Prefacetimable value to our senior leaders both in negotiating with them
and in dealing with them in politico-military crises. But what ele-
ments of leadership should be delineated?
When the pilot program was institutionalized, I sought out lead-
ing figures in the emerging discipline of political psychology and
developed a senior advisory panel to ensure that state-of-the-art
knowledge and methodologies were applied. Serving on the panel
were two of the contributors to this volume who specialized in the
psychological evaluation of political leaders at a distance: Margaret
Hermann, professor of psychology and political science at the Mer-
shon Center of Ohio State University, and David Winter, professor
of social psychology at Wesleyan University. The ranks of the core
group of profilers were augmented by Steve Walker, professor of
political science at Arizona State University, and Walter Weintraub,
a research psychiatrist at the University of Maryland, who had
applied a method of psycholinguistic analysis he had originally
developed working with patient populations to political personali-
ties in his analysis of the Watergate tapes transcripts.
Over the years at the annual scientific meetings of the International
Society of Political Psychology, it was rare when a panel of profilers
did not consider presidential candidates or the new Soviet Party chair-
man. The Gulf crisis again highlighted the importance of leadership
psychology. I had the opportunity to testify twice before congres-
sional committees holding hearings on the Gulf crisis—the House
Armed Services Committee under Les Aspin and the House Foreign
Affairs Committee under Lee Hamilton—to present my assessment
of the personality and political behavior of Saddam Hussein.
In 1991 Stanley A. Renshon, professor of political science and
director of the political psychology program at the City University of
New York, convened a conference on the political psychology of the
Gulf crisis, which became the foundation of an edited volume (S. A.
Renshon, ed., The Political Psychology of the Gulf War: Leaders, Publics,
and the Process of Conflict [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1993}). At the conference, I remarked to my long-standing col-
leagues Hermann, Walker, Weintraub, and Winter that a book
bringing these methods for the psychological assessment of political
leaders together was long overdue. The group seized upon the idea,
and the notion of an edited volume, in which each methodologist