Presidential Decision Making

Presidential Decision Making PDF Author: Roger B. Porter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521271127
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This inside account of decision making in the White House describes the organizational challenges the President faces. The Economic Policy Board was one of the most systematic and sustained attempts to organize advice for the President in recent decades. The author examines the Board's deliberations over three controversial policy issues, drawing on scores of interviews with cabinet officials and career civil servants.

Presidential Decision Making

Presidential Decision Making PDF Author: Roger B. Porter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521271127
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
This inside account of decision making in the White House describes the organizational challenges the President faces. The Economic Policy Board was one of the most systematic and sustained attempts to organize advice for the President in recent decades. The author examines the Board's deliberations over three controversial policy issues, drawing on scores of interviews with cabinet officials and career civil servants.

Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making

Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making PDF Author: Rose McDermott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139468898
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
Examines the impact of medical and psychological illness on foreign policy decision making. Illness provides specific, predictable, and recognizable shifts in attention, time perspective, cognitive capacity, judgment, and emotion, which systematically affect impaired leaders. In particular, this book discusses the ways in which processes related to aging, physical and psychological illness, and addiction influence decision making. This book provides detailed analysis of four cases among the American presidency. Woodrow Wilson's October 1919 stroke affected his behavior during the Senate fight over ratifying the League of Nations. Franklin Roosevelt's severe coronary disease influenced his decisions concerning the conduct of war in the Pacific from 1943–1945 in particular. John Kennedy's illnesses and treatments altered his behavior at the 1961 Vienna conference with Soviet Premier Khrushchev. And Nixon's psychological impairments biased his decisions regarding the covert bombing of Cambodia in 1969–1970.

Risk and Presidential Decision-making

Risk and Presidential Decision-making PDF Author: Luca Trenta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317521250
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This book aims at gauging whether the nature of US foreign policy decision-making has changed after the Cold War as radically as a large body of literature seems to suggest, and develops a new framework to interpret presidential decision-making in foreign policy. It locates the study of risk in US foreign policy in a wider intellectual landscape that draws on contemporary debates in historiography, international relations and Presidential studies. Based on developments in the health and environment literature, the book identifies the President as the ultimate risk-manager, demonstrating how a President is called to perform a delicate balancing act between risks on the domestic/political side and risks on the strategic/international side. Every decision represents a ‘risk vs. risk trade-off,’ in which the management of one ‘target risk’ leads to the development ‘countervailing risks.’ The book applies this framework to the study three major crises in US foreign policy: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. Each case-study results from substantial archival research and over twenty interviews with policymakers and academics, including former President Jimmy Carter and former Senator Bob Dole. This book is ideal for postgraduate researchers and academics in US foreign policy, foreign policy decision-making and the US Presidency as well as Departments and Institutes dealing with the study of risk in the social sciences. The case studies will also be of great use to undergraduate students.

The Last Card

The Last Card PDF Author: Timothy Andrews Sayle
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
This is the real story of how George W. Bush came to double-down on Iraq in the highest stakes gamble of his entire presidency. Drawing on extensive interviews with nearly thirty senior officials, including President Bush himself, The Last Card offers an unprecedented look into the process by which Bush overruled much of the military leadership and many of his trusted advisors, and authorized the deployment of roughly 30,000 additional troops to the warzone in a bid to save Iraq from collapse in 2007. The adoption of a new counterinsurgency strategy and surge of new troops into Iraq altered the American posture in the Middle East for a decade to come. In The Last Card we have access to the deliberations among the decision-makers on Bush's national security team as they embarked on that course. In their own words, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and others, recount the debates and disputes that informed the process as President Bush weighed the historical lessons of Vietnam against the perceived strategic imperatives in the Middle East. For a president who had earlier vowed never to dictate military strategy to generals, the deliberations in the Oval Office and Situation Room in 2006 constituted a trying and fateful moment. Even a president at war is bound by rules of consensus and limited by the risk of constitutional crisis. What is to be achieved in the warzone must also be possible in Washington, D.C. Bush risked losing public esteem and courted political ruin by refusing to disengage from the costly war in Iraq. The Last Card is a portrait of leadership—firm and daring if flawed—in the Bush White House. The personal perspectives from men and women who served at the White House, Foggy Bottom, the Pentagon, and in Baghdad, are complemented by critical assessments written by leading scholars in the field of international security. Taken together, the candid interviews and probing essays are a first draft of the history of the surge and new chapter in the history of the American presidency.

