Groupthink or Deadlock: When Do Leaders Learn from Their Advisors? By Paul A. Kowert. Albany: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. 265 pp., $65.50 cloth (ISBN: 0-7914-5249-2), $21.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7914-5250-6). In Groupthink or Deadlock , Paul Kowert has written a clever but ultimately unsatisfactory book about the nexus between leaders and their advisers when they deal with weighty foreign and domestic policy issues. Kowert's study fits neatly within the steadily growing literature on foreign policy decision making, a field persistently ignored by mainstream international relations that has nonetheless developed into a cumulative, multidisciplinary part of the discipline. At the same time, Kowert's study makes a contribution to presidential studies and indeed, albeit moderately, to leadership studies in political science at large. Kowert builds upon the pioneering work of Irving Janis (1972), Alexander George (1980), and Margaret Hermann (1980). He also fits into a stream of recent, highly related political-psychological studies of leader–adviser interaction in US foreign policymaking by such young scholars as Patrick Haney (1997), Thomas Preston (2000), and David Houghton (2001). Kowert's main claim is that, when making key decisions, US presidents only learn from their advisers if a good fit exists between their personal learning style and the structure of their advisory groups. In short, leaders can be open or closed in their desire or ability to solicit a wealth of information and a diversity of viewpoints. (Open presidents like it; closed presidents do not.) Open leaders should, therefore, work best when they have an advisory system that is open, that is, a quasi-pluralist arena in which information flows upward easily and conflicting arguments are brought before the president. Closed leaders, in contrast, would …