5
The Career of Cold War Psychology
The Cold War sustained the momentum of psychological experts' professional gains and offered numerous variations on the World War II theme that war was a struggle for national and international psyches. It reinforced the notion of psychology's intrinsic political and moral virtue, so crucial to the worldview of the World War II generation. "Psychology is perceived," wrote John Darley, an observer of Department of Defense (DOD) behavioral research in 1952, "as a vehicle that will assist in bringing about the American Creed of equality, fair play, and minimal group conflict." [1] Sentiments such at these, and correspondingly strenuous efforts to adjust always-threatening levels of international tension and reform instances of international misbehavior, flourished in the new era of uneasy peace.
The boundaries between military and civilian targets, between wartime and peacetime conflicts, already beginning to blur during World War II when examined through the lens of "sykewar," took on an eerie permanence during the Cold War. Military psychological operations experts were only stating what many Americans already felt when they pointed out that peace had lost much of its previous association with security: peace was "simply a period of less violent war in which nonmilitary means are predominantly used to achieve certain political objectives."[2] Since peace and war were no longer entirely distinguishable, the services provided by experts became a permanent military asset. "The inexorable relatedness of military and nonmilitary factors in national security policy" was a hallmark of the World War II worldview.[3]
It put psychological experts to work understanding the style of warfare (guerrilla movements in the Third World) and guiding the new kind of military mission (counterinsurgency) that the postwar decades produced.
The Cold War climate left few doubts about the appropriateness of fear or the dangerousness of the world in the aftermath of world war. It intensified the feeling that enlightened policy was not merely a factor in good government, but necessary to the very continuation of humanity. At the least, expert assistance could help U.S. foreign and military policy-makers sort out their pressing problems rationally and intelligently. At most, it held the key to survival in the atomic age.
What was the arms race, after all, if not cultural lag come true in the most terrifying of ways? From the hardware of weapons technology to the software of anti-Communist ideology, everything about the Cold War confirmed the anxieties that lurked just beneath the surface of national celebration in 1945. Wartime psychologists across the political spectrum, from the idealistic Gordon Allport to the realistic Robert Yerkes, had agreed that the combination of unchecked weapons technology and underdeveloped social technology was poisonous. Psychological expertise was among the only antidotes.
The institutional and intellectual developments that shaped psychology's Cold War trajectory are presented in this chapter. They illuminate the mechanisms of psychology's successful public career, which, by the 1960s, was flexible enough to expand well beyond the boundaries of warfare and outside the nurturing military environment, as will be evident in chapters 6 and 7 on psychology's role in the management of domestic racial conflict. The history of indebtedness to war, however, ran deep.
This history was also the prerequisite to Project Camelot, a major DOD-sponsored plan to involve behavioral experts in predicting and controlling Third World revolution and development in order to gain the upper hand in "The Minds Race."[4] Camelot had a strong psychological component, but was conceived from the start as an interdisciplinary effort on the model of World War II teamwork and in the spirit of that war's ambitious and integrated science of human behavior. Launched in 1963, it came into public view as an international scandal in July 1965, a full twenty years after the end of World War II. Camelot and its aftermath are discussed in detail in the next chapter.
In the material that follows, I argue that a combination of factors—psychology's institutional niche in the military, its theoretical explana-
tions of Third World revolution and development, and the contours of Cold War ideology in general—contributed to securing the reputation of psychological expertise as an increasingly vital asset in the policy-making process. This step was essential to making a project like Camelot possible and provoked much of the anxiety, and many of the ethical questions, that this scandal elicited.
Psychology's Cold War career sheds light on the general progress of psychology's public career during this period. It demonstrates how intimately entangled psychology had become with military and foreign policy. It illuminates the sturdiness and persistent influence of the World War II worldview in the face of mounting challenges. In sum, it provides insight into both the building blocks and the weaknesses of psychology's rise to power and helps to explain how and why psychological experts were able to take strides toward achieving the authority they sought in the postwar decades.
Institutional Building Blocks: Defense Dollars
Between 1945 and the mid-1960s, the U.S. military was, by far, the country's major institutional sponsor of psychological research, a living illustration of what socially minded experts could accomplish, especially with a "not too gentle rain of gold."[5] Some of the reasons for the meteoric rise of military psychology were not very subtle. The military had more money than any other public institution during these years, and during the Korean War, the DOD spent more on social and behavioral science than all other federal agencies combined.[6] Projects that would have represented heavy investments for civilian bureaucracies could, on occasion, simply be ways of satisfying the military's curiosity, or appeasing psychology's overheated advocates. Although impressive, the staggering sums that were spent on military psychological services between 1945 and 1970 are not, in themselves, convincing evidence that the military establishment had been thoroughly enlightened by psychology or converted to the experts' world-view. The military spent staggering sums on many things during these years and psychology was, in relative terms at least, dirt cheap.
