United States Presidency Centre
Director’s Remarks
Launch of the
United States Presidency Centre
24 October 2008
I thank everyone for being here to celebrate the launch of the Institute for the Study of the Americas’ new United States Presidency Centre.
The establishment of the centre coincides with a presidential election that has attracted unprecedented global interest. The weight of expectation on whoever becomes the next president not only in the United States but seemingly in the whole world will be immense. The circumstances of the succession, of course, rank amongst the most challenging facing any newcomer to the White House. The task facing the 44th president is increasingly compared in scale of difficulty by media pundits to that faced by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. I would personally be tempted to add Harry Truman to the list. Such quibbles aside, however, we can all accept that President McCain or Obama will have the world’s most important and most challenging job on his hands.
As those of us who study the United States know, of course, the president may be the single most powerful office-holder in the world but the presidency itself is not an inherently powerful institution in the American political system. The constitutional checks and balances theoretically make the president a co-equal branch of American government with the legislature and judiciary rather than the ‘elective dictatorship’ seemingly enjoyed by the British prime minister in our quite different system of government.
It is the American presidency’s paradox of great power in the global context and constrained power at home that make it such a fascinating subject for study. No president of the United States can hope to win office without a vision of how to change the nation and the world for the better. However, the office that he (or one day, she) inherits has been deliberately set within a system of institutional checks and balances intended to prevent presidential domination of government in pursuit of that vision. The potential and reality can be summed up by reference to the words of two great students of the presidency. Writing in 1907, Princeton professor and future president Woodrow Wilson declared, “The president is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.” Half-a-century later, reflecting on the coincident expectations of and obstacles to presidential ascendancy in the American system of government, political scientist Richard Neustadt wrote, “But nowadays he cannot be as small as he might like.”
Neustadt’s concept that the power of the presidency came less from the formal terms of the Constitution than from the informal powers of persuasion at his disposal marked a turning point in scholarly understanding of the presidency. It set in motion a fruitful field of political analysis that is still going strong more than fifty years later.
The United States Presidency Centre sees its mission as being to participate in the ongoing debate about the presidency and to enhance understanding of it in the following ways.
Firstly, and most importantly in view of the broader mission of the School of Advanced Study to which the Institute for the Study of the Americas belongs, the new Centre looks to promote and facilitate research on the US presidency through regular conferences, symposia, and public lectures. It welcomes proposals from scholars from other institutions to establish joint events that explore particular aspects of the presidency from its inception to the present day. The new Centre will also publish under the Institute for the Study of the Americas' imprint edited collections of essays that are based on conference and symposia proceedings on presidency-related subjects conducted under its auspices.
Secondly the Centre looks to help in the academic development of graduate students that are the future of US Studies in this country, whether their interest in the presidency is from a political, policy, historical or cultural perspective. Starting in 2010, we plan to hold an annual one-day conference as a forum for research students working on presidency-related topics at UK universities to present and exchange their ideas.
Thirdly, and following on from the second element of our mission, we believe that study of the presidency must draw on a variety of disciplines if we are to develop a better understanding of this institution. If the circumstances of the moment understandably militate in favour of a political focus on the contemporary presidency, we also look to facilitate research and study of it in a historical and cultural context. To this end, we have deliberately tied the launch of the new centre in with our symposium on The Presidency at the Movies as a demonstration of our commitment on this score. In a further demonstration of our multidisciplinary intent, our next symposium – on Thursday 27 November – assesses the significance of the 2008 presidential election not only in contemporary perspective but also measured against three critical elections of the past.
Last but by no means least, an important part of the United States Presidency Centre’s mission is to promote broader understanding of the presidency and presidential leadership beyond the community of scholars. While the president is one institutional actor – albeit the most important one – within the American political system, it is the fundamental prism for external understanding of US politics and the US role in the world. Our new Centre will engage in outreach activities to non-academic audiences through public lectures, school visits and media interviews. While we have no aspirations to be a think-tank, we particularly hope to host public talks on aspects of the presidency by those who are currently – or recently have been – political actors within the American system of government or who have close knowledge of White House operations as media commentators. In this way, we hope to broaden and improve transatlantic understanding of this complex institution by acting as a forum for debate and exchange of ideas about it.
It remains for me to thank a number of people without whose help the new Centre would have remained a glimmer in the eye rather than a reality. We are indebted to Professor James Dunkerley, the first director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, for his vision in leading its initial development and wholeheartedly supporting its US-focused activities. His successor Maxine Molyneux has been an enthusiastic supporter and promoter of the United States Presidency Centre from its conceptualisation. Deputy Director Tim Lynch has put his immense energy into the project and was responsible for our very successful pre-launch event that debated the thesis of his co-authored book (with Robert Singh, After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2008). The centre would certainly not have existed as a financial, administrative and electronic entity without Karen Perkins’s hard work and her willingness to prioritise my last-minute requests. Agnieszka Gillespie has been and will continue to be the rock on which our publicity operations depend. Finally, the centre has benefited from the amazing ability of Olga Jimenez to organise all Institute for the Study of the Americas events with exemplary efficiency and good cheer.
Additionally, I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who have agreed to sit on the new centre’s external advisory board. These are: from the UK, Phil Davies (Eccles Centre), John Dumbrell (Durham), Rob Singh (Birkbeck) and Mark White (Queen Mary); and from the US, two eminent presidential scholars Jim Pfiffner (George Mason) and Andy Rudalevige (Dickinson College). The United States Presidency Centre will be drawing heavily on their good counsel.
Finally, however, I would like to emphasise that the success of the United States Presidency Centre ultimately depends on people from outside the Institute for the Study of the Americas. We are the facilitating forum. We want to work with colleagues elsewhere on ideas that they have for future events pertaining to the presidency. We hope that those here tonight will take up this opportunity for collaboration. We also hope that you will continue to support the Centre through your presence at our events and engagement in the debates that they generate. We think that the United States Presidency Centre is an exciting and important venture but only people like yourselves can make it so.
Iwan Morgan
Professor of U.S. Studies and Director of the United States Presidency Centre
Institute for the Study of the Americas
School of Advanced Study
University of London
Email: iwan.morgan@sas.ac.uk