reading in an excellent Political Science course I took on American presidents. It divides presidential characters into four basic types: Active-Negative (Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon); Passive-Negative (Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower), Passive-Positive (Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Ronald Reagan) and Active-Positive (Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman).

Theodore Roosevelt as Passive????!!! My word... But then you get the feeling that Barber definitely favors the "Active-Positive"--or maybe it's just the presidents he favors get categorized as such. And that getting labelled as "passive" has less to do with personality, but rather Barber's perception about whether the president seeks to aggressively expand the role of government. Just reviewing the subheadings for his Reagan chapter (this revised edition was published in 1992) makes me twitch. Just the way the scare quotes were used: "Super-siding" the Rich. The Reagan chapter drips with contempt. I have to give credit to my professor--she was more fair. She didn't hide that she was a liberal and a Democrat--but simply in their own terms and goals she counted Reagan as a successful president---and presented to us why--and Carter as a failure. (I remember one dimension was their ability to delegate. Barber by the way passes over the Carter presidency for comment.) So while I do think it's interesting to think of presidents in these categories, I do take a lot of what Barber has to say with a whole barrel of salt.… (more)