Presidential Saber Rattling

B. Dan Wood is Professor and Director of the American Politics Program at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The Myth of Presidential Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2009), The Politics of Economic Leadership: The Causes and Consequences of Presidential Rhetoric (2007) and co-author of Bureaucratic Dynamics: The Role of Bureaucracy in a Democracy (1994).

• 1. Presidential saber rattling in the early American republic; 2. Presidential saber rattling and presidential representation; 3. Measuring presidential saber rattling; 4. The causes of presidential saber rattling; 5. The domestic consequences of presidential saber rattling; 6. The foreign policy consequences of presidential saber rattling; 7. The Bush war on terror and presidential foreign policy representation; 8. Wisdom, virtue, and presidential foreign policy representation.

'Students of the presidency have given immense attention to presidential public rhetoric and presidents going public, but rarely have studied a president's foreign policy rhetoric. B. Dan Wood, one of our most respected presidency scholars, does so in Presidential Saber Rattling. Not only does Wood develop the concept of presidential saber rattling, but he meticulously collects and analyzes more than 50 years of such presidential rhetoric. And he reminds us that saber rattling is an important form of presidential policy making. [This book] is destined to become a classic and to stimulate future research.' Jeffrey E. Cohen, author of The President's Legislative Policy Agenda, 1789–2002