Byrne, Michael;
(2024)
Escaping the Shadow: The Problems of Presidential Succession following a Transformational Predecessor.
Masters thesis (M.Phil), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Harry S. Truman succeeded to the presidency on the death of his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in April 1945. Roosevelt is credited with having established an innovative political regime, the New Deal, which lasted until Ronald Reagan’s presidency saw the creation of the Neo-Liberal regime five decades later. Succeeding such a transformational predecessor made it particularly difficult for Truman to establish his own identity as president. John Adams, Martin Van Buren and George H.W. Bush all faced the same problem in succeeding their transformational predecessors – George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan. Of the four, only Truman was successful in his bid for re-election at the end of his first term, and only Truman is consistently rated by commentators as having emerged from under the shadow of his predecessor to become a consequential president in his own right. In asking why Truman alone succeeded, this study suggests that his ability to generate independent presidential authority played a key role in establishing Truman’s distinctive presidential identity. Adams, Van Buren and Bush, by contrast, were unable to establish independent authority during their own presidencies, with fatal consequences for their re-election bids and for most later evaluations of their performance in office. Each of these four presidents is assessed in terms of the ‘opening political capital’ which he brought to the presidency, the key decisions which helped him to develop independent presidential authority over the next four years, and the ‘closing’ level of political capital which he held when seeking re-election at the end of his first term. It concludes that the manner in which each successor faced down (or failed to face down) opponents from within his own party who positioned themselves as ‘more faithful followers’ of the regime’s transformational founder was critically important in developing independent presidential authority and allowing him to establish an identity clearly different from that of his predecessor.
| Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | M.Phil |
| Title: | Escaping the Shadow: The Problems of Presidential Succession following a Transformational Predecessor |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of the Americas |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10193085 |
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