Many of the academic professionals who had worked in the World War II military were relieved to return home to their universities in 1945, much like the ordinary soldiers they had studied. Samuel Stouf-
fer, who had managed the Research Branch of the army's Information and Education Division, returned briefly to the University of Chicago, then moved on to Harvard, where he became director of the new Laboratory of Social Relations. Rensis Liken, head of the Department of Agriculture's Division of Program Surveys and director of the Strategic Bombing Survey's Morale Division, went to Ann Arbor, where he headed the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Leonard Doob returned to his post at the Yale Institute of Human Relations. Even from such scattered locations in civilian academic life, however, World War II-era experts kept close tabs on the progress of military psychology (typically by serving as DOD advisors) and carefully nurtured the professional networks they had constructed during the world war, to their lasting benefit. According to Nathan Maccoby, a psychologist who worked in the Army Research Branch under the direction of Samuel Stouffer, "The Research Branch not only established one of the best old-boy (or old-girl) networks ever, but an alumnus of the Branch had an open door to most relevant jobs and career lines. We were a lucky bunch."[7]
Those who chose to stay on in the military, or young professionals who spent their entire careers in the new defense-oriented research organizations that proliferated in the postwar era, were fond of pointing out that nothing much distinguished psychology on campus from psychology administered, directly or indirectly, by the Pentagon; virtually all psychological research had military applications.[8] Further, work that was officially nonmilitary took on a military flavor, if only because association with national defense during the Cold War ensured the government's generous and sustained patronage. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both important civilian sources of funding for psychological and behavioral research in the postwar years, came into existence on the heels of World War II.[9] NIMH was established in 1946 as one component of the National Mental Health Act. General Louis Hershey, head of the Selective Service and one of the most vocal lobbyists for this legislation, made liberal use of the military's mental health data and warned that the psychiatric casualties of World War II were but the tip of the iceberg. The NSF was created four years later, after five years of congressional debate over twenty-one separate bills. By 1950 the Cold War climate was firmly in place and the Korean War had just begun.
NSF and NIMH were sensitive to military requirements and institutionally bound to the DOD in a number of ways in spite of their allegedly nonmilitary purposes.[10] The NSF director, for example, served on
the President's Defense Science Board and was responsible for initiating and supporting military research at the request of the Secretary of Defense. Employment patterns were also quite fluid, and experts moved back and forth between military and civilian institutions. Theodore Val-lance, for example, a psychologist and the director of the military research organization, the Special Operations Research Office (Camelot's sponsoring organization in the early 1960s), became Chief of the NIMH Planning Branch just a few years later. Job location changed frequently; the nature of the work did not.
During the 1950s, all the types of work that psychological experts had done in the World War II military were further institutionalized (in the DOD and on campus) with the support of military funding: psychological warfare, intelligence classification, training, clinical treatment, and "human factors" (previously called "man-machine") engineering. Even the mysteries of morale and other fields of human relations research were vigorously pursued on the theory that, however speculative in the short run, their potential military payoff was large enough to justify, the investment.
In the wake of World War II, practical applications counted above all, and the patriotic rush to make psychology (and other behaviorally oriented disciplines) serviceable generated expectations that at least certain kinds of expertise would be dependable enough, and hence indispensable enough, to be called "policy sciences."[11] Lingering skeptics typically confronted the passion—and sometimes the arrogance—of true believers, such as sociologist Talcott Parsons.
Do we have or can we develop a knowledge of human social relations that can serve as the basis of rational "engineering" control? ... The evidence we have reviewed indicates that the answer is unequivocally affirmative. Social science is a going concern; the problem is not one of creating it, but rather of using and developing it. Those who still argue whether the scientific study of social life is possible are far behind the times. It is here, and that fact ends the argument.[12]
Such confidence drowned out whatever tentative speculation existed that the explosion of job opportunities in the military, and elsewhere in government, was turning experts into obedient servants of the state.[13] The panic set off by Sputnik in 1957 about the state of U.S. scientific and technological know-how did nothing, of course, to inspire a more critical mood; it only increased the gush of defense dollars.
