During the following year, he was a professor of public administration at Cornell and, from 1954 to 1964, taught government at Columbia University, where he received a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award in 1961.

He argued that the President is actually rather weak in the US government; is unable to effect significant change without the approval of the Congress; and in practice must rely on a combination of personal persuasion, professional reputation "inside the Beltway," and public prestige to get things done.

[11] With his book appearing just before the election of John F. Kennedy, Neustadt soon found himself in demand by the president-elect, and began his advisory role with a 20-page memo suggesting things the President should and should not try to do at the beginning of his term.

[17][18] Neustadt was a recipient of the 1988 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Thinking In Time : The Uses Of History For Decision Makers and its ideas for improving world order, co-authored with Ernest R.

[2] Neustadt was hired by the then-secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr. to write a book analyzing the decision making that led to the swine flu vaccine debacle in the mid-1970s.

Neustadt's co-author, his graduate assistant Harvey V. Fineberg, said later that the book was written as a private document for Califano, who later insisted on publishing it as The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease.