“John F. Kennedy,” in: "Leaders at war: How presidents shape military interventions".

Qualtitative data from “John F. Kennedy,” in: "Leaders at war: How presidents shape military interventions".  Collected from the Kennedy Library and cover the Cold War period. The archival evidence itself mainly focuses on the coding of the independent variable, leaders’ beliefs. Since this variable is measured in the pre-presidential period, most of the archival sources used are drawn from pre-presidential collections at the presidential libraries. (The dependent variables – the decision to intervene and the choice of intervention strategy – are measured primarily using published primary sources and secondary sources, since many of the cases have a rich set of published sources and secondary literatures.) The pre-presidential collections, from which the shared sources are primarily derived, differ from the presidential papers in significant ways across the three presidencies, and do not conform to the same standards used to maintain papers in a modern presidency because, of course, the papers were generated and catalogued before it was known that each man would ascend to the presidency. Kennedy’s pre-presidential papers are, however, a very rich source for measuring his foreign policy attitudes and include travel diaries, personal letters, and speech drafts.