Leadership in Modern American Political History Fall Term 2007 Instructor Alan Ehrenhalt Class Meeting Time Tuesday 3 45 6 30 p m Jepson 106 Office Hours Tuesday 1 3 p m Jepson 130 or by appointment E Mail aehrenhalt governing com Phone 804 484 1436 Tuesdays only 202 862 1434 other weekdays Course Description and Objectives The goal of this course is to raise some important issues about the nature of political leadership by paying close attention to a simple and crucial source the lives and careers of the people who practice it The period we will be studying is largely a familiar one the half century from 1950 to 2000 from the era of Eisenhower and Joseph McCarthy to that of Bill Clinton Newt Gingrich and the Bush family All of us have lived most of our lives during this time The questions we will be asking however are timeless ones What is greatness in a political leader Do individuals make history or are they largely the passive instruments of larger forces Do ideas create leaders or do leaders simply cloak themselves in ideologies as a means of advancing personal goals Do they create change largely by building consensus and bringing people together or do they do it more often by generating conflict and then using the conflict to acquire power The first few weeks of the course will be devoted to thinking about these problems in a more or less abstract way We will be discussing theorists of history such as E H Carr Lewis Namier and Isaiah Berlin and reading the work of perhaps the greatest of American political historians Richard Hofstadter After this beginning the course will turn to individual biography We will look at the careers of presidents Eisenhower Kennedy Nixon Reagan Clinton congressional leaders Sam Rayburn Lyndon Johnson Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay among others Supreme Court justices Earl Warren and Sandra Day O Connor mayors and governors Richard J Daley and Nelson Rockefeller and examine the lives of activists who have exerted leadership form the outside Martin Luther King Jr Jesse Jackson Ralph Nader and the conservative activists of the 1990s Where appropriate I will bring in videos to make the style and personality of modern leadership more vivid It is unlikely that we will settle on a solution to our major questions at least not on a solution that will satisfy all members of the class Certainly I have no pat answers to distribute and no ideological framework that I want everyone to accept I see this course as an enterprise in which the students and the instructor will examine the evidence together and in which at the end we will have learned to ask the crucial questions in a more sophisticated and more penetrating way Course Approach and Requirements The essence of this course will be reading and class discussion Some weeks there will be a considerable amount of reading but with a few exceptions in the early weeks the reading is not technical and I have done my best to choose selections that are engagingly written and provocative In any case I want you to do all of it and to come to class prepared to discuss it The purpose of the reading assignments is not to induce you to master the selections as if they were sacred texts What matters is the questions that the readings generate and the attempts we will make to puzzle out answers to them as best we can I will ask quite a few questions in class myself not to elicit formal answers but to sustain a dialogue As a way of jump starting the dialogue and of establishing a more pragmatic incentive I will ask each student to submit a brief essay of approximately 500 words on the reading assignment for each class session These should be e mailed to me by 9 a m on Tuesday morning the day that class meets I will read them and be ready to discuss them with you during class sessions and will return them with grades and comments as early in the week as I can Remember that I am not looking merely for summaries of the reading but comments on the implications and on the further issues a particular selection may raise All the readings will be either available for purchase in the bookstore or more often on e reserve The short weekly essays will be the basis for one third of the course grade Class participation will constitute another third An in class final exam will determine the rest Needless to say absence from class sessions or failure to complete a weekly essay will cost you at final grading time The course will not require a research paper and there will be no mid term I am looking forward to meeting you all and to starting out on our journey through some of the most interesting and important areas of political thought Books Recommended for Purchase available in bookstore Beatty Jack Pols hardcover edition Public Affairs Press 2004 Easton Nina Gang of Five paperback Touchstone Books 2000 Hofstadter Richard The American Political Tradition paperback Vintage Books 1989 Klein Joe The Natural paperback Broadway Books 2002 Schedule of Reading Opening Discussion 1 week Reading for Aug 28 Kevin P Phillips American Dynasty p 15 50 e reserve Historians Theories 1 week Ideas vs Relationships Individual vs Inevitability What is greatness Reading for Sept 4 E H Carr What is History p 36 42 54 69 e reserve Lewis Namier Personalities and Powers p 1 7 e reserve Isaiah Berlin The Hedgehog and the Fox in Berlin The Proper Study of Mankind p 443 467 e reserve Theories of American Politics 2 weeks Conflict vs Consensus Reading for Sept 11 Richard Hofstadter The American Political Tradition chapters 2 3 5 9 10 12 in bookstore Reading for Sept 18 Hofstadter The Progressive Historians p 437 466 e reserve Alan Ehrenhalt The United States of Ambition p 5 41 251 265 e reserve Presidential Leadership 3 weeks Eisenhower Kennedy Johnson Nixon Reagan Clinton Reading for Sept 25 Jack Beatty Pols p 223 276 in bookstore Beatty Pols 277 296 Garry Wills The Kennedy Imprisonment p 163 215 e reserve Reading for Oct 2 Robert Dallek Flawed Giant p 185 231 e reserve Garry Wills Nixon Agonistes p 368 380 e reserve Richard Reeves President Nixon p 11 30 575 609 e reserve Wills Reagan s America P 299 324 352 370 e reserve Reading for Oct 9 Joe Klein The Natural entire book in bookstore Congressional Leadership 2 weeks Rayburn Dirksen Johnson McCarthy O Neill Burton Gingrich DeLay Reading for Oct 23 Beatty Pols p 132 171 in bookstore Neil MacNeil Dirksen p 1 21 208 238 e reserve Robert Caro Master of the Senate p 557 598 e reserve Richard Rovere Senator Joe