The World of Dr. Justice: Do those who prepare the PDBs, labor in vain, to penetrate the Presidential bubble?

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Do those who prepare the PDBs, labor in vain, to penetrate the Presidential bubble?

Some Presidents (like Obama) have been very open to detailed factual analysis from the diplomatic corps and the IC, whereas others (like Clinton) pretty much blew them off.

As to the current situation -- I have nothing to say. But again, a niblet of history. The time is October, 1961:

[The US ambassador to Vietnam] concluded that Kennedy relied much more on news reports and the impressions of intimates, than he did on the yards of cables he sent from the embassy each day.

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993), p. 240

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About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley. He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional works I Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation. He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers. He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.