By the early 1960s the DOD was spending almost all of its social science research budget on psychology, around $15 million annually, more than the entire budget for military research and development be-
fore World War II.[14] By the end of the 1960s the figure had almost tripled, but even the huge sums spent by the DOD had been swamped years earlier by Great Society programs wishing to direct psychological expertise toward domestic policy problems.[15] Whatever the intentions of military planners for their in-house and contract research during the Cold War, psychologists were hopeful, during the years following World War II, that "the military may serve for psychology the role that the industrial revolution served for the physical sciences."[16]
After 1945, and until the formal establishment of the NSF in 1950, the federal agency most responsible for funding psychological research was the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Established in August 1946 as the first federal agency dedicated to supporting scientific research, it took up pretty much where Word War II left off. ONR inherited many wartime research contracts that employed psychologists in areas of personnel and training (test design and measurement), group dynamics (conformity, motivation, and leadership studies), human factors engineering (equipment design), and physiological psychology (sensation and perception). With a total budget for psychological research of around $2 million each year, the ONR represented a military commitment to psychological research and expertise far outstripping that of other public agencies. A decade after its establishment, the American Psychological Association (APA) celebrated the work of the ONR at an elaborate Washington banquet, "in recognition of the exceptional contributions of the Office of Naval Research to the development of American psychology and other sciences basic to the national welfare."[17]
In 1950 the Korean War confirmed the wisdom and reliability of the military-psychology combination. Widely publicized "brainwashing" of U.S. POWs by Chinese Communists gave special impetus to studies of sensory deprivation and techniques of ideological conversion, although there was a concerted effort to keep this kind of politically sensitive military research quiet.[18] Ultimately, research related to the mechanisms of mass communications and persuasion found their most eager customer in the evolving U.S. intelligence community.[19] The CIA, in particular, launched an ambitious mind control program during this period.[20] With a professional self-image that leaned heavily on psychological factors, the agency's embrace of behavioral technologies—in-eluding personality measurement and assessment—was not at all surprising. Consider the following description of an agent's primary mission by the CIA's inspector general in 1963: "The CIA case officer is first and foremost, perhaps, a practitioner of the art of assessing and
exploiting human personality and motivations for ulterior purposes... by bringing the methods and disciplines of psychology to bear.... The prime objectives are control, exploitation, or neutralization. These objectives are innately anti-ethical rather than therapeutic in their intent."[21]
While the CIA's determination to train agents in the intricacies of psychological manipulation and its research into mind control were covert, not a matter of public record until decades later, the military's response to the Korean War was to reaffirm, often quite publicly, the fundamental lesson learned during World War II: war should be treated as a psychological struggle and laboratory. The Personnel Research Branch of the U.S. Army, along with several new contract research outfits (including the army's Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins University and the air force's Human Resources Research Institute) sent psychologists to Korea to pursue the question of what exactly made a good solider. These investigations proceeded under the watchful eyes of advisors, including Samuel Stouffer, who had pioneered this sort of attitude assessment effort in World War II.[22] The army also launched Project CLEAR, an effort to check up on the slow progress of military racial integration after President Truman issued an executive order in July 1948 to desegregate the armed forces. These studies too were reminiscent of the work of the Army Research Branch during World War II. Finally, the U.S. Psychological Strategy Board, which coordinated all psychological warfare campaigns in Korea, consulted with behavioral experts including Hadley Cantril, Daniel Lerner, Harold Lasswell, Rensis Likert, Gabriel Almond, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Alexander Leighton.[23] The result was that the World War II experience was grafted onto the Cold War conflict. The commitment to psychology as a weapon continued unabated (fig. 14).
Ideological Building Blocks: Scientific Utility, Professional Gain, and National Security
In another pattern originating in World War II, military planners during the Cold War years consistently joined the lofty purposes of scientific advance to more immediate national security needs. Their notion of scientific advance, however, was a decidedly self-inter-
Figure 14. Diagram of the individual's drives and reactions, from
U.S. Army 1962 Field Manual on Psychological Operations.
ested one in which psychologists and others subordinated scientific goals to the DOD mission. In 1953 Don Price, the deputy chairman of the DOD Research and Development Board, tried to raise awareness among researchers about their properly submissive Cold War role, a role he felt they were foolishly resisting:
[The military] stands firmly on its cardinal principle: it does not make research contracts for the purpose of supporting science, but only "in order to get results that will strengthen the national defense. . . ." American scientists are still struggling to reconcile their eighteenth-century devotion to science as a system of objective and dispassionate search for knowledge and as a means for furthering the welfare of mankind in general, with the twentieth-century necessity, of using science as a means for strengthening the military power of the United States.[24]
As long as psychology could demonstrate its utility to "strengthening the military power of the United States," many military patrons were more than willing to champion it, and their record of solid support for military psychology during the Cold War years was impressive.
Psychology's conquest of the military, however, was far from complete. In spite of the experts' best efforts, some key policy-makers persisted in the old-fashioned belief that psychological knowledge was nothing but a mystified and expensive version of common sense, really a shameful waste of taxpayers' money. Others were even more hostile. Hyman Rickover, for example, the architect of the nuclear navy, "anticipate[d] with horror the day when the Navy is induced to place psychiatrists on board our nuclear submarines."[25] He believed that psychological experts had actually caused problems during World War II and decreased the efficiency of the military during the Cold War years. The "gauche and amateurish" antics of military psychologists, Rickover reflected in 1968, were not merely annoying diversions. They had actually been straightforward threats to national security for almost three decades. According to him, psychology's silly concerns distracted soldiers from the important business at hand—beating the enemy—which had very little to do with either "morale" or "adjustment."
