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The relevance and usefulness of working with an analytical framework that considers both tracks is, of course, not confined to studying the Eisenhower presidency. The workings of the informal track are not likely to become the subject of a written archival document. It is important to use interviews, memoirs, the media, etc., to obtain this valuable material.

Another aspect of the importance of a contextual framework for assessing the evidentiary worth of archival sources has to do with the hierarchical nature of the policymaking system in most governments. We find useful the analogy of a pyramid of several layers. Each layer, beginning with the bottom one, sends communications upwards (as well as sideways), analyzing available data on a problem and offering interpretations of its significance for policy. As one moves up the pyramid, the number of actors and participants grows smaller but their importance (potential, if not actual) increases. As one reaches the layer next to the top—the top being the president—one encounters a handful of key officials and top advisers. At the same time, we find that researchers at times interview officials who are too high in the hierarchy to have had close involvement in or detailed recall of the events under study. Often, lower-level officials who worked on an issue every day have stronger recollections of how it was decided than the top officials who actually made the decision but who focused on the issues in question only intermittently. However, a researcher must take into account that even well-informed lower-level officials often do not have a complete or fully reliable picture of how and why a decision was made—i.e., the “Rashomon” problem, when different participants in the process have different views as to what took place.

This layered pyramid produces an enormous number of communications and documents that the scholar must assess. The possibility of erroneous interpretation of the significance of archival material is enormous. How do sophisticated historians and other scholars cope with this problem? What cautions are necessary when examining archival sources on top-level policymaking? How does a researcher deal with the fact that much of the material coming to the top-level group of policymakers from below is inconsequential? How does one decide which material coming from below to the top-level officials made a difference in the decision? How can one tell why he or she really decided as he or she did as against the justifications given for his or her decisions?

The analyst’s search for documentary evidence on reasons behind top-level decisions can also run into the problem that the paper trail may end before final decisions are made. Among the reasons for the absence of reliable documentary sources on such decisions is the role that secrecy can play. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State during the Kennedy administration, later stated that secrecy “made it very difficult for many to reconstruct the Bay of Pigs operation, particularly its planning, because very little was put on paper. [Allen] Dulles, [Richard] Bissell, and others proposing the operation briefed us orally.”207

No doubt there are important examples of scholarly disputes that illustrate these problems and indicate how individual analysts handled them. What general lessons can be drawn that would help train students and analysts? We have not yet found any book or major article that provides an adequate discussion of the problems of weighing the evidentiary worth of archival materials.208 The most we can do, therefore, is to warn writers of historical case studies about some of these problems and to call attention to some of the methods historians and political scientists have employed in dealing with archival materials. Deborah Larson, for example, suggests that “to judge the influence of a memo written by a lower-level official, one can look to see who initialed it. Of course, that a secretary of state initialed a memo does not prove that he read it, but it is a first step in analysis. Sometimes higher officials will