Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.923
EAN: 9780321013491
Edition: 2
Feature: ISBN13: 9780321013491
ISBN: 0321013492
Label: Longman
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Longman
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 440
Publication Date: 1999-01-29
Publisher: Longman
Studio: Longman

• ISBN13: 9780321013491
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

One of the most influential political science works written in the post World War II era, the original edition of Essence of Decision is a unique and fascinating examination of the pivotal event of the Cold War. Not simply revised, but completely re-written, the Second Edition of this classic text is a fresh reinterpretation of the theories and events surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis, incorporating all new information from the Kennedy tapes and recently de-classified Soviet files. The Second Edition refines the arguments presented in the original book in light of Graham Allison's experience as the Assistant Secretary of Defense and the founding Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Second Edition also features a new co-author, Philip Zelikow, author of the best-selling and critically-acclaimed The Kennedy Tapes, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1997. Essence of Decision, Second Edition, is a vivid look at decision-making under pressure and is the only single volume work that attempts to answer the enduring question: how should citizens understand the actions of their government?

Customer Rating:
Summary: Really Interesting
Comment: Essence of Decision makes a bunch of really interesting nuanced generalizations on decision making and organizational structure by drawing examples seamlessly from 70 years of national foreign policy.

Interesting for both its stories (Cuban Missile Crisis, WWII) and revelations how organizational structure and individual biases infects all decision making processes.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: First president to be fooled by the Castro Brothers
Comment: I was an exiled Cuban teenager working in Key West when the October missile crisis exploded.
Jets flying over our heads day in and day out, missile launchers deployed all over the keys from Key Largo to Key West, the only highway connecting to the mainland solely dedicated to troop tansport. What a nightmare!

In those days I considered Nikita Kuruschev an irresponsible head of state, and a peasant bully with no brains by putting the world on the brink of nuclear war.

Today I consider the Russian Prime Minister a political genius. Why?

The Russians knew perfectly well that a missile base ninety miles away from the US will be totally unacceptable to the Americans and thus a crisis of major proportions will ensue as a result.
But the truth is that Kuruschev only wanted the Soviet Union to have a political presence in the hemisphere and nothing else.
He also knew that following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, more attempts to depose the Castro brothers will continue to be made by Cuban exiles with the help of the US government. This was unacceptable to the Russian Prime Minister. Their presence in Latin America was an incredible achievement and they were not going to let it go.
Today I see the missile crisis as nothing but a poker game between a savvy politician and a naive and inexperienced president.
After much fist shaking, the Russian prime minister finally agreed to withdraw their nuclear missiles from Cuba on condition that the US government never again will interfere in Cuban politics or allow any insurgent group to undermine the Cuban government from American shores.
Fifty years later, and thanks to President Kennedy and his advisors, not only communism is alive and well in Cuba but it has also spread to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and more on the way.
Our former president in order to clean his deplorable foreign policy record decided to engage in a war of liberation against North Viet Nam.
One blunder after another has cost thousands of American lives, socialist ideas are thriving in Latin America and hatred against our country has never been worse.

Signed:
Andrew J. Rodriguez
Award-winning author: "Adios, Havana," a Memoir

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent guide to explaining governmental and corporate decisions
Comment: I made a bit of a mistake when I read this book; I should have waited until I got a chance to pick up the second edition. The first edition is a little dated, both in examples and language, and Cuban Missile Crisis (CMC from here on out) experts would not doubt find plenty of out of date facts. However, for me, the point of the book was not to explain every facet of the CMC, but to use examples from the CMC to illustrate the different models of decision making. I won't go into details about the models (if you want a general overview check out the Wikipedia article on the book).

While "Essence of Decision" discusses decision making in a governmental context, I find that it is useful in explaining decisions many other contexts, including corporate decisions. I feel like the overall point is that no decision is made completely in the dark and no decision is made completely in the light. When trying to explain something like Enron or Countrywide, it is easy to demonize a few people but it is more important to realize that a lot of smaller decisions allowed these catastrophes to occur. Although "Essence of Decision" is limited to the Cuban Missile Crisis, it is easy to see examples of complex decision making on the news and at work every day. I found the book to be very helpful in understanding the inner-workings of everyday life and would highly recommend it to others interested in gaining a greater understanding of why things happen the way that they do.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very Pleased
Comment: Delivered early. Great condition. Good delivery info provided. I'll do it again.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Taking drama and mangling it with (useful) academic vocab
Comment: This is a political-sciency version of the closest we came to a nuclear war, in effect using the crisis to introduce the reader to a methodology on how people make decisions. The authors see three ways that things get decided, and when observers confuse them, dire consequences may follow. First, there is the rational-actor who does things for explicit reasons, as if there were one decisionmaker who controls everything from conception to implementation. Second, there is the political decision, often made for purposes of manipulation rather than for stated goals and hance are harder to read. Third, there is bureaucratic decison-making, according to which actors on the ground carry out orders in the way that they are trained (i.e. by standard operating procedures, or SOPs).

Basically, in my reading, they argue that these modes were mixed in the Cuban Missile Crisis - the US thinking that there was a (rational actor) policy to militarise Cuba with nuclear weapons when in fact much of the provocatively appearing construction was due to SOPs of the military who installed the missiles. Thus, the US had less to fear, but its political reality made an over-reaction inevitable.

Now, these are very useful distinctions and the analysis is interesting. However, they do not make for very interesting reading or very good history. That makes this book a slog, which limits its appeal to academics rather than the general reader. I read this for a class - otherwise, I would never have gotten through it.

Recommended on balance, but go elsewhere if you are looking for a good story rather than a rather staid acadeimic analysis.

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