Rickover was not alone in feeling that military research ought to be limited to a narrow definition of winning wars and not used "to determine various important human characteristics on the basis of the contents of wastepaper baskets."[26] Especially during the McCarthy years, active political suspicion was heaped onto the charge that behavioral expertise was stupid and irrelevant.[27] Worse, it might even be un-American. U.S. social and psychological experts, along with their foun-
dation patrons, came under regular attack in Congress for leftist political sympathies and alleged plans "to weaken or discredit the capitalist system in the United States and to favor Marxist socialism."[28]
The constricted Cold War climate at home was likely an important factor in popularizing the new term, "behavioral science," which promised to exude hard-headed objectivity in the face of accusations that the human sciences were soft on socialism.[29] Some psychologists, Gordon Allport among them, were unhappy with the "behavioral science" label, but not too unhappy. In an address at Wellesley College, Allport mused, "Personally, I am not entirely happy with it since the science we seek is a science of feeling, of thought, of dreams and of silence, quite as much as of behavior. But philanthropic foundations seem to like the name behavioral science, and we shall raise no objection to it lest Cinderella miss her chance to ride in a golden coach provided by the Foundation. Up to now these sciences have been riding in a Ford model T."[30]
Suspicions about social science's socialistic inclinations never disappeared entirely, but as time went on, other concerns superseded them.[31] After the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, many dedicated anti-Communists like Richard Nixon worried more about the competitive edge of U.S. social scientists than about their alleged political sub-versiveness. The military—along with the rest of U.S. society—came to associate psychology with sophisticated cultural and scientific understanding, a capacity that seemed not at all trivial, and certainly not optional, in a dangerous world. In January 1964 the Department of Defense reported to Congress that behavioral scientists were involved in all aspects of policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation.[32] No fuss greeted this routine announcement, and no controversial attention was paid to military behavioral science until Project Camelot came to light the next year.
The most virulent critics and the most enthusiastic proponents of military psychological expertise all based their arguments on the rhetoric of national security, a fixture of the era. While psychologists were the first to admit, to one another at least, that they actually knew appallingly little about their areas of supposed competence, they made promises to the military as a way of killing two birds with one stone: demonstrating psychology's social responsibility and advancing their own professional interests.[33] The establishment of the ONR, the National Security Act of 1947 (which reorganized all the military and national security agencies of the federal government), the Korean War, and
other important developments in the wake of World War II added up to a "a dream come true" for psychological experts.[34]
If this sounds opportunistic, it was. There is no doubt that psychological experts massaged the system when they could, packaging their research plans in terms they knew would appeal to the military. Much of the debate about basic versus applied research had this quality; the distinction itself was partially created by the unprecedented sums of money available from government agencies in the period after World War II. Differences had always existed, in theory at least, between "applied" research geared toward smoothing the operations of the state and "basic" research prompted by purely scientific concerns. In practice, psychological experts worked on the assumption that their military customers always preferred the latter to the former. As one of them said, "Basic research is what I want to do, whatever that is, and whenever the mood strikes me. . . . Applied research [is] what someone else wants me to do, with some practical purpose in mind."[35] Some, undoubtedly, responded to the political economy of the research market by expediently translating their basic scientific concerns into a language filled with practical applications, thus garnering financial support under false pretenses. Many, perhaps most postwar psychological experts, however, did not have to lie, or even misrepresent their goals to military funders. They believed that defense-related work could simultaneously advance scientific knowledge and state efficiency.
Such multifaceted ambitions deepened with the Cold War because superpower hostilities created openings for projects like Camelot. If its genesis in international crisis was unfortunate, Camelot nevertheless symbolized how tantalizing the prospects were of a permanent social and psychological experiment on a very grand scale. Opportunities to study and manipulate the basic components of human motivation and behavior, and consequently to take a real shot at long-term psychological policy making, came frequently during the Cold War. The planet was still psychology's laboratory.
Most psychologists, on the other hand, were hardly crude opportunists. They were sincere in their convictions that psychology was crucial to national security and that psychologists were obligated to serve their government, perspectives deeply rooted in the World War II experience. They were certain that advancing their techniques of tension prediction and reduction could help the United States move toward an enlightened and peace-prone foreign policy rather than one crafted out of the war-prone cobwebs of intuition.
