During the Cuban missile crisis, serious differences of opinion arose within the ExComm group advising President John F. Kennedy, which we summarize here. There were three options: Soft (a blockade), Medium (a limited air strike), and Hard (a massive air strike or invasion). There were also three groups in Ex Comm. The civilian doves ranked the alternatives Soft best, Medium next, and Hard last. The civilian hawks preferred Medium best, Hard next, and Soft last. The military preferred Hard best, but they felt “so strongly about the dangers inherent in the limited strike that they would prefer taking no military action rather than to take that limited strike.” [Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 97.] In other words, they ranked Soft second and Medium last. Each group constituted about one-third of ExComm, and so any two of the groups would form a majority.
(a) If the matter were to be decided by a majority vote in ExComm and the members voted sincerely, which alternative, if any, would win?
(b) What outcome would arise if members voted strategically? What outcome would arise if one group had agenda-setting power? (Model your discussion in these two cases after the analysis found in Sections 2.B and 4.B.)
