From the early days of the Gulf Oil Spill, pundits have talked about whether this is Obama’s Katrina. Wrong analogy. It is now becoming clear that it may be his Bay of Pigs instead.
Recall that the Bay of Pigs Invasion was a monumental failing of the Kennedy Administration that occurred shortly after John F. Kennedy took office. Planned by CIA and Defense Department officials during the final years and months of the Eisenhower Presidency, the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs was designed to spark an uprising of dissident Cubans who would then overthrow the Castro Regime. When faced with the Go/No go decision, Kennedy and other new and similarly inexperienced members of his executive team deferred to the expertise of those who had planned the operation. As others have shown in post mortem analyses, the decision-making process was seriously flawed. (See, e.g., Michael Roberto, “Why Making Decisions the Right Way is More Important than Making the Right Decisions,” Ivey Business Journal, 2005.)
Kennedy did not make the same mistakes in the Cuban Missile Crisis. There he assembled separate teams, each of which was to work on a strategy for responding. He made sure that a devil’s advocate (Bobby Kennedy) was continually asking hard questions to help avoid what we now call Groupthink. (Irving Janis invented the term 10 years later.) Most importantly, he recognized what social psychologists have shown in numerous studies since: The expertise of experts is limited to their specific area of expertise and usually does not extend to making predictions or global recommendations. Experts get predictions related to their fields of expertise wrong more often than they get them right. (Psychologists call this the overconfidence bias.) As a result of his bitterly earned experience about the wisdom of experts, at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy rejected the unanimous recommendation of the military experts to launch an attack on Cuba to “take out the missiles.”
From the outset, journalists have reported a tendency of President Obama to surround himself with the best and brightest experts available. He is reputed to encourage the expression of a wide range of views, facilitating vigorous debate before finally making a decision. The process of reviewing and deciding what to do in Afghanistan, reportedly, was a masterpiece of this kind of decision making, conforming to the best practices of the art.
But with the Gulf Oil Spill there has been no time for careful deliberation. Decisive action has been—and still is—required. Evidence of such take-charge leadership is lacking. We just don’t have the sense that one person is firmly in command. Instead, public pronouncements suggest that the President is deferring to experts—principally the people who made the mess in the first place, the executives at BP. Several pundits have repeatedly pointed out mistakes that the President and his team are making: Showing up on scene late. Not listening to the people with the greatest knowledge about the Gulf: the fishermen, recreation professionals, and other locals who have lived and worked in these waters all their lives. Not commandeering the resources of other oil companies to clean up the mess as it happens. Not soliciting the help of thousands of volunteers. And more.
President Obama’s strengths lie in careful deliberation and an almost constitutional aversion to rash, impulsive action. We have yet to see, however, that he is quick on his feet in a crisis. It is not too late for him to turn this around, to stop deferring to experts in matters about which they are not expert—namely, being the President. It is his job to take control of the wheel of the ship and get us out of this mess. Let’s hope he, like Jack Kennedy before him, is a quick study.
Mike Palmer
