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Foreign Policy
Spring 1999
Essence of Decision
By Graham Allison & Philip Zelikow
Reviewed by Barton J. Bernstein *
In 1971, Graham Allison, then a young professor of government at Harvard, published Essence of Decision. The volume promised to take readers behind the scenes of the Cuban missile crisis and, in doing so, to present models for interpreting and explaining American foreign policy. Essence was a bold, sophisticated, and deeply flawed book. Despite problems of methodology and occasionally weak evidence, the volume probably ranked among the dozen most important American political science books issued in the 1970s.
Essence presented three, now-familiar models for analyzing decision making: Model I (the rational actor); Model II (organizational process); and Model III (governmental politics, better known as bureaucratic politics). According to Allison, many analysts err by relying too heavily on Model I—in short, by assuming that foreign-policy decisions reflect the priorities of a rational state and failing to recognize the importance of organizational constraints and bureaucratic influences. Essence explained foreign policy as the result of a process, not of values or ideology.
The book quickly gained attention. It made many analysts more aware of the lenses through which they studied foreign policy and their assumptions about selecting and organizing evidence. The book argued that the models that scholars choose to interpret decisions will often shape their findings. Allison intended Essence to reach beyond the realm of American foreign policy to the broader study of decision making, and he succeeded. The book’s influence spilled over from political science into the fields of sociology, public administration, and occasionally history. It became required reading in various business schools and public-policy programs.
Before long, however, a small cottage industry sprung up to critique the claims and models in Essence. The book, critics complained, seemed to minimize the president’s role in setting foreign policy and to neglect the influence of Congress and the public. Put bluntly, Essence had turned the analysis of policy largely into the study of organizations and bureaucracies. Stephen Krasner, in the Summer 1972 issue of FOREIGN POLICY, criticized Essence in his sardonically titled article, “Are Bureaucracies Important? (or Allison Wonderland).” Krasner cited, among other liabilities, the book’s antidemocratic implications, its undue emphasis on bureaucracies, and its seeming exemption of the president from responsibility for policy.
There were many serious problems with Essence. Its claims for bureaucracies and organizations were in fact excessive. And its categories were sometimes rather fuzzy. Why Allison placed some events in Model II rather than III or vice versa occasionally seemed arbitrary. Furthermore, the book’s use of three models did not produce one account of the missile crisis but rather a number of them, leaving readers to integrate the findings into a single interpretation on their own. And the volume placed too much emphasis on dubious evidence and even carefully analyzed a few events that never occurred—including, among other incorrect claims, that high state department officials and top navy officers thwarted presidential orders.
The accumulating criticisms of Essence, as well as new material—reports from Soviet archives, interviews with participants in the missile crisis, recent scholarship, and declassified American sources, including tapes of many meetings from October 1962—made a revised book both possible and desirable. Joining Allison as a coauthor of the new edition is Philip Zelikow, now director of the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Zelikow had been a member of President George Bush’s National Security Council before moving to Harvard, where he began his collaboration with Allison.
The revised volume is expanded by nearly 70 pages, and many of the chapters on theory, originally based on examples from 1950s and 1960s scholarship, now draw heavily on Bush administration policies. The new Essence is not a complete reworking of the original, it seems, but rather a partial response to critics and an analysis of new evidence on the missile crisis. Unlike the 1971 volume, for instance, the new edition provides a brief conclusion that attempts to integrate the book’s various analyses of the crisis. But even as new sections are grafted on and others are sliced away, the authors almost never explain why and where they have made major revisions, and why they have chosen to respond to some criticisms of the original Essence and ignore others. Even though some of the theory in the 1971 edition has been pared and recast, most often the authors simply add more propositions to an already lengthy list. The expansion inserts hedges and qualifying statements but seldom shows any thorough rethinking of the book’s main assertions.
