A View from the Oval Office: Insights from the Presidential Daily Brief, 1961-77

• In Event: Text-as-Data, Archives, and Diplomacy

Abstract

In 2015, the Central Intelligence Agency completed a special declassification review of presidential intelligence summaries delivered daily from 1961 to 1977. These Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs) provide a candid, granular view of the most important national security issues across two decades and four American presidencies. With standardized formatting, all-source basis, and daily production make PDBs a singular source for social scientific inferences about presidents and the events that surround them. Because of their unique status, the PDBs were the subject of a special declassification review process that resulted in declassification of some kinds categories of information – such as details derived from signals intelligence – that are otherwise redacted. More than other intelligence documents, then, the PDBs provide a candid, working, and temporally comprehensive view of matters of national security concern at the highest levels.

Drawing on text extraction and over-time text-as-data analysis, this paper describes the Presidential Daily Brief Dataset, a digitized, searchable, comprehensive compilation of PDBs from the 1961-1977 period. It then presents preliminary findings on two distinct issues. First, I analyze changes in PDB content and structure as a window into presidential priorities and presidential intellectual style. Historians of intelligence have reported that PDB length, coverage, and other features were adapted for each president to maximize appeal. Such changes allow a rare view into how presidents varied in their attention to detail, preference for issue and regional coverage, and so on. Second, I will use comparisons between PDB content and news media coverage to trace the evolution of public vs. private knowledge about a discrete policy area: nuclear proliferation. Identifying points of divergence and convergence between PDBs and New York Times coverage will provide preliminary findings on the evolution of elite perceptions -- and misperceptions -- about nascent nuclear weapons programs.

Author

• Austin Carson, University of Chicago