Rating: 
Summary: The Great Non-Event
Review: Reading "Essence of Decision" resonates with Kurosawa, or maybe Stoppard. We have a central story - one of the great non-events in human history, the moment when the Soviet Union and the United States "came eyeball to eyeball" (as Dean Rusk is said to have said) before someone blinked. We hear it three times: one, from the standpoint of the "rational actor;" second from the internal logic of organizations; and third, from the perspective of politics where people more or less rub along together.It's an event that bears retelling and, with qualification, the device works. The upshot is that we get some insight into the missile crisis. But not at all incidentally, we get some insight into the academic study of politics (I resist calling it "political science"), and a whiff of what it might have to offer for our better understanding of the world. Aside from the Kurusowa effect, there is another structural innovation. We have, in a sense, two books interleaved, like Faulkner's "Wild Palms." The even-numbered chapters tell (and retell) the basic story. The odd-numbered chapters offer a framework of "theory." I suppose you might read just the even-numbered chapters - indeed the authors themselves suggest as much, though rather half-heartedly. And indeed, the odd-numbered chapters can be heavy going. One cannot help recalling the old canard about the sociologist as a person who gets a government research grant to find the bordello next door. You are tempted to say that their theory is what sophisticated people know anyway, and the clueless will probably never figure out. But there is an answer to this dismissal. That is: most (or at least) a lot of history gets told from the standpoint of the "rational actor." A survey of the competing approaches makes it clear just what this approach leaves out. And if the polyphonic approach is so obviously superior to the single narrative line, then why have historians from Thucydides to Henry Kissinger been willing to do without it? One answer might be: for all their talents, they simply haven't learned the way to tell a story in any other way. So on the whole, retelling works. But not, perhaps, as well as it might. Another reviewer has said that this isn't really a case to illustrate "organization" theory here because this is not a case that highlights organizations - rather, at least for the United States, the response to the Cuban missile crisis was the work of a small group of men, working together in close cooperation. There is some merit to this view: concededly, you do not get the clash of bull elephants that you might have got at another time when Defense makes war on State, and both work together to fend of Intelligence. But you get a taste of it: we find that the Joint Chiefs were most hospitable to an invasion; that State thought that maybe we could talk it through; and that John McCone from the CIA was the one person who most clearly anticipated the threat. Moreover, you see the "organization" problem in a somewhat different light, when you see how the President's orders were massaged or modified by the military (sometimes, even, within the military). But perhaps in any event, I need not get too distracted by the framework. Along the way, there are any number of nuggets that stand pretty well on their own. I liked in particular, for instance, the discussion of the role of committee work. We tend to stick up our nose at any project done by committee. But, argue our authors, in World War II it was Churchill, high-handed as he was, who worked through committee-and virtually always followed the committee's advice. The "strong leader" who kept things close to his vest, was Hitler. But more generally - I was already an adult at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and I remember it well. Specifically, I remember how frightened were so many people in my surroundings. I wasn't that frightened; I figured that one way or another, we would rub along. In the end, of course, I was right - we did rub along. But I think in retrospect, it was I who was kidding myself and the Nervous Nellies who had the right attitude. We did rub along, but as Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo, it was a near thing. I particularly like Robert Kennedy: "The fourteen people [in the American inner circle] were very significant-bright, able, dedicated people, all of whom had the greatest affection for the U.S. ... If six of them had been President of the U.S., I think that the world might have been blown up." [Final technical note: one or more of the other reviews appear to be discussing the first edition of this book. The (current) seocnd edition is not a mere cosmetic update, but substantially a new book].
Rating: 
Summary: A new view
Review: This book is Graham Allison's take on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he's far from the only author to try and tackle this event. What makes "Essence of Decision" different, however, is that Allison adopts no one, definitive answer to the "main questions" of the crisis, but rather offers three ways of interpreting the event, all with their merits and drawbacks. Allison's main argument is that many foreign policy experts, laymen and experts alike, depend on "rational choice" theories. For an armchair analyst, using game theory or assuming one person is making all the decisions is indeed an easy way to explain the world. However, as Allison demonstrates, people simply don't work that way. To fill this gap, Allison gives two alternate theories: a bureacratic-organization model (where information and decisions are limited by pre-existing structures) and a political process method (where those with close social links to the key decisionmakers have a decisive advantage). Allison makes a good case for these alternate theories, noting that one must discard a lot of facts to construct a "rational" model, and that, in his own words, anyone with a good imagination can construct a rational model (which, incidentally, violates the scientific law of falsifiability). This book seems to be a deliberate attack on the "rational models" most academics use, which is its primary virtue. I myself first encountered it in a sociology class, as the basic theories Allison created to help explain the missile crisis are applicable to many things, from foreign policy to product marketing.
Rating:
Summary: A new view
Review: This book is Graham Allison's take on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he's far from the only author to try and tackle this event. What makes "Essence of Decision" different, however, is that Allison adopts no one, definitive answer to the "main questions" of the crisis, but rather offers three ways of interpreting the event, all with their merits and drawbacks. Allison's main argument is that many foreign policy experts, laymen and experts alike, depend on "rational choice" theories. For an armchair analyst, using game theory or assuming one person is making all the decisions is indeed an easy way to explain the world. However, as Allison demonstrates, people simply don't work that way. To fill this gap, Allison gives two alternate theories: a bureacratic-organization model (where information and decisions are limited by pre-existing structures) and a political process method (where those with close social links to the key decisionmakers have a decisive advantage). Allison makes a good case for these alternate theories, noting that one must discard a lot of facts to construct a "rational" model, and that, in his own words, anyone with a good imagination can construct a rational model (which, incidentally, violates the scientific law of falsifiability). This book seems to be a deliberate attack on the "rational models" most academics use, which is its primary virtue. I myself first encountered it in a sociology class, as the basic theories Allison created to help explain the missile crisis are applicable to many things, from foreign policy to product marketing.
Rating:
Summary: Good for anyone intersted in decision making
Review: This book is not only the best I've seen concerning the Cuban missile crisis, but it also provides an excellent veiw of international policy making. Many other books concerning the crisis don't illustrate nearly as many implications that the various power centers had to deal with. It also gives an excellent portrayal of presidental decision making.
Rating: 
Summary: Taking drama and mangling it with (useful) academic vocab
Review: 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. Second, there is the political decision, often made for purposes of manipulation rather than for stated goals. 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. 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.
Recommended on balance, but go elsewhere if you are looking for a good story rather than a staid acadeimic analysis.
Rating:
Summary: A book for young executives
Review: Venturing into big corporations is sometimes an obscure science. You do not understand how or why things get done. This book helps you understand the intricacies of organizations. It starts with the usual logical model, goes on elaborating until it develops a model, which does a better job explaining the "unexplainable" actions of organizations. The Cuban Missile Crises is the vehicle to illustrate all three models. The reading of the first edition was a bit dull, but got better in the second edition.
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