Presidential Judgment : Foreign Policy Decision Making in the White House
From the Introduction by Aaron LobelThis book is the product of an Institute of Politics (IOP) study group at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the purpose of which was to examine the judgment of six American presidents in the context of their foreign policy decisions: Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. To provide first-hand accounts of presidential judgment in action, five distinguished former practitioners delivered presentations that offer insight into the presidents they knew best.In addition, the nation's thirty-eighth President, Gerald Ford, shared his personal reflections on the difficult foreign policy decisions he made while in the White House.These six presentations considered foreign policy decisions from the perspective of a president and his staff forced to operate with neither perfect information nor the benefit of hindsight.The practitioners in this book certainly do not claim to resolve the mysteries surrounding judgment. In fact, they appear to disagree, or differ significantly in emphasis, concerning whether judgment is the product of an individual capacity or a decision making process. Seen as a whole, their presentations highlight the importance of three factors that contribute to presidential judgment: (1) the structure of the National Security Council (NSC) and the flow of information to the president; (2) the substance of the president's beliefs about foreign policy; and (3) the intellectual style, experience, temperament, and character of the president. The concepts of structure, substance and style are important, but the practitioners in this book also imply that examples of presidential decisions must be examined with close attention to particulars in order to fully understand the meaning of judgment.