Allison on Essence

Thirty years after publication, Essence of Decision, the book that reshaped how policymaking is conducted, receives an overhaul.

by Alexandra Marks MPA 1991

As a young graduate student, Graham Allison was captivated by what he still considers one of the finest hours in crisis decision making in American history — the Cuban Missile Crisis. His voracious curiosity, whetted by the unique analytical bent of his mind, led him to probe like no academic had before the intricate and subtle complexities of the Kennedy Administration's behavior during those pivotal 13 days in October 1962 when the country was brought to the brink of nuclear war. By the time he had produced a draft of his doctoral thesis on the subject, the wise men at Harvard already recognized they had an extraordinary find on their hands.

In 1968, Professor Richard Zeckhauser thought so much of Allison's work he brought the young academic into his advanced economics course to explain the theories of modeling he'd drawn from the crisis. Allison's thesis was then called "Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis."

"He came in and wrote on the blackboard, CM and CMC," says Robert Klitgaard, who was then a senior at Harvard College and is now the dean of the RAND Graduate School. "What he was trying to do was add to the skills of the economist a sensitivity to bureaucracy and politics — a kind of, 'Hold your horses guys, there's more to it than this.'' And Graham...enabled people to make that intellectual connection."

Three years later, his thesis was published as Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the time, neither Allison nor his publisher realized what they had on their hands. Essence proved to be a seminal book, which helped spawn the public policy discipline by laying the foundation for a series of new analytical approaches to understanding the behavior of governments and other institutions.

It also provided a theoretical framework on which to build the nascent Kennedy School during its formative years, as it grew under Allison's leadership into one of the country's premier public policy institutions. To date, Essence has been used in countless courses across the coun-try and has sold more than 250,000 copies — something almost un-heard of for a political science book. Indeed, it's become a bible of sorts, for the discipline. Now, almost 30 years since its first publication, Allison and co-author Philip Zelikow have produced a second edition, which proves to be as indispensable as the first. Updated to include all of the relevant historical data and evidence that's come to light since the fall of the Soviet Union and the discovery of the Kennedy tapes, the new edition also incorporates a generation of theoretical advances that grew from Allison's first, fertile models of decision making.

"The new edition...is even more powerful than the original as a gripping history and a superb textbook," says General Colin Powell. "The lessons are as useful to me now as they were when I first studied them over 20 years ago."

The new book also embraces one of Allison's enduring concerns — the continuing risks that come from weapons of mass destruction, whether they be nuclear, biological, or chemical, in the hands of terrorists or rogue governments. He hopes the new Essence can provide "an antidote to the complacency that's set in and the forgetfulness" about the power of the world's nuclear arsenals and its other deadly contrivances.

"They haven't gone away," he says pointedly, "they just appear in a new and in some ways more frightful guise in the form of loose nukes."

If the new edition has as much impact as the last, Allison may achieve his goal of pricking the nation's consciousness during this age of economic plenty and domestic security. Generations of Kennedy school students who were taught Allison's rational actor models, organizational theory, and had their strategic and analytic skills honed in his core curriculum courses still use them in their everyday life — whether they be diplomats, journalists, military officers, or government bureaucrats.

Julie [Coyne] Ames MPA 1991 and Chris Ames MPA 1991 are typical. Now married, they took S-247, which Allison taught in conjunction with Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye, Jr., as mid-career students in 1991. Both consider it the "flagship course" of the Kennedy School.

"All the myths were dispelled about foreign policy as the realm of just diplomats or just the military," says Julie Ames, now a public relations executive in San Diego. "Sometimes Chris and I will be reading the New York Times and we'll hand each other an article and say, 'This is an S-247 topic.' If you could only take one course at Harvard, that would be it."

Allison's groundbreaking work has also had a profound effect on the school's faculty. Several use Essence in the course work. And many more were influenced by it as they developed their own academic expertise. It was one of the first books Stephen Walt read as an undergraduate in international relations at Stanford University in 1975.

