A thought about presidential decision making.

Often we focus on political decision making at moments of great crisis, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the creation of the Berlin Wall, the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, or the recognition of a new, potentially pandemic disease. Decisions at such times are indeed important, but many more decisions are made in the White House or the Kremlin that are considered as routine. The processes leading to "routine" decisions are I think different than those in "crisis", but their cumulative impact may be very great. How many "routine" decisions led to the lack of regulation and oversight of the financial industry, which in turn led to the financial crisis? How many "routine" decisions led to crises that held the risk of nuclear war on a global scale?

The studies I am familiar with on decision making in the White House seem to focus on the President and a relatively small group of people who met with him to discuss the specific decision. I suspect that each of the people involved in discussions with the President has in turn a system which feeds him/her information, analysis and opinion. In the case of office holders such as the Secretary of State, the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of the Treasury, as heads of huge bureaucratic agencies, the individual benefits from direct conversations with subordinates (including from well down in the bureaucracy if necessary), Congressional colleagues and experts, but also from staffed out documents. Of course, these contacts of contacts draw upon their own institutional resources for those conversations. Thus the extended trees of social networking involved in presidential decision making seem to be underrepresented in the studies on crisis decisions.

One of the consequences of this is that there may be a bias in analysis of international negotiations. When the President of the United States negotiated with the Premier of the USSR, the trees of social networks involved in the decision making on each side may have been very different. Moreover, Stalin had much more autonomy negotiating for the USSR than did Khrushchev; Stalin had consolidated dictatorial power establishing a cult of personality while Khrushchev was deposed by the Politburo. Moreover, even in a negotiation of the leaders of two superpowers, the leaders of other nations had to be considered, each of whom had his own social network tree, and there would have been links among those trees.

In the case of routine decision making, it seems to me likely that much of the decision making is in fact delegated. I worked on a few decision memorandums for the president and in each case there was extensive work done by teams of career analysts, drawing upon information from their bureaus, to formulate several serious alternatives; this was followed by interdepartmental meetings at the deputy secretary or assistant secretary level to review and modify the decision document before the memo was presented to the president. This framing of the decision to be made by the president greatly reduced the choices available and influenced the final choice.

Obviously the several million people in the U.S. government have a lot more knowledge and understanding than the president alone could ever hope to have. What do we want of a president as decision maker? I think we want someone with a clear philosophy of government (hopefully a realistic and appropriate philosophy) so that his subordinates can present alternatives in line with that philosophy. Ideally we would want someone with a broad understanding of economics, foreign affairs, finance and administration. One would want someone able to draw effectively on the resources available to a president for decision making, and indeed to choose a staff  to help organize those resources effectively. And one would wish someone able to defend the choices made to the public, the bureaucracy, the other branches of government, and to fellow world leaders. Ideally one would want a good balance among these skills. A president who fails to delegate analytic tasks adequately will not have the time to communicate adequately; a president who is all front and little substance will also be likely to achieve little.