The president's day : managing time in the Oval Office / Matthew N. Beckmann.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Time, people, and process -- Jimmy vs. Ronnie -- Making time -- Filling time -- Nixon, man vs. model -- Everyday leadership.

""Lyndon Johnson felt the burden of the presidency acutely: "Only in the White House can you finally know the full weight of this office." Herein lies a fundamental insight into presidential work: for all the attention on dramatic moments, a president's performance is mostly seeded in the daily grind of doing the job. On the front lines, matters of leadership manifest as questions of time. How can the president harness the office's awesome resources while handling its exacting demands-day after day, month after month, year after year? In this work of presidential studies, political scientist Matt Beckmann considers the daily schedules of postwar presidents. Presidents attend obligatory events, make critical meetings, meet necessary people. From this angle, presidents are largely constrained by an office they did not create and incentives they cannot control. Richard Neustadt made the point: "However much the president knows, however sharp his senses, his time remains the prisoner of first things first." Whereas presidents once embodied the presidency, the creation of the Executive Office of the President and broader growth of "the presidential branch" seemingly added institutional scaffolding at the expense of individual discretion. But far from being interchangeable cogs set in an institutional system, presidents have broad discretion about how to implement an impossible job, and this is revealed in the distinctive ways they invest their time each day. Beckmann introduces an eclectic array of granular evidence about postwar presidents' daily work practices from 1961 to 2008, John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. These data come from a myriad of sources, culled from a myriad of methods: elite interviews and archival records, small-n case studies and large-n quantitative analyses. This large-scale project affords the first comprehensive look into the ways presidents work on stage and behind the scenes. Beckmann sorts and analyzes nearly forty thousand activities, across nearly two thousand days, spanning forty-eight years, covering nine presidencies, to discover how the latitude presidents have in how to operate their office.""-- Provided by publisher.