Cold war was, above all, a psychological phenomenon, just as total world war had been. While cold war presented the U.S. military with new challenges—unconventional styles of warfare against a new cast of confusing enemies—nothing could have offered clearer evidence of the World War II maxim that war was fundamentally a battle for hearts and minds. Third World upheavals were nothing if not contests for the feelings and will of people. What could have vindicated more comprehensively everything the World War II experts had said about the chaos of public opinion and morale and the need for expert management of ideology and propaganda? Military might, on its own, was simply not up to the task of winning the Cold War because victory would not go to the side with the most guns. No one was more intimately acquainted with the drift of military thinking than President Eisenhower, who proclaimed in 1954 that "the world, once divided by oceans and mountain ranges, is now split by hostile concepts of man's character and nature. . . . Two world camps . . .lie farther apart in motivation and conduct than the poles in space."[36] The Cold War was a "war for the minds of men," Eisenhower concluded.[37]
The World War II worldview was the most decisive factor shaping psychology's Cold War history, and the link between the two emerged in part from the sustained vision of a rigorous and predictive behavioral science, which lasted from 1945 well into the 1960s. The World War II sources were tangible as well as abstract. A number of individuals whose formative professional experiences had been in World War II went on to lay the plans that inspired the ill-fated Project Camelot. Charles Bray, for example, was chair of the Applied Psychology Panel of the National Defense Research Committee during World War II, which had mobilized some two hundred psychologists in twenty research projects geared to streamlining military operations and increasing proficiency. His leadership of the Smithsonian Institution's Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, was especially important in laying the groundwork for projects like Camelot. Many other psychological experts with World War II experience involved themselves in military psychology well into the 1960s, often in important planning and advisory capacities. These included Leonard Carmichael, Leonard Doob, Frank Geldard, Daniel Lerner, Morris Janowitz, S. Smith Stevens, Samuel Stouffer, Theodore Vallance, Dael Wolfe, and others.
The most significant organizational innovation during the Cold War years was the establishment of military contract research organizations,
which proliferated between 1945 and the early 1960s. Funded almost exclusively by the military, but nominally affiliated with "multiversities" and located on campuses, these new organizations (called Federal Contract Research Centers, or FCRCs) handled massive volumes of psychological and other types of scientific work for the DOD.[38] According to the NSF, the numbers of professionals of all types employed by FCRCs tripled between 1954 and 1965 and their budgets increased by 500 percent.[39]
Stationed in a kind of "twilight zone" between the clear public functions of government bureaucracies and the supposedly private concerns of universities, these FCRCs literally transferred much DOD data gathering to organizations outside of the state, furthering the mixture of military and nonmilitary, public and private, that was so characteristic of Cold War research.[40] The most famous of these hybrid organizations is undoubtedly the RAND Corporation, founded with air force aid in 1946. Another was the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), the sponsor of Project Camelot.[41]
Theoretical Building Blocks:
The Psychological Basis of Development and Revolution in the Third World
Development
The theoretical work of psychologists after World War II, especially in the areas of Third World development and revolution, complemented the institutional factors that were strengthening psychological research within the military and helped bring psychological perspectives to the attention of policy-makers. The notion, for example, that the roots of war were to be found in the psychological particulars of national character and the universal truth of frustration and aggression did not evaporate at the end of World War II. During the period between 1945 and 1960, psychological experts pursued questions about how to derail the development of militaristic aggressiveness, and, more ambitiously, how to construct an alternative psychology, oriented toward peaceful economic development and political stability. The fundamentals of the national character approach, although they sometimes
came in for sharp methodological criticisms, gained wide currency among foreign and military policy-makers in the period following the war[42]
Formulated as an explicit alternative to the inadequate (because they were not primarily psychological) explanations of economists and other social scientists who stressed material factors and large-scale social forces transcending the individual person, some psychologists singled out personality as the ultimate key to manipulating economic and political developments in the newly emerging states of the Third World. As early as 1946, psychologist Carl Hovland offered the following general advice to the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation, who were exploring the possibility of funding projects on the "Psychological Principles Underlying Economic Behavior": "Now it is not anticipated that it will be possible within the near future to explain all economic phenomena on the basis of psychological laws now known. But it is the writer's opinion that it is high time that a start be made."[43] Between World War II and the mid-1960s, psychologists tackled this area of theory. and research. Many eventually concluded that there was little point in assisting abstractions like "developing societies" by pouring vast public sums into a process whose economic mechanisms were baffling.
Personalities, on the other hand, were concrete entities. Not only did they "develop," but they were assumed to be reachable through conscious intervention into the family's childrearing practices. Mothers, because they functioned as personality factories, became favorite subjects of expert attention and logical objects of public policy. The inner landscape, that familiar geography on which so much military conflict transpired, also turned out to be the key to unlocking peaceful economic change in far-flung corners of the world.
