Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making

Examines the impact of medical and psychological illness on foreign policy decision making. Illness provides specific, predictable, and recognizable shifts in attention, time perspective, cognitive capacity, judgment, and emotion, which systematically affect impaired leaders. In particular, this book discusses the ways in which processes related to aging, physical and psychological illness, and addiction influence decision making. This book provides detailed analysis of four cases among the American presidency. Woodrow Wilson's October 1919 stroke affected his behavior during the Senate fight over ratifying the League of Nations. Franklin Roosevelt's severe coronary disease influenced his decisions concerning the conduct of war in the Pacific from 1943–1945 in particular. John Kennedy's illnesses and treatments altered his behavior at the 1961 Vienna conference with Soviet Premier Khrushchev. And Nixon's psychological impairments biased his decisions regarding the covert bombing of Cambodia in 1969–1970.

1. Introduction; 2. Aging, illness, and addiction; 3. The exacerbation of personality: Woodrow Wilson; 4. Leading while dying: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1943–45; 5. Addicted to power: John F. Kennedy; 6. Richard Nixon: bordering on sanity; 7. 25th Amendment; 8. Presidential care.

The impact of medical and psychological illness on foreign policy decision making. It discusses four cases in American history in which presidential decision making was affected by illness. Health problems have a bigger impact on important political decisions than people may have realized.

Rose McDermott is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor McDermott's main area of research revolves around political psychology in international relations. She is the author of Risk Taking in International Relations: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy (1998) and Political Psychology in International Relations (2004). Professor McDermott has held fellowships at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, both at Harvard University.