Charles F. Hermann

rdf:langString Charles F. Hermann

rdf:langString Charles Frazer Hermann (born June 29, 1938) holds the Brent Scowcroft Chair in International Policy Studies at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He is an expert in matters relating to American foreign policy, crisis management, and decision-making. Hermann joined Texas A&M University in 1995 when he was called to serve as the founding Director of the Bush School, which was established as part of President George H. W. Bush’s Presidential Library complex at Texas A&M University. From 1969 to 1970, Hermann served on the United States National Security Council (NSC) staff under the then National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. His appointment to NSC was through the International Affairs Fellowship of Council on Foreign Relations. Hermann is an author/editor of nine books and numerous journal articles on issues relating to foreign policy, simulation, national security, and group decision-making. His most recent book, When Things Go Wrong: Foreign Policy Decision Making under Adverse Feedback – a book about managing foreign and security policy in cases of protracted decision making – presented an enlightening and systematic investigation of one of the big questions in public policy. It answered the central question of – "what do foreign policy decision makers do when things go wrong?" It addresses situations in which foreign policy makers receive feedback that the policy they are following is failing. The book was hailed as an interesting and useful source that provided some necessary tools for analyzing complex decision-making processes. Before serving on the National Security Council, Hermann taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. During that time, he authored the book, Crisis in Foreign Policy: A Simulation Analysis, in which, he presented several models of crisis decision-making and tested them against the data from an international simulation series and U.S. foreign policy cases. In this work, Hermann conducted an exemplary simulation-experiment, which yielded both proactive findings and a stimulating post hoc model. M.J. Driver, writing in the American Political Science Review in September 1970, suggested that the book be used as a primer for simulation-experiment design. Michael Banks, writing for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said that the book is likely to become an essential work of reference for any specialized study of crisis in the future. One of the major contributions of the book was a rigorous definition of crisis specifying the conditions which differentiate it from normal circumstances, and a basic hypothesis stating that the pattern of decision-making varies from one situation to the other.