Leonard Doob, an important figure in World War II psychology and one of the authors of Frustration and Aggression, spent a number of the postwar years conducting psychological studies in African and Caribbean societies and developing a theoretical argument that posited "civilization" (by which he meant Western-style industrial and cultural development) as an outgrowth of personality change.[44] Civilization's presence or absence, in other words, had more to do with the conditions of psychological development and with the state of affairs "within people" than with such external, material realities as economic infrastructure, raw materials, population growth, or the character and extent of political institutions. "People acquire the central goal of seeking to be-
come more civilized," Doob argued, "when their traditional values no longer bring them satisfaction and/or when some experience gives them a favorable view of civilization."[45]
Although Doob held tightly to the vision of an objective and non-judgmental behavioral science, insisting, for example, that "the process of becoming more civilized is neither praised nor condemned," his conclusions told a different story.[46] His data characterized the people of "uncivilized" societies as rigid and lacking in empathy, whereas the psychological profile of civilized people included tolerance, reason, self-reflection, and a refreshing absence of dogma.[47] Doob still endorsed the psychoanalytic premise that civilization required repression, but the resulting misery seemed to fall squarely on the shoulders of those individuals who were in the process of acculturation, striving for an urbanized, industrialized society. The psychological conflicts involved in "becoming more civilized" could, according to this way of thinking, function as the basis for nationalist or revolutionary ideologies since these ideologies offered psychologically necessary safety valves for the accumulation of hostile emotions by directing those emotions toward outsiders, frequently Westerners. If residents of the Third World could be systematically aided in navigating this treacherous route toward civilized personalities, Doob suggested, they would likely find that state psychologically satisfying when they finally arrived.
His research methods, which relied heavily on projective tests like the Rorschach, were indicative of general trends in the direction of postwar social scientific research.[48] Personality measures were more and more frequently used by anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists engaged in fieldwork in the Third World because getting illiterate or semiliterate people to draw or respond to ink blots was a practical possibility. For the many who were influenced by varieties of psychoanalytic theory, of course, exploring the levels below consciousness was also a theoretical necessity. A whole generation of postwar social scientists was routinely schooled in the use of tests like the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), F Scale, Rorschach, and the Goodenough Drawing Test, in addition to more conventional intelligence-measuring techniques like the Stanford-Binet scale. One survey of cross-cultural research in the early 1960s concluded that "students of culture have looked to the psychologist—or at least to psychological concepts and methods—for the key to their revised scientific interest."[49]
Probably the best-known example of postwar psychological theory pushed to the limits of its explanatory power in relation to international
economic development was the work of David McClelland. A personality psychologist originally interested in theories of motivation, McClelland's The Achieving Society (1961) aimed to illustrate that psychological determinism could be empirically sound and quantitatively rigorous when it came to explaining and predicting patterns of national economic development. McClelland, committed to methodological advance in psychology, also had in mind the practical translation of psychological theory into public policy. "The shortest way to achieve economic objectives," he wrote, "might turn out to be through changing people first. . . . The precise problem of most underdeveloped countries is that they do not have the character structure, especially the motivational structure, which would lead them to act in the ways required. The model is like a combustion engine without the gas to make it go."[50]
Individual psychology, as it turned out, was "the gas," the precious fuel of economic progress. Much as Doob had focused on the individual personality as the entity that either moved or failed to move toward a state of civilization, McClelland theorized that the personal psychological resources of a given country largely determined whether or not it would be an "achieving society." Economic development was a product of a competitive, achievement-oriented type of personality whose main sources were internal and psychological. This achieving personality (or any other kind, for that matter) was manufactured within the family. Relationships between mothers and children (in the case of McClelland's research, it was exclusively mothers and sons ) were therefore directly implicated as likely obstacles to national economic growth and reforming motherhood emerged as possibly the clearest solution to national economic failure.
McClelland's grand theory began modestly in the early 1950s with an effort to quantitatively isolate and measure individual motives, including the one that became a central factor in his later work on economic development: the need for achievement, or what he called "n Achievement." Firmly committed to the most exacting experimental methods as well as to the pursuit of psychoanalytic insights, McClelland developed ingenious techniques for taking "psychic X-rays" of a given society's unconscious inclinations. These included methodical content analyses of folk stories and children's stories from around the world (in order to discern patterns of cultural fantasy and aspiration—a kind of projective test for the entire society), direct tests for n Achievement (via studies of mothers and sons in Germany, Japan, India, and Brazil), and
observation of the actual behavior of business entrepreneurs—who were assumed to embody the achieving ideal—in the United States, Turkey, Italy, and Poland.
McClelland assumed a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between mothers' early expectations of sons, the development of a (male) entrepreneurial class, and levels of national economic development. Although he claimed that his model was not bound to any particular economic philosophy, and would predict growth rates equally well in capitalist and socialist economies, his concept of achievement certainly assumed a fundamentally competitive and acquisitive economic drive.
