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.

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.

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.

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.

Examines the history of the office of national security in the United States from its inception, describing how the role of the national security advisor to the president has evolved between the 1950s and 2000s, and discusses the influence of the national security advisor on the commander in chief's decisions.

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.

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