| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kenneth R. Mayer. With the Stroke of the Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 293. $39.95.

Kenneth R. Mayer's book is a study of how presidents have used "their executive authority to make unilateral policy without interference from either Congress or the courts" (p. 4). The primary "tool" in a president's arsenal has been the executive order. The author is a political scientist and his book is replete with lists, tables, formulae, and discussions of margins of error. But if Mayer's study is not a history, it is well written and by no means too arcane even for the least analytical of historians. 1

Mayer's presidents differ from the image of the chief executive as someone whose primary attribute is the power to persuade. This book tempers, and to a degree challenges, Richard E. Neustadt's classic Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (1960). Mayer's chief executives are not presidents in "sneakers"; they are willing, able, and often eager to get things done. Because the executive is more easily held accountable than the other branches of government, that political accountability drives executive action and cushions it from both criticism and challenge. Through the use of executive orders, presidents have been able, in a de facto sense, to make their own law and have only rarely been successfully challenged. . . .

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