His assumptions about gender merited no such self-conscious commentary. Basically, if mothers' inculcated enough n Achievement, the country would prosper; if they did not, it would remain impoverished or even slip backwards into underdevelopment. The fact that girls and women were central economic actors, especially in subsistence-based, agrarian societies, was entirely invisible in this model of development. Women were considered important, but for the values they instilled, as mothers, in their young sons. According to McClelland, the childrearing style that produced the highest levels of n Achievement balanced warmth against high expectations and exhibited just the right amount of pressure to achieve: not too much and not too little. To the extent that political or economic forces were relevant in producing national achievement levels, they operated largely on mothers and their child-rearing practices. "The family as the nucleus of the social structure is a little like the nucleus of the atom; it is harder to influence by external events than one might expect."[51]
After comparing various national economic growth rates with measures of n Achievement in 1925 and 1950, as well as examining historical cases as divergent as Spain in the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, pre-Inca Peru, and the nineteenth-century United States, McClelland found that surges in n Achievement levels were consistently followed by spurts of productive economic activity, confirming his theory that psychological change was the motor of economic history. "What people want," he concluded, "they somehow manage to get. . . . These results serve to direct our attention as social scientists away from an exclusive concern with the external events in history to the 'internal' psychological concerns that in the long run determine what happens in history."[52] At last, patterns of economic development could
be reliably predicted on the basis of measurable psychological factors: "The psychologist has now developed tools for finding out what a generation wants, better than it knows itself, and before it has had a chance of showing by its actions what it is after."[53]
The policy implications of such awesome knowledge were very clear to Doob and McClelland. First, U.S. foreign aid geared to economic development really ought to target psychological development since the latter was both a fundamental and a measurable cause of economic growth. This simplified the policy-making process by turning it away from such elusive factors as agricultural efficiency and turning it toward those indicators with a demonstrable, empirical relationship to n Achievement. Second, the goal of aid should be to nurture and produce emotionally mature entrepreneurial elites who would then lead their countries toward economic growth and success. In this translation of psychology into public policy, old-fashioned development programs could still be useful, if considered in the new light of their psychological consequences. Birth control programs were, for McClelland, just one example. "One must obviously reduce the number of some kinds of people more than others, yet practically all birth-control policies ignore this problem entirely. No matter how few, the 'wrong' kind of people will not produce rapid economic development, nor will the 'right' people, no matter how many, block economic development. 'Right' and 'wrong' mean here, of course, more or less suited in motives and values to the task of economic development."[54] McClelland was more than willing to testify before Congress about the deficiencies of the country's development assistance policies, many of which, in his view, suffered from reliance on the erroneous motivational assumptions of economists. "Behavioral science knowledge about human motivation," in contrast, "could have very concrete practical implications for U.S. aid policy. . . ."[55] He recommended that all government programs of foreign assistance be carefully scrutinized for evidence of their "psychological multiplier effect" and U.S. investments restructured in favor of those which had demonstrated the biggest payoff in developing the "right" kinds of personalities and discouraging the "wrong" ones.[56]
For its part, Congress seriously explored the psychological aspects of international relationships on several occasions in the mid- and late 1960s, facilitated by J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.[57] Fulbright, who had been one of the youngest university presidents in the country (appointed to head
the University of Arkansas at age thirty-four) before his entrance into electoral politics, was known for founding the program of international scholarly exchange that bears his name and also for sponsoring high-profile hearings on Vietnam, beginning in 1966, which were considered instrumental in turning public opinion against the war. He opened a 1969 hearing on "Psychological Aspects of Foreign Policy" by stating, "It is believed by many that wars begin in the minds of men. As a politician, I am inclined to view it that the mysteries of political behavior have their origin in the mysteries of the human mind, and yet an examination of the human mind in order to understand our own political behavior has not heretofore appealed to either the public or to political leaders. It may be we are frightened by the possibilities that might be revealed by some self-examination."[58] Fulbright's hearings delved into topics ranging from communism's psychological appeal to the role of unconscious projection and need for love in U.S. foreign policy; they were designed to air "unorthodox approaches."[59] Expert testimony was offered by Jerome Frank, Margaret Mead, Karl Menninger, and Charles Osgood, among others, who took advantage of the opportunities Fulbright offered to champion the usefulness of their insights but did not hesitate to scold Congress for its inadequate appreciation of mental and behavioral expertise. "Perhaps what psychiatrists have learned about establishing communication with a frightened, angry, and suspicious person may have some relevance," pointed out Jerome Frank about "Psychological Difficulties in Giving and Receiving Aid."[60] Other testimony and written reports addressed "The Effect of Natural Drives on Communism and the Changes in Communism," the "Effect of 'Face' on Rigidity of Chinese Communism," and "Is the United States Acting Rationally?"