"I wrote my final paper on the book," says Walt, who was recently appointed the Kirkpatrick Professor of International Relations at the Kennedy School. This year Walt also chaired a roundtable discussion on the revision of Essence at the American Political Science Association. He attributes the success of the first book to the fact that it provided "three powerful, simple, and intuitively plausible" ways of analyzing decisions in an organization. That made it easy to learn and easy to teach. It also traveled well across different policy problems, from domestic to international politics, to the decision-making processes at universities.

But what Walt and others find remarkable about the revision is its ambitiousness. Instead of just updating the manuscript cosmetically, Allison and Zelikow tried to address the full range of both historic and theoretical literature written since it was first published — almost 30 years of research with which to wrestle.

Brian Mandell, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School, has already used the new edition in the classroom. "I think it's just much more fulsome, richer, and nuanced than the first text," he says. "It verifies, opens up, and illuminates parts of the black box of Soviet thinking and American leadership at that time that we didn't have access to before."

Like any notable book, Essence came in for its share of criticism and controversy. Some believe the new edition has lost the beauty of the simplicity of the first. But such comments pale compared with some of the harsh attacks endured by the original. One critique in Foreign Policy in the early 1970s was titled, "Allison's Wonderland."

Top among the criticisms at the time was Allison's contention that President Kennedy must have made a secret deal of some sort with Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev. History has now vindicated that view. But there is no hint of gloating when Allison talks about the revelations found in the depths of the Soviet archives and on the secretly recorded Kennedy tapes, only a surprisingly fresh excitement from someone who's studied this topic for more than 30 years.

"You can go and actually be a fly on the wall in the most intimate deliberations of the U.S. government as it considers making war — this has never happened in history, there's no equivalent data about any equivalent crisis," he says.

Allison then goes on to lay out in exquisite detail the scene as Kennedy sat with 20 of his most trusted advisers and grapples with how to respond to the Soviet threat. It's Saturday, October 27. The United States has blockaded Cuba, where the Soviet long-range nuclear missiles have already been installed and are being made operational every day. The consensus in the room is to give the Soviets an ultimatum — remove the missiles or face the consequences. Kennedy is balking. He takes on each of his advisers and pushes them, one after another to look at the con-sequences of such an action, two, three, even four steps down the road.

"You see for the first time in an historical situation the President as analyst-in-chief — usually a president sits there and peo-ple do the pros and cons and he's a judge," says Allison. "In this case he's going head to head with the people that he most respects and differing with their views and coming to a different conclusion."

At the time Allison wrote the first edition, most of the material about the missile crisis was still classified. He had to rely on what reports were available and interviews with participants. Still, by applying his analytic skills and the models he'd developed, Allison imagined what must have happened.

"There was Kennedy looking over the cliff thinking, 'Oh my God, we might really have a nuclear war.' He judged the chances were between one and three and even of us going to war. And then he's thinking as he did empathetically of this poor guy Khrushchev who's sitting over there also worrying about this. It seemed to me implausible that he wouldn't give him something, especially if he could give it privately."

And that's exactly what the secretly recorded tapes show he did. After sending most of his advisers home for dinner, Kennedy told a select few that he was going to send his brother, the attorney general, to visit Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dubrynin to give him the letter with the ultimatum that was already written. At the same time, the attorney general told Dubrynin that if they removed the Cuban missiles, within several months NATO would withdraw the missiles in Turkey, which had infuriated the Soviet Union in the first place. But Khrushchev was told it had to be kept secret or the deal was off. That's just one of dozens of intriguing incidents compellingly unfurled in the new edition.

There are also a series of frightening events that Allison says illustrate the potential fuses to war "that go down paths of misperceptions, accidents, and unanticipated consequences," an understanding of which can help not only avoid war, but also everyday institutional and bureaucratic disasters. Which makes the second Essence as essential reading as the first.

Alexandra Marks MPA 1991 is a senior writer for The Christian Science Monitor.