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Shortly after James Forrestal resigned as Secretary of Defense in late March 1949, the nation was shocked to learn that he was under treatment for a severe mental illness. Within a few months Forrestal committed suicide. This tragic occurrence, coming after Forrestal's highly successful career in government, directly challenged the long-standing mental-health mythology prevalent in Washington. The essence of the myth, as noted by Albert Deutsch at the time, was the belief that "no Very Important Person, under any circumstances, can possibly suffer from a psychosis." The denial of this possibility in official Washington was of a piece with widely shared beliefs that to suffer a mental illness was a disgrace that automatically and permanently rendered one unfit for public office.

The system of multiple advocacy attempts to convert intraorganizational conflicts over policy into a balanced system of policy analysis and debate. This requires the executive to (1) structure and manage the policy-making system to ensure that there are advocates to cover the range of interesting policy options on a given issue; (2) equalize or compensate for disparities among the actors in the resources needed for effective advocacy; (3) identify and correct possible "malfunctions" in the policy-making process before they can have a harmful effect on the executive's choice of policy. Nine types of malfunctions are identified in this paper via critical diagnosis of U.S. foreign policy making in cases in which the executive had to decide questions of commitment, intervention, or escalation. Responsibility for identifying and correcting such malfunctions and for managing multiple advocacy effectively should be clearly fixed with the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. However, the Special Assistant should not combine the role of "custodian-manager" of the policy-making system with the additional tasks of (a) policy adviser to the President; (b) public spokesman for existing policies; (c) "watch-dog" of the President's personal power stakes; or (d) implementer of policy decisions already taken. The attempt to do so invites serious role conflicts that can undermine the Special Assistant's performance of the all-important task of custodian.

The type of comprehensive conceptual scheme presented by Professor Smith in the foregoing paper is, in the writer's opinion, the most useful framework currently available for studying the relationship between opinions and personality. The paper draws upon a major work by Smith and his colleagues, Opinions and Personality, which has not only been greeted as a "pattern-setter for a new phase of attitude research" but is already having an important impact on political behavior studies.That political scientists should find the pluralistic theory proposed by Smith congenial, cannot be explained merely by the fact that it is accompanied by an emphatic rejection of the type of simplistic theorizing about personality and opinion already in disfavor with most of them. Rather, its appeal is solidly intellectual, deriving from the fact that it stems from a general (and long awaited!) movement of convergence within the field of psychology.

During WWII a group of content analysts in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made inferences about Nazi propaganda strategy & its underlying policy calculations from a close inspection of German radio & press communications. After the war the writer matched the FCC inferences against historical data & attempted to reconstruct & codify methods of inference which had been successfully applied. AA.-IPSA.

The Korean War represented the first American experience with the problem of meeting local Communist aggression by means of limited, if costly, warfare. But despite the revulsion with that experience, and the "new look" at military strategy and foreign policy, it may not be the last. The character of recent weapons developments and the passing of our thermonuclear monopoly make it probable that in the future, as in the past, American policy-makers will be forced to consider the alternative of local conflict, with all its problems and risks, in determining how to respond to the threat or actuality of Communist moves in the peripheral areas.In these circumstances, analyses of American policy-making immediately before and during the Korean War may well illuminate the perspectives and considerations relevant to this difficult and dangerous type of operation. Here, no more can be done than toexamine the effect of strategic planning and estimates of Communist intentions and behavior on the decision to commit American forces to the defense of South Korea. This decision, and even the crucial decision to commit ground forces to eventual offensive operations against the aggressor, was made within afew days of the North Korean attack. Attention, accordingly, is focused on American policy reactions to the war in the first week or ten days following June 25, 1950.