The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersmust remember that any kind of content analysis depends on the
written record. But not all records are accessible, or even known, to
researchers. For example, the existence of tape recordings of the
deliberations of President Kennedy and his advisers during the
Cuban Missile Crisis was not publicly disclosed until twenty-five
years afterward. Only recently have some of the taped discussions
and conversations of Presidents Johnson and Nixon become available
to scholars.
Many important "messages," furthermore, are not to be commu-
nicated in such a way that they end up in the public archive. For
example, shortly after the outbreak of the first Balkan War (October
14, 1912), Sir William Tyrrell (private secretary to British foreign
secretary Grey) dined with German charge d'affaires Richard von
Kuhlmann (Nicolson 1930, 279-80). At that dinner, according to
Kuhlmann's later telegram to German chancellor Bethmann-Holl-
weg, Tyrell transmitted Grey's "serious and decisive proposal" for
"heartfelt and durable conciliation," whereby Germany and Britain
would walk "hand in hand" in resolving not only the Balkan crisis
but also all other areas of potential conflict. In reply, however, the
German foreign secretary doubted whether Grey would communi-
cate such a significant proposal in a "dinner table conversation." In
fact, there is no record of these events in any official British archive
and no written record of the ultimate result of the conversation in
German or British archives. Precisely what transpired during that
dinner, then, is not available for content analysis
Similarly, many of the most important aspects of the Cuban Mis-
sile Crisis, especially from the Soviet side, do not exist, are not avail-
able in official documentation, or have not yet been declassified. For
example, several important conversations between American news
reporters and Soviet officials, at the height of the crisis, were remem-
bered differently by different people (Fursenko and Naftali 1997,
258, 260—61, 270, and esp. 264—65). Our knowledge of the conver-
sations between Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Dobrynin is
similarly based only on reports and memoirs (Fursenko and Naftali
1997, 252—53, 281-82). In short, recollected texts, being subject to
distortion (see Winter 1987^, are not verbatim texts.
Even verbatim texts rarely capture many nuances of human speech
and communication such as irony, emphasis, hesitation, and doubt.