Robert Dallek Quotes
Presidents need to be critically studied and analyzed.
Dallek, Robert. Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents. Hyperion, 1996.
on the decision of whether to use military force against the Assad Syrian regime for their using chemical warfare against their own people
Trump, in contrast, to other president, in times of crisis, tendned to send tweets on the subject--often very political and divisive--instead of takeing the kind of leadership steps taht were taken by the otehr presidents of the 20th adn 21st century.
That is one view—the one tried the most frequently by Presidents who by their own estimates didn’t get a responsive civil service working to his priorities. Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson had great cooperation from their civil servants; they instead appointed very competent people with strong senses of fairness and leading personnel. Ronald Regan tried both techniques. He used Wilson’s technique in his Education and Justice Department where there was slow-rolling and dissonance when his appointees tended to be ideologues with little or no outstanding professional competence in the fields they supervised. However, his military and State Department bureaucracies was very responsive to his appointees who were excellent leaders.
Robert A. Dallek is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He retired as a history professor at Boston University in 2004 and previously taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Oxford University. He won the Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 as well as other awards for scholarship and teaching.
