From Kennedy and Cuba to Bush and Somalia, the access to television time afforded a president and the extent to which the White House can help to shape television coverage give a president an important advantage in dealing with a foreign crisis. Television coverage of antiwar movements during Indochina and the preparations for the Gulf War, for example, forced presidents and Congress toward greater clarity and candor, which, in the end, benefited those leaders and the democratic process.
Television can encourage presidents to favor crisis management over long-term planning.
Because television focuses on the tangible and the dramatic, it rewards crisis management over crisis prevention. Television can drastically reduce the time, secrecy, and calm available to a president for deliberating with advisers on an urgent foreign problem. No future president will have the leisure that Kennedy had to think about the Soviet missiles in Cuba, but presidents should seriously consider buffering the early decision-making process as much as possible. Presidents cannot presume that they can maintain a monopoly on information for long. Thanks in part to television, just as a Kennedy in 1993 could not keep the missiles secret for six days, Bush could not expect to keep the shape and timing of the initial attack on Baghdad secret for long.