Leadership Styles: John F. Kennedy vs George W. Bush - Essay Example

Leadership Styles: John F. Kennedy vs George W. Bush Presidents vary in their style of leadership, ambitions, policies, and ideologies. The impact of style of leadership of a president on the global politics is huge. Two of the biggest threats to national security have been encountered by President John F. Kennedy and President George W. Bush. To be more particular, the threat encountered by President John F. Kennedy was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 which was such an intense standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States that it could have set the stage for a nuclear war.

On the other hand, President George W. Bush encountered the national security threat in the form of 9/11 attacks, which have served as the cause for the commencement of the war against terror. President John F. Kennedy needed to deal with the Cuban Soviet missile sites. Those missile capabilities provided the Soviets with a great strategic as well as tactical advantage, leaving almost no time for the US to reach to the missile strike. President John F. Kennedy had different options of dealing with this threat, including launching a quick military action against the bases of missile, though he wanted Nikita Khrushchev, his Soviet counterpart, to remove his own accord’s missiles.

Kennedy’s attempt was to make a response that would reflect the will and strength of America, while leaving the Soviets with a chance to back down. In order to achieve this, Kennedy compiled a large group of experts to formulate the different scenarios for producing the desired outcomes. This led Kennedy to make a Naval blockage for a face-saving and peaceful resolution of the national security threat. Unlike Kennedy, Bush had to respond to the attacks made in America for which he could obviously and overtly hold no nation-state responsible.

Rather than trying to compile an equivalent of the Ex Comm, Bush formulated the Bush doctrine that emphasized upon the need to execute a military action. His decision was to launch a war on terrorism so that America could hit back and ensure the deterrence of such attacks in the future. To achieve this, Bush made a small war cabinet whose responsibility was to hammer out the prosecuting wars’ details in Iraq and Afghanistan, and assess and respond to their political implications, rather than formulating a team of experts to analyze the information and make suggestions regarding whether or not it is feasible for the US to go on war.

The most obvious difference between the styles of leadership of Kennedy and Bush which is evident from their responses to the national security threats of their respective times is that while Kennedy involved himself in decision-making at all levels and tried to make a peaceful approach after analyzing a whole range of options, Bush directly launched the war and then turned things over to the war cabinet for materializing his decision. Different analysts hold different opinions about the leadership styles of both presidents, but irrespective of the nobility and rationality of their decisions, their impact on the global politics has been huge.