The White House phone may ring at 3am, but it usually doesn’t mean as much as Hillary would have you believe:
There is no dispute, as a dramatic campaign ad from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign suggests, that presidents get plenty of phone calls at 3 a.m.
A sleeping Ronald Reagan was alerted early in the morning to what turned out to be the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian passenger plane. George H.W. Bush was informed after he went to bed of an apparent coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Bill Clinton received word in the middle of the night that negotiations had broken down in the case of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy whose relatives were battling the federal government to prevent him from returning home.
But in none of these cases were presidents asked to make major decisions. Instead, former White House advisers say, these calls — and countless others like them — were largely aimed at keeping the president informed of critical developments, particularly ones that might cause embarrassment if the public learned that a commander in chief had slept through the episode undisturbed.
“In my experience, I cannot think, off the top of my head, of a snap decision that had to be made in the middle of the night,” said Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state and national security adviser. In fact, he said in an interview, “I think that one should reduce the number of snap decisions to be made.”
Exactly. Snap decisions often have the unfortunate prospect of being entirely wrong for one thing and, for another, the world just doesn’t work in the way that the 3am phone call ad would have you believe:
The situation that unfolded after the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962, perhaps the greatest crisis of the Cold War, is a case in point.
As chronicled by historian Michael R. Beschloss in “The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963,” National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy decided to wait until morning to tell President Kennedy that the CIA had aerial photos of the missiles. Bundy knew the president was tired after a late flight from New York, and he would later tell Kennedy that he concluded “a quiet evening and a night of sleep were the best preparation” for what would undoubtedly be a major crisis. Kennedy then took more than a week to craft a response with his advisers before going public with the news.
Fred I. Greenstein, the scholar of the presidency at Princeton University, said the episode “refutes the notion that presidents have to be on the job in a crisis situation the moment the crisis breaks. It shows that it might be good judgment involved in not waking people up. Presidents who desire to be up at all hours may not be wired in ways that are fully in sync with the needs of the job.”
More importantly, the right decision usually ends up being one that is arrived at after deliberation. What would Kennedy have been able to do at that very moment when the missiles were discovered ? The one “snap” decision would have been to launch an immediate attack, which could have led to a wider war with the Soviet Union.
We don’t need a President who can make snap decisions, we need one who can appoint a staff that can handle momentary needs on their own and a deliberation process that actually thinks through the logical consequences of actions before undertaking them.
