Haney seeks to determine the impact of presidential advisory systems on the decision making procedure under crisis circumstances. A president can organize his advisory system along three ideal-typical lines. First, a formalistic model in which the president is on top of a clearly hierarchical system of communication; second, a competitive model in which the president promotes open debate and disagreement, but remains clearly in charge; and, third, a collegial model in which the group members share responsibility and act as a team. Presidents Truman and Nixon created advisory systems that came closest to the formalistic model (even though Nixon’s delegation of authority to Kissinger was clearly anomalous); Eisenhower practiced a blend of formalism and competition, whereas Johnson and Bush mixed formalism with collegiality.

Next, Haney assesses the performance of each presidential advisory system. Performance is defined as fulfilling six critical procedural tasks of crisis decision making: survey of objectives; search for alternatives; search for information; the processing of new information; evaluation of costs, risks and consequences of the preferred option; the development of implementation, monitoring and contingency plans. The case survey analysis shows that no clear relationship exists between type of presidential advisory system and crisis decision making performance. What does become clear, however, is that no crisis is handled very well or very poorly. Moreover, across all cases, decision makers tend to neglect the search for alternative options and often perform poorly in thinking through the consequences, risks and costs of the preferred option and in working out contingency plans. At the same time, most decision makers do a good job in defining the objectives and in gathering relevant information. The processing of new information is less successful.

Organizing for Foreign Policy Crises is an important book theoretically and methodologically. As to theory, Haney is right to assimilate insights from the new institutionalism into the study of foreign policy crises. It is necessary to assess the impact of formal and informal rules, here the presidential advisory system, on crisis decision making. The hypothesis that three different types of advisory structures will affect performance is sound. The choice to operationalize performance in terms of procedural quality makes sense. Haney avoids getting dragged into definitions of success and failure. Methodologically, the book is even more important. Haney demonstrates that it is possible for foreign policy analysis to obtain cumulation of knowledge by systematically re-examining existing in-depth case studies. Haney’s approach, thus, merits imitation. Moreover, Haney’s successful attempts to make his study meet the criteria of intersubjectivity set an example to many scholars in foreign policy crisis decision making. Bad luck for him that his hypothesis is rejected.

This study leaves the reader puzzled, however. Why is there no clear pattern of advisory systems and performance? One could question the measurement of performance. However, Haney shows that his scorings correlate strongly with those in other case survey analyses of the same variables in the same crises (pp. 106–110). According to this reviewer, the explanation is in the nature of presidential decision making in the US: in the end, it is the President who makes decisions, no matter how collegial the advisory system. Advisers will anticipate this. After all, the extent of collegiality and competition is itself derived from presidential ‘delegation’. This is borne out by the fact that Haney cannot find clear cases of collegial or competitive advisory systems. Both remain, essentially, varieties of formalism. Basically, the American presidential system is a formalistic system. To test his hypothesis, Haney should look at other political systems, such as coalition cabinets.

A second element which may disturb his findings is his treatment of crisis. All performance scorings are the summation of (lack of) policymakers’ behaviour during the entire crisis. However, their performance may have been different at different stages of a crisis. This may especially be the case in protracted crises such as Berlin, Suez, Tet and, possibly, even Panama. This is acknowledged as much by Haney, when he decides to divide up Tet into two cases: one, the surprise attack itself (badly handled), the other, Johnson’s dealing with Tet in the months following the start of the Viet Cong offensive (well handled). Underneath, glimmers a question that Haney had hoped to avoid: what is the dependent variable? In Tet 1, all performance criteria are linked to explaining Johnson’s lack of anticipation of an attack. In Tet 2, they are connected with stopping the attack. Most other crises could be dissected into various stages as well. In the Suez crisis, for instance, any analysis should take into account an explanation of the consequences of the American refusal to fund the construction of the Aswan Dam (which sparked off Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal Company). Each stage could have its own dependent variable (possibly even more than one). More cases could, thus, be construed than the nine (or ten if Tet is counted twice) Haney has selected. They may give new evidence on the relationship between organization structure and performance.

Two minor issues to conclude with. First, although it easy to criticize an author for his selection of cases, one should question the extent to which Haney succeeded in composing a comparable sample of crises. Both Panama and, to a large extent, Suez were crises in which the primary adversary was not the Soviet Union. The Gulf of Tonkin crisis was less a threat than an opportunity. Suez can also be construed less as a Cold War threat than as an opportunity to oust two allies from the Middle East. Panama, clearly, was an opportunity for Bush to get rid of his alleged ‘whimp-like’ character. Second, Haney’s exclusive focus on the President and his advisory system makes him ignore the larger institutional context, for example, of bureaucratic politics. Yet, some of his empirical evidence, especially regarding the learning capacity of the Johnson group after Tet 1, may as well be indicative of the relevance of bureaucratic politics. More in general, the observed tendency to ignore the search for alternative options may be evidence of a group’s failure as well as of the bureaucracy’s tendency to put forward standard solutions. Haney justifies the disregard for other institutional features with the idea that crisis situations produce centralization of decision making (p. 9). Yet, in both regular and crisis situations will routine be part of the decision making process. Arguably, advisory systems themselves are patterns of routine. These considerations, however, should not prevent any foreign policy scholar from reading this unroutine-like study.