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For Kerry, Decisions Are Found Only in the Details
The candidate consults widely and deliberates carefully
before reaching any conclusion on strategy or policy, his confidants say.
By Matea Gold Los Angeles Times Staff Writer June 21, 2004

WASHINGTON — Sen. John F. Kerry has divulged little about his process of selecting a running mate. But if past behavior is a guide, he will spend the coming days immersing himself in information and debating the merits of contenders with a disparate group of confidants.
The Democratic presidential hopeful will make the case against his favored choice just to test the strength of his own arguments. Only when he is confident that he has thought through all the considerations will Kerry settle on a vice presidential nominee — no matter how long it takes.

Kerry's deliberative decision-making process, described by 20 friends, advisors, colleagues and aides in a series of interviews, is the hallmark of his approach to political and policy matters.

How the Massachusetts senator has approached issues such as campaign strategy, oil drilling in Alaska and postwar developments in Iraq offers a glimpse of how a President Kerry would make decisions in the White House.

Those who have observed him up close describe a man who is fundamentally more pragmatic than ideological, who delves into details, and who often surprises new aides by arguing his opposition's case, when in fact he is merely playing devil's advocate.

Kerry has an almost compulsive need to seek out feedback from a circle of advisors so large and diverse that those closest to him have trouble estimating its size. (By his own count, the candidate says he consults with hundreds of people.)

The core group consists of many who have been with him since his early days in Massachusetts politics: his brother Cameron; his former brother-in-law David Thorne; fellow Bay State Sen. Edward M. Kennedy; strategist John Marttila; and Ron Rosenblith, his first chief of staff in the Senate.

But Kerry says he also seeks perspective from people he has met on the campaign trail, from hospital administrators to Wall Street analysts.
Regardless of the issue, "he wants to get his arms around it and isn't comfortable unless he feels he has expertise in it," Cameron Kerry said.

"I've certainly had the experience of going in and saying, 'You should say the following.' … But he's not accepted that easily. He's apt to pick up the phone and call any number of people who have an independent judgment."

Kerry's style stands in contrast with the man he is hoping to replace in the White House, a president who is known for leaving details to his aides. It's also an approach that has fed the criticism of Republican opponents, who say Kerry lacks clarity and certainty.

Those close to the senator say his decision-making is one of his greatest strengths, demonstrating thoughtfulness, intellectual prowess and an ability to broker dissent. But because of his thoroughness, Kerry can also come across as overly cautious, some acknowledge.

"It's exhaustive and it's detail-oriented, so by its nature it's not an intellectual process given to speedy decision-making," one former Senate aide said.

Sometimes, Kerry's deliberations cause his staff consternation. Last fall, the candidate considered whether to opt out of the public campaign finance system, a decision that would mean foregoing public matching funds in order to spend unlimited amounts of money raised from private donors during the primaries.

Kerry pondered the matter for more than three months, consulting as many as three dozen fundraisers, political strategists and attorneys. It was a politically delicate issue, since rejecting public funds could open Kerry up to criticism that he was abandoning campaign finance reform.

The lengthy process caused aides to fret that they wouldn't have enough time to adjust their fundraising strategy once he made a decision. Finally, in mid-November, a week after former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean opted out of the system, Kerry followed suit, saying Dean's move left him with no choice.

Those who know him best say Kerry's style is one of diligence, not hesitation.

In the Senate, he would make a decision "sometimes six months before a vote, sometimes six minutes before a vote," said Jonathan M. Winer, who worked for a decade as Kerry's Senate counsel and legislative assistant. "He is not going to delegate his decision-making to somebody else's opinion."

Though "this can easily be caricatured as indecisiveness," Winer added, "it's a choice not to make a decision prematurely that could be wrong or inadequate."

In an interview with The Times, Kerry said his method stemmed from what he learned from lively discussions at his family's dinner table, where "everybody had an opinion, and you'd argue and listen and talk about things."

It was refined by three years of law school and his experience as a Middlesex County prosecutor in the late 1970s.

"The Socratic teaching of the law really forces you to look for that truth … and helps you understand sometimes how difficult it is to find in certain instances," Kerry said.

He has applied that prosecutorial approach to his work in the Senate, tackling issues with a thoroughness that often daunts his staff.
In 2001, when Kerry decided to take a leadership role among Democrats in opposing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he was not content to cite the environmentalists' case that drilling would harm a pristine area. Instead, he challenged the Republicans' argument that opening the refuge would help wean the U.S. off foreign oil.

Kerry delved into the scientific data on the merits of horizontal drilling — a method that oil drilling advocates said could minimize disruption to the refuge, and a subject that most lawmakers left to experts.

"Kerry got into that kind of minutiae" and asked, " 'What is the latest drilling technology? If we're not going to drill in the refuge, where are we going to drill?' " recalled George Abar, Kerry's Senate legislative director. "He wanted to see numbers, maps, and he would push back on some of our claims."

In the end, Kerry made the case to his colleagues that the refuge would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by only 2%, an argument that helped win enough votes to defeat efforts by the Bush administration to lift the ban on drilling, according to those involved in the process.

Several advisors said Kerry tended to approach issues on a case-by-case basis — employing "practical problem solving" — rather than make ideological decisions. He is moved less by rhetoric, more by facts and figures.

"You don't get knee-jerk reactions out of John based on ideology," said Paul Nace, a longtime friend. "Part of the debate and discussion is that it rationalizes the process, as opposed to making it an emotional process."

But Kerry's desire to understand — and even think like — his opposition can sometimes defuse his ability to articulate his views clearly, some advisors concede, and contributes to a speaking style laden with caveats.

In the presidential campaign, his nuanced views have proved the most problematic in explaining his stance on the war in Iraq. After voting in October 2002 to give President Bush the authority to use force against President Saddam Hussein, Kerry spent much of the primaries trying to reconcile that vote with his criticism of the administration.

He argued that although he believed that Hussein was a threat, he was disturbed by Bush's handling of the invasion, which he said unnecessarily alienated U.S. allies and jeopardized the country's standing in the world. By making such distinctions, he reinforced a reputation for taking both sides of the issue.

In March, GOP critics pounced when Kerry tried to explain that he supported an earlier, Democratic version of an $87-billion bill to fund operations in Afghanistan and Iraq by saying, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it."
The Bush campaign quickly inserted that line into an ad.

Kerry dismisses the criticism, pointing to the life-and-death decisions he made during the Vietnam War, when he commanded a swift boat on the Mekong Delta, and his decision to speak out against the war after he returned to the US, as evidence of his ability to make quick choices.

"I've never failed to make a decision when a decision was necessary, period," he said. "I'll look for facts, but I'll go with my gut."
That said, the candidate agreed that he engrossed himself in details whenever possible.

"If it means getting facts and listening to people who are smarter than me — if you fight about it a little bit — you can kind of apply your values and your standards to what you've heard and make a decision, and that's how I do it," he said. And so as he crisscrosses the country, Kerry can frequently be seen with his ear glued to his cellphone, reaching out to a network of advisors
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His personal aide, Marvin Nicholson Jr., has amassed hundreds of names and phone numbers in seven black leather phone books, a Rolodex so large and unwieldy that Nicholson is trying to organize them in a Palm Pilot.

Before making a new statement on the situation in Iraq, the candidate checks in with his team of foreign policy advisors, many of them Clinton administration alumni. The group includes former national security advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger; Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr.; former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former U.N. Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke; former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn; and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry.

"What he likes to do is hear a lot of different opinions and often play the devil's advocate: 'Why do you think this? Is this really the right approach? Doesn't this disprove what you just said?' " Albright recounted.

Biden says Kerry often calls him at home after 10 or 11 at night, on the way to his hotel, to toss out possible responses to the news of the day. Kennedy says he speaks with the candidate several times a week, occasionally in conversations that stretched more than an hour.
"He's inquisitive," Kennedy said. "I think that's a great quality. I saw that in my brothers."

But the frequency with which Kerry calls his advisors has exasperated some of his campaign officials.

At one point in the fall, he spent so much time on the phone that former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, his national chairwoman, and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill threatened to take his cellphone away, according to several people familiar with the situation.

Kerry prevailed and kept his phone. But the candidate is now trying to find a balance between seeking information and letting others find it for him.

"Part of the process of running for president, as much as holding office, is that you're going to have to learn what things you do delegate and what things you focus on," Cameron Kerry said. "And he's having to learn that."

WASHINGTON — President Bush styles himself as the first CEO president, applying the rigor and authority of his MBA education to the job of chief executive of the nation.

But that's not the picture that emerges from three recent insider accounts of the workings of the Bush administration, experts in decision-making and presidential management say. On the contrary, they say, the president appears to have a highly personal working style, with little emphasis on systematic analysis of major decisions.

"There seems to be almost an absence of any analytical or deliberative process for mapping the problem or exploring alternatives or estimating consequences," said Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

And Bush appears to give greater weight to his own instincts than to experts or other sources of advice and information. The president has a "bias for action," said Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "I've been struck by [how] Bush's sense of personal identity as a leader shapes his decisions," he said.

For the last three years, experts on the presidency have largely withheld judgment about how the Bush White House — considered the most secretive since Richard Nixon's — makes major decisions. The experts thought they had inadequate information to reach general conclusions.

That has changed. Scholars of management and government have begun to pore through this spring's crop of insider books and draw preliminary assessments of how Bush operates as president. And their main conclusion is that he makes decisions primarily on instinct, not analysis.

Kramer, for example, said: "I would contrast his style to someone like [Nixon's former Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger, who looked at decisions more in terms of a balance of power and what is realistic to achieve, thinking about how the rest of the world will respond."
For Bush, by contrast, "emotion and vision and instinct are his view of the world." That can be a good thing, Kramer added. "He bases his decisions on a few principles, but if those principles are good principles, that can lead to good decisions."

The three insider books are as different as the insiders who wrote them. The first, "The Price of Loyalty," reflects the experience of former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, the former Alcoa chief executive who was forced out for dissenting over economic policy.

The second, "Against All Enemies," was written by career bureaucrat and former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, who thought the administration was inattentive to the dangers of terrorism. And the third, "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, is a journalist's account of the war on Iraq based on interviews with the president and his advisors.

In addition, two books by Bush loyalists — advisor Karen Hughes' "Ten Minutes from Normal" and former speechwriter David Frum's "The Right Man" — are also insider accounts, though they shed less light on the White House decision-making process. Frum left the White House early in the administration, and Hughes, a longtime supporter, offers only a few, unfailingly flattering glimpses of her boss in action.

The O'Neill, Clarke and Woodward accounts have strengths and weaknesses, reflecting the experience, access or bias of the authors, scholars say. But by looking at all the books, they say they can begin to overcome the inadequacies of any single account.
"Triangulate is an excellent image," said Fred I. Greenstein, a presidential historian at Princeton University. "These books certainly tell you things."

Greenstein said that one striking thing about all three books was what they don't show. There are few examples, for instance, of Bush presiding over meetings in which subordinates presented problems, weighed evidence and aired differing views.

"I think a lot of policy is made on the fly," he said. "It isn't a process in which people assemble and go back and forth in a rigorous way."
Another thing largely missing from the books was any indication that documents or memos weighing policy alternatives are circulated and discussed. Harvard's Allison said one of the few documents the administration did prepare in advance of the Iraq war — the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq probably had weapons of mass destruction — was quickly compiled and not very well done.
"The more it's examined, it seems quite sloppy," he said. "At this point, if there had been some good analysis of the issues on paper, we would have seen some evidence of it."

"The contrast with the textbook conception of informed decision making is distressing," he said.

Without a framework for analysis, many important policy discussions appeared to have been disorganized at best, the management specialists say.

O'Neill, himself a legendary chief executive, was scathing in his depiction of a meeting Bush held to decide whether to push for a second round of tax cuts, describing the discussion as haphazard as "June bugs hopping around on a lake."

"Without the hard, factual analysis that allows you to make informed judgments about the worth of various proposals, [that's] about what you can expect," he said.

