By the postwar era, Washington’s humble term ‘‘chief magistrate’’ could no longer adequately describe an office that in power and responsibility had expanded far beyond Hamiltonian hopes or Jeffersonian fears. The president was now the great leader of the Progressives’ dreams, Herbert Croly’s ‘‘Thor wielding with power and effect a sledge-hammer in the cause of national righteousness’’—or perhaps, with the arrival of the atomic age, a figure better described as a Zeus, capable of launching city-flattening thunderbolts. God metaphors abound in mid-century scholars’ descriptions of the presidency. In 1960, the University of Chicago’s Herman Finer declared that the presidency was ‘‘the incarnation of the American people in a sacrament resembling that in which the wafer and the wine are seen to be the body and blood of Christ,’’ the office rightly belonging ‘‘to the offspring of a titan and Minerva husbanded by Mars.’’1

Superman Comes to the Supermarket
In a remarkable speech given not two weeks after he’d announced for the presidency, Senator John F. Kennedy captured the prevailing mood:

The history of this Nation—its brightest and its bleakest pages—has been written largely in terms of the different views our Presidents have had of the Presidency itself. This history ought to tell us that the American people in 1960 have an imperative right to know what any man bidding for the Presidency thinks about the place he is bidding for, whether he is aware of and willing to use the powerful resources of that office; whether his model will be Taft or Roosevelt, Wilson or Harding.

In case it needs explaining, for JFK, Taft and Harding were the patsies, Roosevelt and Wilson, history’s winners. Kennedy went on to quote Wilson’s line in Constitutional Government, ‘‘The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can,’’ and complain that ‘‘President Woodrow Wilson discovered that to be a big man in the White House inevitably brings cries of dictatorship.’’ (Perhaps that had something to do with Wilson’s tendency to incarcerate people who opposed his policies.)

After a few digs at Eisenhower’s placidity, JFK maintained that the country could no longer afford ‘‘a Chief Executive who is praised primarily for what he did not do, the disasters he prevented, the bills he vetoed.’’ Rather, the presidency required ‘‘extraordinary strength and vision,’’ because it was

the center of moral leadership—a ‘‘bully pulpit,’’ as Theodore Roosevelt described it. For only the President represents the national interest. And upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations of all parts of the country, all departments of the Government, all nations of the world.2
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/04/part-3-cult-of-presidencythe-age-of.html