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Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missle Crisis
Paperback
About the author
Graham T. Allison
32 books39 followersLibrarian Note: Also writes under the name Graham Allison.
Graham Tillett Allison, Jr. (born 23 March 1940) is an American political scientist and professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is renowned for his contribution in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection , co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976 and had some influence on the foreign policy of the administration of President Jimmy Carter which took office in early 1977. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy, with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism.
Allison is best known as a political scientist for his book Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971), in which he developed two new theoretical paradigms — an organizational process model and a bureaucratic politics model — to compete with the then-prevalent approach of understanding foreign policy decision making using a rational actor model. Essence of Decision swiftly revolutionized the study of decision making in political science and beyond.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
Graham Tillett Allison, Jr. (born 23 March 1940) is an American political scientist and professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is renowned for his contribution in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection , co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976 and had some influence on the foreign policy of the administration of President Jimmy Carter which took office in early 1977. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy, with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism.
Allison is best known as a political scientist for his book Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971), in which he developed two new theoretical paradigms — an organizational process model and a bureaucratic politics model — to compete with the then-prevalent approach of understanding foreign policy decision making using a rational actor model. Essence of Decision swiftly revolutionized the study of decision making in political science and beyond.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 10, 2026
En anglais. Le développement au début du livre des théories qui sont comparées par la suite, est plutôt austère. Mais leur utilisation contrastée sur la crise des missiles de Cuba procure une profonde réflexion sur la méthodologie à utiliser en politique, et donne des pistes sur la compréhension de cette crise majeure. Exceptionnel!
December 15, 2025
I read this book for a book-club while participating in a fellowship at RAND. The specifics of the models that Graham works to establish are described in excruciating detail and then the data that he surveys in the application of those models to the Cuban missile crisis is both amazing and mind-numbing. I'm pretty sure I blanked out for a handful of pages - this is not a wildly stimulating read, but it is rather interesting. What I greatly appreciate is Graham's willingness to explain why exactly things unfolded the way they did and then explain why that explanation is completely wrong.
We don't live in a black and white world. Science is rarely ever exacting as it would like you to believe and NEVER exacting in the political environment. Humans are NOT always rational in the purest transactional sense that's comprehensible and always influenced by their environment. Graham's work is uncomfortably and wonderfully complex, ambiguous, and uncertain - just like this world. I think it's a great book for senior officers and national leaders to think through what really matters - it might be something you never considered.
The quotes at the beginning of the book were absolutely on point:
"The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer-often, indeed, to the decider himself...There will always be the dark and tangled stretches in the decision-making process-mysterious even to those who may be most intimately involved."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
"I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes, whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived."
-Alexis de Tocqueville
I REALLY like that second quote...so spot on...
We don't live in a black and white world. Science is rarely ever exacting as it would like you to believe and NEVER exacting in the political environment. Humans are NOT always rational in the purest transactional sense that's comprehensible and always influenced by their environment. Graham's work is uncomfortably and wonderfully complex, ambiguous, and uncertain - just like this world. I think it's a great book for senior officers and national leaders to think through what really matters - it might be something you never considered.
The quotes at the beginning of the book were absolutely on point:
"The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer-often, indeed, to the decider himself...There will always be the dark and tangled stretches in the decision-making process-mysterious even to those who may be most intimately involved."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
"I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes, whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived."
-Alexis de Tocqueville
I REALLY like that second quote...so spot on...
January 4, 2025
This is the first edition of the book published in 1971. A definite must read for any serious student of foreign policy and international relations. It is also a good primer and preparation to read the second edition of the same book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews