Understanding Decisionmaking, U.S. Foreign Policy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis: A Review Essay

Abstract

Graham T. Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2d ed. New York: Longman, 1999 In 1971, Graham Allison published his revised Harvard government department dissertation, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.1 It was an ambitiously intelligent and sophisticated book, ranking among the most important studies in American political science in the 1970s and signiacantly inouencing other aelds. Over the years, Allison’s volume helped shape interpretations in disciplines interested in decisionmaking, and provoked many methodological and conceptual critiques, as well as some on issues of evidence, sources, and missile crisis history.2 The book made many analysts of policy more self-conscious about the models of process and of explanation they employed, and Essence