In the chapters on theory, Model I is granted more significance than it was in the 1971 book. Model II is intelligently expanded to take account of more recent scholarship on the complexities of organizational culture. The authors also address some of the pitfalls of Model III. In particular, they have redefined the most famous sentence from the original book: “Where you stand depends on where you sit,” or in other words, an individual’s interests and approach depend on the bureaucracy from which the individual comes. But the authors seem to ignore that the original phrasing greatly overreached both relevant evidence and reasonable theory. Rather, they act as if critics had somehow misunderstood. The revised book declares that “depends” does not mean “is always determined by.” Seeking to retain much of the 1971 volume’s emphasis on the sitting/standing relationship, the revised version contends that “where one stands is influenced, most often influenced strongly, by where one sits.” But analysts of the missile crisis will find even the revised sitting/standing theory often works badly to explain the events of October 1962. The Joint Chiefs of Staff conform well enough. But Robert Kennedy, if interpreted primarily in his bureaucratic role as U.S. attorney general and not in his more important, nonbureaucratic role as the president’s brother, does not. It is often difficult to use the theory to explain the behavior of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara or Secretary of State Dean Rusk. cia director John McCone, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and Undersecretary of State George Ball frequently fall outside the lines as well. How exactly the theory applies to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen is unclear and thus difficult, if not impossible, to assess.
The revised Essence does indicate the power of Model II (now called organizational behavior) to explain matters that went awry in the missile crisis. The U.S. Air Force, seeking to protect its bombers, dispersed them to civilian airports, undercutting McNamara’s new “no-cities” nuclear-targeting strategy. Some of the bombers were dispatched to the southeastern United States, within range of Soviet mrbms (medium-range ballistic missiles) in Cuba. The president’s decision to place the country on high emergency alert meant that American aircraft in the northern polar region carried nuclear air-to-air missiles, which the pilots controlled manually. The U-2 that strayed into Soviet airspace on October 27 could have prompted retaliation by the Soviets and an American-initiated use of nuclear weapons. Such a disaster, the new Essence shows, may have been only narrowly averted.
In 1971, and again in 1999, Essence tries to explain Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to deploy Soviet missiles in Cuba in the first place. Surprisingly, the authors quickly reject the reasonable interpretation that Khrushchev was, at least in part, hoping to defend Cuba. Both editions, however, agree with many analysts that Khrushchev was seeking to enhance Soviet missile power by placing mrbms and irbms (intermediate-range ballistic missiles) on the island. Recent evidence suggests that in the early 1960s, the Soviets were far behind the United States in the nuclear-arms race. In autumn 1962, there were only about 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles in the Soviet Union, compared with 180 in the United States. Taking into account other delivery systems, including long-range bombers and submarine-based missiles, the U.S. nuclear arsenal was more than eight times greater than the Soviet Union’s at the time of the missile crisis.
The authors unconvincingly contend—with skimpy evidence and much conjecture—that Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba, in large part, to compel the West to leave Berlin. According to the authors, Khrushchev was planning to unveil the missiles after the U.S. elections in November 1962. Thus, he was acting both defensively and offensively. This “Berlin” argument will undoubtedly attract considerable attention, but it seems very strained and contradicts most recent scholarship. In explaining President John Kennedy’s choice of a blockade and his determination to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba, the authors acknowledge the importance of American domestic politics as well as administration concerns about alliance politics, the Berlin problem, and international credibility. But they devote too little attention to explaining why President Kennedy chose to bypass private negotiations and move directly to a dangerous confrontation.
Essence offers a troubling look at President Kennedy’s and the American government’s decisions in the Cuban missile crisis. The book usually seeks to avoid explicit value judgments, but the mounting evidence it presents of decisions going perilously awry raises doubts about both American leadership during the crisis and about the processes of American policymaking. Corrosive questions about responsibility, intention, and decision making demand equal scrutiny of the Soviet Union and, in particular, Khrushchev.
Unfortunately, Essence still greatly minimizes the crucial role of President Kennedy in the missile crisis and, in doing so, also offers a dubious set of theories to explain American foreign-policy decisions. The chief contribution of the original Essence, and now of the revised edition, may be that it helps illuminate decision making in noncrisis situations and in the actions of nongovernmental organizations.
Just as the 1971 book spawned a whole genre of criticism, the new edition may well help create a second wave of analysis and debate, a testament to Essence’s enduring influence. But the new edition, like the old, will attract as much attention for its flaws as for its insights. Despite its title, the book neither determines the essence of decision nor adequately explains the Cuban missile crisis. Perhaps, Essence’s greatest legacy in the study of the crisis will be the scholarship it inspires.
Endnotes
*: Barton J. Bernstein, professor of history at Stanford University, has written on various Cold War issues, including the Cuban missile crisis, and directs the university’s American studies program. Back.