Preface
Jerrold M. PostWith the wisdom of hindsight, many of life's most consequential
decisions are often a matter of happenstance. In the spring of 1965,
was in Washington, DC, completing my second year as a Clinical
Associate of the National Institute of Mental Health before I was to
return to Boston for a planned career in academic psychiatry, when a
friend from medical school approached me to discuss "an unusual job
opportunity." Despite having secured a position on the faculty of
Harvard Medical School, I could not resist this provocative invita-
tion. We met for lunch, and he offered me the opportunity to
develop a pilot program for assessing at a distance the personality
and political behavior of foreign leaders for senior U.S. government
officials. A service of common concern, the unit would be adminis-
tratively based in the Central Intelligence Agency. I thought it
would be an interesting divertissement and decided to delay for two
years my entering the groves of academe.
In what was to be a marvelous intellectual odyssey, the planned
two-year diversion lasted twenty-one years. On assuming my posi-
tion at the Central Intelligence Agency, it was immediately clear
that my training in clinical psychiatry, while useful, was clearly
insufficient for the complex and daunting requirements of the chal-
lenging task ahead. The clinical case study was designed to establish
a diagnosis in a patient suffering with mental illness, but the large
majority of political leaders are psychologically normal. Indeed,
severe mental illness would be incompatible with sustained leader-
ship. Yet political leaders from different political cultures differ pro-
foundly, and understanding those differences would be of ines-