Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making
Rose McDermott
Cambridge University Press, 2008

This book examines the effect that medical and psychological illness can have on foreign policy decision making. McDermott explores the topic of impaired leadership by providing detailed analysis of four American presidents: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. Drawing extensively on archived information, including previously unpublished medical material, she demonstrates how their respective illnesses and treatments may have influenced presidential decision making in crucial foreign policy situations. The book concludes with an in-depth discussion of the 25th Amendment and how our system of government needs better procedures in place to deal with both healthy and impaired leaders.

In an appendix to the main chapters, McDermott uses the case of the Shah of Iran during the Carter administration to illustrate both how the health of foreign leaders may affect foreign policy decision making, and the need for good medical intelligence about those leaders.

Review
"In this gripping and innovative book, Rose McDermott shows why she is the leading political psychologist of her generation. The analysis she provides will disturb deeply both students of political leadership who take human rationality to be axiomatic and a general public deeply influenced by often carefully manufactured images of vigor, health, and emotional stability in their leaders."

&mdash Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University