Presidential Decision Making Adrift

Presidential Decision Making Adrift PDF Author: David Wells Engstrom
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847684144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The subject of refugee policy has generated considerable public debate during the past decade. In this case study of presidential decision-making, David W. Engstrom analyzes the Carter Administration's response to the Mariel boatlift from Cuba in 1979. Engstrom argues that a faulty decision making structure and ignorance of the historic dynamics of Cuban immigration contributed to the government's mishandling of the refugee crisis. More generally, he explores the ways in which refugee policy is shaped by foreign policy concerns, domestic politics, and economic circumstances. This important book will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American studies, foreign policy, and immigration and refugee policy.

Making Foreign Policy

Making Foreign Policy PDF Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042958122X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Originally published in 2005. David Mitchell provides a better understanding of the role presidents play in the decision-making process in terms of their influence on two key steps in the process: deliberation and outcome of policy making. The events that have taken place in relation to the Bush administration's decisions to fight the war on terrorism and invade Iraq highlight how important it is to understand the president's role in formulating policy. This influential study presents an advisory system theory of decision-making to examine cases of presidential policy formulation drawn from the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations. Easily accessible to scholars, graduates and advanced undergraduates interested in US foreign policy or foreign policy analysis, presidential studies, and bureaucracy and public administrations scholars, and to practitioners and those with a general interest in International Relations.

Decision-making in the White House

Decision-making in the White House PDF Author: Theodore C. Sorensen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231136471
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
"This book is based on the Gino Speranza Lectures for 1963, delivered at Columbia University on April 18 and May 9, 1963"--P. [vii].

Paying Attention to Foreign Affairs

Paying Attention to Foreign Affairs PDF Author: Thomas Knecht
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271056681
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Do American presidents consider public opinion when making foreign policy decisions? In a democracy, it is generally assumed that citizen preferences inform public policy. For a variety of reasons, however, foreign policy has always posed a difficult challenge for democratic governance. In Paying Attention to Foreign Affairs, Thomas Knecht offers new insights into the relationship between public opinion and U.S. foreign policy. He does so by shifting our focus away from the opinions that Americans hold and toward the issues that grab the public’s attention. Policy making under the glare of public scrutiny differs from policy making when no one is looking. As public interest in foreign policy increases, the political stakes also rise. A highly attentive public can then force presidents to choose foreign policies that are less politically risky but usually less effective. By tracking the ebb and flow of public attention to foreign policy, this book offers a method of predicting when presidents are likely to lead, follow, or simply ignore the American public.

Shame and Humiliation

Shame and Humiliation PDF Author: Blema S. Steinberg
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773513914
Category : Presidents
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Blema Steinberg adopts a psychoanalytical approach in her examination of the decision making of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower during the Vietnam War. She argues that personality traits, such as narcissism, influenced critical decisions they made about U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

Why Presidents Fail

Why Presidents Fail PDF Author: Richard M. Pious
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742563391
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Presidents are surrounded by political strategists and White House counsel who presumably know enough to avoid making the same mistakes as their predecessors. Why, then, do the same kinds of presidential failures occur over and over again? Why Presidents Fail answers this question by examining presidential fiascos, quagmires, and risky business-the kind of failure that led President Kennedy to groan after the Bay of Pigs invasion, 'How could I have been so stupid?' In this book, Richard M. Pious looks at nine cases that have become defining events in presidencies from Dwight D. Eisenhower and the U-2 Flights to George W. Bush and Iraqi WMDs. He uses these cases to draw generalizations about presidential power, authority, rationality, and legitimacy. And he raises questions about the limits of presidential decision-making, many of which fly in the face of the conventional wisdom about the modern presidency.