Sometimes, policy discussions seem not to have taken place at all.

In the Woodward book, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is depicted as attending an National Security Council war planning meeting on Aug. 5, 2002, and realizing that the president and his top advisors were discussing details such as troop deployments and targets in Iraq without ever having held an NSC meeting on the question of whether to go to war in the first place.

"I really need to have some private time with [the president] to go over some issues that I don't think he's gone over with anyone yet," the book quotes Powell as telling national security advisor Condoleezza Rice.

According to the book, Powell never took part in a debate over whether to go to war, only talks on how to attack.

Stanford's Kramer said though Bush showed little interest in the kind of number-crunching analysis taught in business school, his style of management does conform to the popular image of chief executives as forceful and "decisive." "There seems to be a lot of value attached to showing resolve and demonstrating resolve," he said.

But Jay Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of "Decision Making at the Top," said the decision-making techniques taught at that school — from which Bush received an MBA — focus on understanding the nature of decisions, not simplifying them.

"What we teach around here is that you've got to understand the complexity of the territory you're trying to affect," he said. "You don't make a decision until you've surveyed all the possible ramifications. The binary idea that you're either right or wrong is just foolishness."

Another critical part of MBA-style analysis is understanding and compensating for your own assumptions, Lorsch said.

Decision makers who are inadequately aware of their assumptions leave themselves vulnerable to two errors: First, subordinates learn to tell them what they want to hear. Second, they are less rigorous in processing data and gauging its validity.

"Whether it's O'Neill or Clarke or Woodward, the theme that runs through all of them is that there was an obsession with Iraq," Lorsch said. "They were probably interpreting the data in a way consistent with their beliefs."

Martha Joynt Kumar of the University of Maryland said the books also depicted Bush as being largely unconcerned with the quality of information he received.

"He doesn't like long meetings. He likes truncated meetings. That means you're not going to have the kinds of sessions … that are going to bring in lots of different kinds of information," Kumar said.

Greenstein said that when weighing an important decision such as whether to go to war, specialists in the presidency generally think it is better for presidents to hold meetings in which dissenting views are heard and weighed. That way, the president is seen as considering all the angles.

"It is generally seen as less desirable to see your advisors individually" as Bush appears to have done before deciding to wage war on Saddam Hussein, Greenstein said. "That will raise the question of, does the person who talks to the president last have undue influence? And it also gives influence to those who are better at bureaucratic turf battles."

Of course, every president operates differently, and each administration reflects the personality of the chief executive. President Eisenhower was formal and bureaucratic, scholars say, reflecting his military background. President Kennedy was more informal or even haphazard, but he cast a wide net for information before settling on an answer, as did President Clinton.

In practice, Bush appears closest to the style of Reagan, said Bert A. Rockman, director of the School of Public Policy and Management at Ohio State University.

"The decisiveness part is certainly there," he said. "The imperviousness to facts and analysis is also there. So what we have is someone who is going on raw instinct."

A corollary, Rockman said, is that though Bush likes making decisions, his organizational style is not very good at implementation or follow-up.

Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, said that though Bush's style was similar to Reagan's, he seemed to rely on a narrower circle of advisors.

"Bush appears to rest his confidence in a few people whose judgment corresponds to his gut instincts" he said. "He seems to be obsessive about being decisive, but willing to make hard and fast decisions on the basis of ideology more than evidence."

Kramer of Stanford's Graduate School of Business said he suspects that the current president may be consciously or unconsciously reacting to his father's reputation for prudence — a trait some in the current administration have criticized because it led George H.W. Bush to end the Gulf War without removing Saddam Hussein.

"Decision makers are influenced by historical comparisons, and he may be overcorrecting, trying not to be like his father," Kramer said.
So far at least, scholars say, it appears that Bush's personality — not his staff, and not his organizational structure — is the key to understanding his presidency. Kumar of the University of Maryland said that was similar to her analysis of previous presidents.
"We often think that a White House staff is going to fill in, to compensate for a president's weaknesses. But it doesn't really work that way," she said. "White Houses reflect their president's strengths and also reflect his weaknesses."
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