As America's leading expert on the Presidency and an adviser to presidents from Harry S Truman to Bill Clinton, Richard E. Neustadt was ""the most penetrating analyst of power since Machiavelli,"" as Guardian of the Presidency makes clear. In this inspirational book, Neustadt's former colleagues and students celebrate the rich and diverse contributions he made to political and academic life in the United States and beyond. JFK confidant Ted Sorensen, the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harrison Wellford, formerly of the Office of Management and Budget, and Matthew Dickinson focus on his role as a White House adviser. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter highlights Neustadt's ability to interpret the Presidency for the outside world. Fellow scholars Ernest May, Charles O. Jones, Harvey Fineberg, and Graham Allison analyze his legacy as an educator and founding director of Harvard's Institute of Politics. Anthony King (Britain at the Polls) and Eric Redman (The Dance of Legislation) discuss his work in the United Kingdom and Brazil. Former Vice President Al Gore offers an appreciation of Neustadt's influence on generations of students. The book concludes with Elizabeth Neustadt's personal reflections about her father.

Bitter Harvest identifies the principles governing Franklin Roosevelt's development and use of a presidential staff system and offers a theory explaining why those principles proved so effective. Dickinson argues that presidents institutionalize staff to acquire the information and expertise necessary to better predict the likely impact their specific bargaining choices will have on the end results they desire. Once institutionalized, however, presidential staff must be managed. Roosevelt's use of competitive administrative techniques minimized his staff management costs, while his institutionalization of nonpartisan staff agencies provided him with needed information. Matthew Dickinson's research suggests that FDR's principles could be used today to manage the White House staff-dominated institutional presidency upon which most of his presidential successors have relied.

This book argues that modern presidents could learn much from Franklin Roosevelt's method of organizing his presidency. Roosevelt consciously avoided a large, functionally specialized White House bureaucracy. Instead, he developed staff agencies composed mostly of civil servants and personally managed them using competitive administrative practices. Matthew Dickinson is the first scholar to reconstruct the methods FDR used and his research suggests modern presidents could benefit greatly by studying them.