Description
Examines the foreign policy decisions of the presidents who presided over the most critical phases of America's rise to world power in the 20th century, and assesses the effectiveness and ethics of their choices.
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With both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney avowing their dedication to maintaining American primacy in world affairs during the 2012 election, Nye (Harvard U.) asks how much such promises are actually within the power of presidents to keep. He seeks the answer through a combination of international relations and individual leadership theory in his examination of eight leaders who presided over key periods of expansion in American power: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. He argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom that transformational leaders with bold objectives were more successful in the task, in fact transactional presidents with more modest ambitions (like Eisenhower and Bush) were sometimes more effective and more ethical. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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