DOI: 10.5064/f68g8hmm
title: Data for: “John F. Kennedy,” in: Leaders at war: How presidents shape military interventions

description: &lt;b&gt;This project was originally published as an Active Citation Compilation, a precursor to&lt;br/&gt;&lt;a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/ati"&gt;Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)&lt;/a&gt;. It has now been converted to the ATI format. The assembled project can be viewed at:&lt;/b&gt; &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/john-f-kennedy#annotations:group:2Nopp9mx" &gt;https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/john-f-kennedy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;h3/&gt;

&lt;h3&gt;Project Summary&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The broader study provides a framework for understanding when and why great powers seek to transform foreign institutions and societies through military interventions. It highlights a crucial but often-overlooked factor in international relations: the role of individual leaders. The book develops and tests a theory that explains how leaders shape both the decision to intervene and the choice of intervention strategy. It argues that leaders’ threat perceptions – specifically, whether they believe that the internal characteristics of other states are the ultimate source of threats – influence how they prepare for and confront intervention choices, especially the degree to which they try to use intervention to remake the domestic institutions of target states. The study concentrates on United States military interventions during the Cold War, allowing the author to focus on the role of leaders by holding constant the structure of the international system as well as domestic institutions. Furthermore, one might expect a particularly strong consensus about the nature of threats during the Cold War, making it a relatively easy case for realist approaches and a harder test for a theory based on causal beliefs. The empirical core of the book concentrates on three US presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. The variation in these three presidents’ causal beliefs provides strong analytical leverage in testing the theory. To refute the notion that beliefs are merely justifications for action, and to avoid conflating beliefs and behavior, the author uses archival and historical evidence from the pre-presidential period to show that each president held his beliefs prior to confronting crises and even prior to taking office. After demonstrating the importance of leaders during the Cold War period, the study also explores the theory’s applicability to other historical and contemporary settings, including the post-Cold War period and the war in Iraq.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;Data Abstract&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The data were collected primarily during two research trips to the Kennedy Library in 2006 and 2008 and cover the Cold War period. The archival evidence itself mainly focuses on the coding of the independent variable, leaders’ beliefs. Since this variable is measured in the pre-presidential period, most of the archival sources used are drawn from pre-presidential collections at the presidential libraries. (The dependent variables – the decision to intervene and the choice of intervention strategy – are measured primarily using published primary sources and secondary sources, since many of the cases have a rich set of published sources and secondary literatures.) The pre-presidential collections, from which the shared sources are primarily derived, differ from the presidential papers in significant ways across the three presidencies, and do not conform to the same standards used to maintain papers in a modern presidency because, of course, the papers were generated and catalogued before it was known that each man would ascend to the presidency. Kennedy’s pre-presidential papers are, however, a very rich source for measuring his foreign policy attitudes and include travel diaries, personal letters, and speech drafts.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;Files Description&lt;/h3&gt;
For most archival-based citations, images for every page of the sources referenced in the citation are available; the few exceptions include items such as diaries, only specific pages of which are copied.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;Logic of Annotation and Activation&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The goal of this pilot project is to give access to the archival sources cited in the book, subject to permissions. The intention is to allow the reader to view sources that could only be obtained in an archive, to see additional context and make a judgment about whether the inference is appropriate. Since this pilot is focused on archival documents and reducing the transaction costs associated with viewing archival sources, the author has only activated footnotes referring to archival sources and believes that the resources of standard university libraries and the Web provide reasonably ready access to the balance of the materials. One of the motivations for this pilot was to demonstrate the feasibility of using an existing system of organization, which the author employed while conducting the original research, to transfer these images to the QDR for depositing and for activation. The documents were captured using a digital camera and had already been organized in digital format. Because one of the main motivations was to show how scholars could leverage their existing systems to transfer data relatively easily, the author has not retroactively annotated citations. The author has included two types of data that did not appear in the endnotes to the book, however: (1) folder titles for each archival source (cut from the final manuscript for reasons of space); (2) transcriptions of portions of some documents, which the author produced while processing the archival material, winnowing the evidence, and writing up the results. Not every endnote or inference will have transcriptions, however. In many cases the author transcribed documents before making an actual inference, and transcribed more than was ultimately quoted or cited. The transcriptions are retained for the reader’s information (and to make some documents, such as handwritten diary entries, easier to read). Furthermore, one of the additional motivations for the pilot is to demonstrate how the QDR and active citation might work in cases where permissions allow the posting of full documents, so the documents are the focus and the transcriptions are simply “extra” data. Although some sources may not have transcriptions, this says nothing about their value and they will still have images for the underlying data. While the logics of activation and annotation depart somewhat from the current active citation standard, this pilot is intended to demonstrate that a significant degree of transparency can be achieved within the limits of feasibility by leveraging existing practices.&lt;/p&gt;
description: Standard access for all files; the information in the data files is all in the public domain, and the author has allowed the sharing of the images made by her of the original archival documents.