Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis The major argument of the book created by Graham Allison and his colleague Philip Zelikow is the possibility of several variants, or scenarios, according to which the political events are being developed in the world. The focus of the book is the so called Cuba Missiles Crisis used by Allison and Zelikow (1999) as the case study to test their three fold model of policy analysis. The three aspects that the authors consider are the so called “Rational Actor”, the “Organizational Behavior”, and the “Governmental Politics” models. According to the first model, the governmental decisions made by the USSR and the USA were conditioned by rational thinking and the pursuit of utility. The second model suggests that the imperfection of the state run construction process results in the inability of the government to act freely and makes the government commit political mistakes. The final model, concerned mainly with “court politics”, states that the personal benefit pursued by each of the situation players conditioned their actions during this crisis. As for the evidence presented in the book, and its credibility, the work considered can be called a well-documented and reliable source of the political, historical, and social information. To support this statement, the history of the publishing of Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis can be considered. The first edition of the book was carried out in 1971, but in 1999 the authors saw the necessity of the revised edition as far as the new information about the governmental negotiations and other proceedings was revealed in the late 1990s. Therefore, the argument of the book and its major ideas are supported by the specific governmental materials, including the tapes of the governmental hearings of the issue, the correspondence of certain politicians including Kennedy, Khrushchev, etc. What also adds credibility to the evidence presented by Allison and Zelikow (1999) is that their own hypotheses about the reasons and the outcomes of the political proceedings are supported by specific research data. Drawing from these facts, the book under consideration teaches a lot about the general principles according to which the public policy making is carried out. Although these principles are not made public, as a rule, it is evident for a number of scholars including Allison and Zelikow (1999) that intriguing and personal benefit are the driving forces of the political changes in the local and the global scope. Accordingly, the major revelation this book presents is that the political events are not planned and carried out for the sake of nations, whose leaders conduct them. Vice versa, the statesmen are involved in their special game in which the political parties and personalities, usually funded by certain mighty corporations like EXCOMM, pursue the interests of these companies and of their own. Moreover, if the personal interests are under a certain threat, as the Soviet ones in case if the USA undertook the air attack on Cuba, the decisions claimed to be for the universal good are easy to change for the opposite. Finally, the book under consideration has taught me a lot in respect of policy analysis process. First of all, the ideas prese