(Page 39 of 49) - Victory and Defeat in International Relations authored by Tierney, Dominic.

never took the main building), but in the minds of many Americans, it engendered an image of
significant U.S. failure. If an observer’s metric for success was stability in South Vietnam,
observers could see on their televisions that the very bastion of the U.S. presence, within a
supposedly safe city, was swarming with the enemy, with the implication being that the whole
country was overrun. Similarly, the particular way in which the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 was
carried out increased the favorable impression of the operation. If the Royal Navy had simply
picked up the troops according to standard military procedures it would have looked like a fairly
typical retreat. The fact that the evacuation was partly carried out with a flotilla of volunteers
sailing small vessels from England to rescue the desperate men, created a heroic image of the
plucky British population uniting to defy the German war machine. In 1983, observers judged
Reagan’s intervention in Grenada to be a significant success only after they saw images of
rescued American medical students joyfully returning home to the U.S., kissing American soil at
the base of the aircraft steps, images which were followed by the president making his case for
military action.

Daniel Kahneman and others have shown that when people look back on

events, their memory of the event is equivalent to the worst (or best) part, and what it was like at
the end. They do not remember the average, the duration, the day-to-day emotions at the time, or
the variation in the experience. Hence, a dramatic and salient negative peak experience, and then
a final image of defeat, is likely to encourage one to remember the episode as one of consistent
failure.

The rally phenomenon

Dramatic and violent events also tend to create a “rally” phenomenon, whereby support for the
president predictably increases, as do evaluations of his job performance, whether the events
themselves are favorable to the leader or not. Most rallies are caused by sudden crises, although
not all crises produce rallies, particularly if elites fail to halt their criticism of the president.

Following the U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 there
was a 5% increase in approval for President Kennedy despite it being a fiasco. Richard Brody
concludes: “In aggregate terms, a lack of critical opinion leadership can outweigh even relatively
unambiguous evidence of policy failure and hence pave the way for positive evaluations of
presidential performance.”

As a stark example of the rally phenomenon, President Bush’s

approval ratings shot up immediately after the terrorist attacks in 2001; attacks which in
themselves, of course, did not signal that Bush was doing a better job. As cognitive consistency
would predict, once observers favor a leader on one dimension such as national security, they
start to view that leader as being successful across all dimensions. On September 9, 2001, 48%
of Americans approved of Bush’s handling of the economy, down from 52% the month before.
By November 6, approval of the president’s handling of the economy had leapt to 72%.
Approval of the president’s handling of education also rose from 61% before 9/11, to 71% in
January 2002. Most rallies are short-lived, however, as evaluations of leaders’ performance tend

Kernell, Going Public, p. 163.

Redelmeier, D., and D. Kahneman. 1996. Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: Real-time and

retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures. Pain 116 (3-8).; Thomas, D., and E. Diener. 1990.
Memory accuracy in the recall of emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59:291-297.

Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential leadership (Washington D.C.: C.Q. Press, 1993),

pp. 160-168.

Brody,Assessing the President, p. 77.