From Chapter 4 ("Signals and Noise at Home") of Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor, a comic-poetic turn of phrase:

The sense of being assailed by conflicting opinions and advice, all aggressively and persuasively expressed, may also have characterized the President's state of mind in these last weeks. At any rate, this state of mind (combined with his absorption in European affairs) makes more understandable the absence from the record of his personal reactions to the Far Eastern situation. In reading the memoirs of the men surrounding the President, one finds a constant preoccupation with the puzzle of what was going on in the President's mind. What did that smile or that raised eyebrow or that grim look actually betoken? A few of these advisers complained that they could not get a straight deal from the President, but most of them watched and waited patiently, as if the President were pregnant with decisions, and only God knew the moment at which the birth was due. ...

^z - 2017-11-12