Thinking in Time by Richard E. Neustadt

Author:Richard E. Neustadt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1988-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

9

Placing Strangers

When suggesting how to identify concerns, trace their histories, and test underlying presumptions, we have noted that concerns often differ from person to person. Sometimes the differences seem to be institutional. Even in the urgency and camaraderie of the missile crisis ExComm, Dean Rusk, George Ball, and Robert McNamara all spoke against removing those useless U.S. missiles from Turkey. They were worrying about the reactions of Turks and other NATO colleagues. Theodore Sorensen, Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who spoke in favor of removal, saw the issue more in a domestic context. Rufus Miles’s famous law was at work here: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”1 But sometimes differences seem more personal. Rusk and Ball diverged over Vietnam even though their offices were side by side on the same floor of the same department.

For effective analysis or management, the kind that is not just academically right but gets something done, it is crucial, we think, to anticipate and take into account the different ways in which different actors see the world and their roles in it—not only organizationally but also humanly as individuals. We recognize that such anticipation is mostly a matter of innately sensitive fingertips aided by experience. We recognize also that an effort to make more of it seems, at first glance, to invade the domain of psychologists and psychoanalysts, if not of astrologers and shamans. We have nothing of the sort in mind. But anticipating those differences is too crucial a part of analysis and management to be sidestepped altogether, and we think that some tracking of individuals, some delineation of their histories—akin to time-lines for issues—if used very carefully and with awareness of limitations, can yield results useful both for making decisions and for carrying them out.

Just as there is value in taking the history of an issue back to its beginning, so there can be reward from asking about someone else the simplest of all questions: When was he or she born? Where? What happened after that?

Ronald Reagan’s admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President of his young manhood in the Great Depression, became known to the country during Reagan’s Presidency and caused surprise. Many commentators suspected him of trickery and only over time came to concede that somehow Reagan meant it. Somehow he believed he was following in Roosevelt’s footsteps—not in the letter of policies but in the spirit of innovation. That belief was an important clue to Reagan’s behavior. Had it been widely understood before 1981, it might have changed some stereotypes about his probable performance in the White House, where he turned out to be neither sheer reactionary nor mere stage presence.

But before Reagan reached office most of the predicting came, inevitably, from persons who had been too young to see Roosevelt as Reagan evidently saw him or to grasp the difference between FDR seen backward, through the screens of war and of enduring changes from the Second New Deal, and FDR seen forward through the crisis year of

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