Telling, but Perhaps not Believing

Penn Arts and Sciences Magazine: Spring/Summer 2012 issue
by David R. Gibson
illustration by Matthew Leake

Presidents are called on to do many things. One is to make guesses about the future, and in particular, about the possible consequences of actions on a geopolitical stage occupied by adversaries bent on manipulating events to their advantage. The crises faced by President Obama involve many such guesses, such as guesses about the consequences of expanding or contracting U.S. commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, building a missile defense system over Russian opposition and attacking Iran.

In the best of circumstances, these guesses are the end product of the protracted exercise of imagination. Presidents may do their imagining alone, wandering through the Rose Garden or jogging around Camp David, but sometimes they assemble their diplomatic and military advisers in order to talk through various scenarios. Then the act of imagination is accomplished, in part, through the medium of language, or talk, and subject to its rules and vicissitudes.

To show why this matters we need better data than social scientists—rarely invited to sit in on Cabinet meetings—are normally allotted. However, almost 50 years ago, as he huddled with his advisers in the Cabinet Room to talk about Soviet missiles in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy flipped a hidden switch that activated a secret tape recorder. The result was an astonishing 20-plus hours of recordings of talk at the highest level of decision-making during the most dangerous moments of the Cold War, recordings that hardly anyone knew about until Watergate and that were only declassified in the mid-1990s.

This group, known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or the ExComm, spent much of its time telling stories about possible futures: if we do this, the Soviets will do that, and so on. On the whole, these stories ended badly, with an escalating crisis looking likely whatever the United States did and the clouds of nuclear war visible in every direction.

Given this, how did Kennedy select a naval blockade over the main alternative, an immediate air strike? If Kennedy found a way forward, it was because the blockade plan was revisited again and again, and on each return ExComm members were permitted to tell the story as if it had not been told many times before, judging from the lack of references to earlier tellings and the objections they elicited. This eventually made it possible for the group to tell a story about a blockade without an ending that had previously, and repeatedly, been affixed to it: that if, as everyone expected, it failed to force Khrushchev to withdraw his missiles and instead gave Soviet technicians time to ready some for firing, the U.S. could find itself bombing operational missiles a few days later, some of which could be launched, perhaps without authorization, against American cities.

Not everyone was willing to partake of this conversational amnesia, however. But when someone like Attorney General Robert Kennedy or United States National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy tried to re-raise the alarm about the risks of bombing the missiles, they found themselves in various ways prevented from monopolizing the floor long enough to make their point—such as by being interrupted, or by being spoken over and ignored by subsequent speakers, as if no one had heard them.

Because of this, starting on October 18, 1962—three days after the missiles were discovered—Kennedy was able to repeatedly hear a story about a blockade that did not end in nuclear war. This made it possible for him to make a decision that made sense against the backdrop of recent talk, even though it meant choosing a plan of action against which much had already been said and even though after he announced the blockade he fretted about the perils thereby incurred to anyone who would listen.

All of this suggests that sometimes it is more important for a hopeful story to be told than for it to be entirely believed. Something similar happened during President Barack Obama's 2009 Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review. Faced with an eight-year war increasingly threatened by a resurgent Taliban, Obama summoned top military and civilian officials to talk about a possible troop increase. According to Bob Woodward's 2010 Obama's Wars—admittedly, a poor substitute for audio recordings—Obama sought a story that connected a modest increase to the desired outcome of (at a minimum) a stable Afghanistan inhospitable to al Qaeda. His principal military advisers, such as General David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, refused to provide one, however, insisting that a large increase was needed, while offering few guarantees that even that would be successful. The group talked in circles until, on November 23, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright, representing the views of the Chiefs while Mullen was away, proposed the faster deployment of troops and their faster withdrawal arguing that the timeframe was more important than the size of the deployment (partly because it would motivate the Afghans to ready themselves to take over security operations when the drawdown occurred). Described later by attendees as a turning point in the deliberations, this was a key ingredient in Obama's ultimate decision to send an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan for an Iraq-like "surge," and to both deploy them quickly and begin withdrawing them in July of 2011.

Cartwright's story gave Obama a way forward when, as in 1962, all options looked bad, though the plan was based on (at best) untested assumptions about how the principal actors (Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and Pakistanis) would respond. Of course, all of this happened many months ago, and the situation in Afghanistan remains precarious. But if this crisis does not end as well for the United States as the one 50 years ago, it will probably have less to do with differences in the quality of the deliberative process, or the wisdom of the men (and this time around, women) involved, than hindsight will no doubt suggest.

David Gibson is an assistant professor of sociology at Penn. His forthcoming book, Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision During the Cuban Missile Crisis, explores the secret taping of talks between John F. Kennedy and his top advisers regarding the discovery of the Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba.

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