COGNITIVE STYLE AND FOREIGN POLICY DECISIONMAKING: AN EXAMINATION OF EISENHOWER'S NATIONAL SECURITY ORGANIZATION (DECISION STYLE, ADVISORY, MANAGEMENT)

One assumption of this research is that there are systematic differences between political leaders in terms of their cognitive style and that we can assess these differences from a distance. A second assumption is that cognitive style plays an important role in the political leader's selection of certain organizational arrangements for making foreign policy decisions. More specifically, it is assumed that a president's cognitive style will influence how he structures and manages high level foreign policy decisionmaking. An examination of foreign policy decisionmaking in the Eisenhower administration serves as the empirical basis for the generation of hypotheses derived from the above assumptions. Primary documents, memoirs and secondary sources serve as the data base for the analysis.;Several hypotheses are proposed relating the cognitive style of the president to the type of organizational arrangements he is likely to construct and use to manage foreign policy decisionmaking.;Eisenhower's cognitive style most closely resembles that of the speculative decisionmaker. A preliminary assessment of his national security management system provides substantial support for the general hypothesis that the president who exhibits a speculative style will combine many features of both the formalistic and collegial mangement approaches. While Eisenhower relied on clearly established procedures for communicating and conducting policy analysis, his primary rationale for the content of the formal guidelines seemed to be to capture the qualities of the collegial approach in which policymakers working as a team would analyze and debate alternative points of view.;The conceptualization of cognitive style which underpins this research draws substantially from Jung's framework of psychological types and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Cognitive style is characterized in terms of the following four dimensions: information gathering, information evaluation, time orientation, and problem emphasis. Four different cognitive styles are identified based on where an individual falls in terms of these dimensions: systematic style, speculative style, judicial style, and intuitive style.