The United States elects its president every four years, which makes it unique among democratic nations. Time magazine runs a story about James David Barber every presidential election year, which makes him unique among political scientists. The two quadrennial oddities are not unrelated.

Barber was 42 years old and chairman of the political science department at Duke University when the first Time article appeared in 1972. It was about a book he had just published through Prentice-Hall called The Presidential Character. The book argued that presidents could be divided into four psychological types, which Barber called "activepositive," "active-negative," "passive-positive," and "passivenegative." What's more, according to Barber via Time, with "a hard look at men before they reach the White House" voters could tell in advance what candidates would be like if elected: healthily "ambitious out of exuberance" like the active-positives; or pathologically "ambitious out of anxiety," "compliant and other-directed," or "dutiful and self-denying" like the three other, lesser types, respectively. In the 1972 election, Barber told Time, the choice was between an activepositive, George McGovern, and a psychologically defective active-negative, Richard Nixon.