Triumphs and Tragedies

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged R. Gordon Hoxie to establish what would become the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC), the Supreme Allied Commander-turned-President lamented the lack of historical case studies to prepare him for civilian political leadership. As a military leader, he could pour over analyses of previous battles, deployments and international crises, yet no similar repository of institutional memory existed for the equally complex arts of governing and legislating.

In 2000, the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress published Triumphs and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency, a collection of case studies focused on the complexities of Presidential leadership—a modern fulfillment of President Eisenhower’s wish. This anthology of case studies was written by subject matter experts, and intended to provide the President-elect with lessons from his predecessors’ experiences in a wide array of issues. During the course of 2013, CSPC, with the help of subject matter experts, assembled case studies that focused on Congressional Leadership into Triumphs & Tragedies of the Modern Congress. The anthology will have four co-editors, James Kitfield who is a Senior Correspondent at the National Journal and CSPC Senior Fellow, Christopher P. Lu who is Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, Norman Ornstein who is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a CSPC Senior fellow, and Max Angerholzer who is the President & CEO at CSPC. Triumphs & Tragedies of the Modern Congress is an anthology with 52 Case Studies, its intention is to allow for those interested to learn more about prior Members' experiences in Congress.