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CHAPTER 7 IIFoliowing the Leaderll : The Impact of U.S. Presidential Style upon Advisory Group Dynamics, Structure, and Decision Thomas Preston Introduction In September of 1950, President Harry S. Truman and his advisers made the decision to cross the Thirty-eighth Parallel and occupy North Korea. Although the situation was "framed" by Truman and his staff as an opportunity to reunify Korea, end the threat offurther aggression from the North, and answer domestic critics of the Administration's foreign policy, within three months the decision had deteriorated into an abject policy failure. The massive intervention by Chinese forces on November 25 resulted in the worst military defeat in American history and a full-scale rout of United Nations forces back to the Thirty-eighth Parallel (Janis 1972, 14). On: the other hand, when Truman and his Blair House Group made the initial decision to intervene in Korea to halt the North's unexpected invasion of the South in June of 1950, it was widely seen as an example of decisive presidential leadership and successful decision making. United Nations forces succeeded in halting the North Korean advance, prevented the fall of South Korea, and provided the United States with a golden opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to Containment policy. How were these two pivotal decisions made? Was Truman's leadership style a decisive factor? The policy outcomes were strikingly different in the two cases. Was the advisory process similar in both decisions, or did Truman's advisers fall victim to serious group malfunctions in the ill-fated September 1950 decision? It should be noted that I do not mean to imply a perfect correlation between process and outcome "quality"! Yet, enriching the decision process by increasing access to information, debate on options, and so on does promise to improve the chances of achieving desired outcomes. (See Fuller and Aldag, this volume; 't Hart, this volume, for discussions of multiple standards of evaluation.) 191 192 Beyond Groupthink Clearly, national leaders tend to receive the lion's share of the credit, or the blame, for foreign policy decisions and their outcomes. Policy failures, like the decision to cross the Thirty-eighth Parallel, are usually blamed on the "leadership," or lack thereof, of the president. On the other hand, leaders are also given credit for favorable policy outcomes, like the original intervention decision. Often such policies originate from the advisory groups surrounding the president. In fact, many of Truman's other notable foreign policy successes , such as the enactment of the Marshall Plan, establishing the Truman Doctrine, and the decision to aid Greece and Turkey, have been attributed to his effective policy leadership. Although such claims represent gross simplifications of the foreign policy process and fail to take into account factors separate from the leader, such as advisory group composition, structure, and the external policy environment, they touch upon a critically important question relevant to group dynamics. Specifically, what effect do the characteristics ofindividual leaders have upon the structure and interactional dynamics oftheir advisory groups, and in turn upon the policy decisions (or outputs) of these groups? Why is it that in some cases presidents and advisers work together efficiently as a decision group, seek information, tolerate adviser dissent, and actively consider and debate a number of different policy options, and in other cases they do not? What is it that leads some advisory groups to consider only a narrow range of information or policy options, exclude dissenters, and limit debate to a very small inner circle around the president? In the case of Truman's decision to cross the Thirty-eighth Parallel, why did Truman receive a policy paper from his staff recommending him to cross the parallel which failed to adequately outline opposing views and potential dangers in the action? Why did Truman's NSC group, or the president himself, fail to fully discuss or debate the assumptions within the proposal? And finally, to what extent were the structure and interactional norms of Truman's advisory group, and their subsequent decisional outputs, affected by Truman's own individual characteristics and style preferences? The central role played by individual leaders in shaping the structural characteristics and dynamics of advisory groups is of critical importance to our efforts to better understand the processes involved in collective political decision making. This "leader-group nexus" represents a multifaceted intersection involving the impact of leader personality and style upon the characteristics of advisory groups at both the structural ("foundational") level and at the process ("interactional") level (cf...

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