The same appears to be the case for foreign policy of a more positive or cooperation torn as well. Consider, for example, the fact that President Bill Clinton traveled abroad the most during 1998—the same year that Monica Lewinsky scandal broke at home—and that Nixon engaged in the most foreign travel of his presidency during 1974 at the height of the Watergate scandal (Berthoud and Brady 2001). As President Ronald Reagan’s staffers admitted regarding one of his trips to Europe, “because the polls were showing a drop in the president’s popularity, which made him vulnerable in Washington, we decided that conferring on location with European heads of state would be good for his image as a leader” (Kernell 1986: 96). In effect, as Brace and Hinckley (1992) have argued, much foreign travel of U.S. president is strategic and reactive and timed closely with conditions affecting a president’s support at home. A similar kind of phenomenon has also been found to occur after peacemaking ventures. As Secretary of State James Baker is reported to have observed: Why shouldn’t presidents use positive, non-crisis events to mask periods of vulnerability in the same way that they do for incidents involving conflict and tension?
Moreover, research has shown that presidents’ expectations about public reactions to their foreign policy ideals and initiatives are generally filtered through their interactions with members of Congress. This influence appears to occur in at least three way: (1) assessment regarding what a particular Congress is likely to support and preempting or tailoring proposals to take such preferences into account. (2) procedural legislation that changes the nature of the relationship between Congress and the president enabling Congress to play a larger role in shaping what the president can and cannot do in the foreign policy arena, and (3) activities that frame the need for a particular foreign policy using the media and public discussion that are meant to change the climate of debate and influence what the president does.