Revolution
Social psychological perspectives also pervaded the study of political upheaval in the Third World in the period after World War II, in large part because the striking pattern of interdisciplinary teamwork during World War II had left as much of a mark on many sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and economists as it had on those with formal psychological training. The tendency toward the study of "total societies," for example, required a patchwork of methods and theories drawn from throughout the social sciences. The new
prominence of psychological research in fields conventionally associated with political science or sociology helped to push the center of gravity in research done by nonpsychologists toward the consideration of psychological variables.[61] As early as 1939, Robert Lynd had offered the following comment and advice in his critical discussion of the direction of U.S. social science: "With its field thus fortunately concentrated on the central powerhouse of culture, individuals, [psychology] is in the strategic position of having the other social sciences turn increasingly to it for the solution to realistic problems—mental health, education and child development, labor problems, advertising and market research, public opinion and propaganda. It is a safe prescription to almost any young social-scientist-in-training to 'get more psychological underpinning.'"[62]
By the early 1960s much of mainstream social science was committed to a behavioral science approach to the analysis of Third World revolution, an orientation that would significantly shape policy, as well as research, during the Vietnam era. Influential books like Walt Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) made it obvious not only that societies needed to be jolted into modernization (typically by revolution), but that an appropriate psychological outlook—characterized by rationality, risk taking, and desire for growth and consumption—was a prerequisite to national "take-off."[63] A Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist during the 1950s, Rostow became a Vietnam War policy-maker and controversial advocate of counterinsurgency in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as chairman of the Department of State Policy Planning Council and deputy to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, another academic-turned-policy-maker. He testified before Congress about the advantages behavioral experts brought to "winning the Cold War" and singled out the psychologist for special mention as "a valued collaborator in penetrating the operation of the Communist mind and the attractions which communism offers certain kinds of people."[64]
By the early 1960s the analytical concept of "political culture" had also injected a new appreciation for psychology into the study of comparative politics. The very use of the term, according to its originator, Gabriel Almond, a Stanford University political scientist, indicated a "psychological orientation toward social objects."[65] Directly descended from World War II analyses of national character, political culture illustrated just how central a psychological orientation had become for so-
cial scientists not formally identified with psychological training, in this case political scientists interested in Third World revolution and development.[66] According to Lucian Pye,
The concept of political culture assumes that each individual must, in his own historical context, learn and incorporate into his own personality the knowledge and feelings about the politics of his people and his community. This means in turn that the political culture of a society is limited but given firm structure by the factors basic to dynamic psychology. . . . [Political culture combines] the revolutionary findings of modern depth psychology and recent advances in the sociological techniques for measuring attitudes in mass societies.[67]
While they depended heavily on World War II—era national character studies, political culture advocates were also likely to criticize them for being biased toward the unconscious and insufficiently attentive to rational, adult motivation. They prided themselves on the theoretical flexibility with which political culture could encompass both conscious and unconscious psychological factors. This balanced emphasis, however, did not so much depart from the direction of psychological theory, as conform to it. In the years after World War II, interest in conscious motivation and ego development revived, including among psychoanalytic theorists such as Heinz Hartmann.[68]
The definition of development—political and economic—that paralleled political culture made it clear too that the point was to delineate a national personality profile, but through more exhaustive and systematic comparisons than had been possible for World War II-era social psychologists. Political culture advocates included in their notion of political development precisely the kinds of findings just detailed in the work of psychologists Leonard Doob and David McClelland. They also harked back to the World War II discovery that individual subjectivity, could be the key to untangling social and political processes. "Political culture does not refer to the formal or informal structures of political interaction," one key advocate remarked. "Nor does it refer to the pattern of interaction among political actors. . . . It refers not to what is happening in the world of politics, but what people believe about those happenings."[69]
The popularity of the political culture concept was fueled as much by policy-makers' immediate concerns as by the theoretical momentum of social science. Its multidisciplinary approach to the problem of nation building certainly seemed appropriate to the complicated analysis of whole political systems, a kind of bridge between the microanalysis
of life histories and the macroanalysis more typical of political sociologists and historians.[70] But the concept also promised to "yield more understanding about the possibilities and limitations for consciously changing a political culture in order to facilitate national development."[71] It was partly because of the blueprint it offered for engineering political change in the Third World—a prime concern of much U.S. foreign and military policy during the Cold War years—that the political culture perspective became a dominant one by the mid-1960s.
Its advocates were concentrated in the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics.[72] That committee's chairman was Lucian Pye, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist and one of the DOD's many advisors on behavioral research. Pye argued that the main challenges Third World societies faced in becoming modem nation-states were psychological. "Fears of failure in the adventure of nation building create deep anxieties, which tend to inhibit effective action. . . . The dynamics of such psychological inhibitions to effective action, particularly in relation to the politics of modernization, can permeate and restrain the entire process of nation building."[73]
Like McClelland on economic development, Pye pointed out that political development would go nowhere if Third World personalities were not emotionally suited to the requirements of such a national "adventure." Referring frequently to the writing of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who had published the widely read Childhood and Society and Young Man Luther since his wartime studies of Hitler's psychology and Nazi mentality, Pye suggested that modernizing the political structures of Third World states would require the inculcation of new forms of identity through a revamped socialization process. Also like McClelland, personalities stood, for Pye, at a critical juncture between individual psychology and a country's political institutions. They were the critical variable and, further, they were reformable. By supporting the development of a modernizing identity among emotional elites in the Third World, the United States could promote peaceful movement toward Western models of political organization and minimize the chances of bloody, Communist-inspired revolutions.
Pye and others considered the question of national identity—whether and to what extent people developed a self-confident psychological affiliation with and sense of belonging to a nation-state—especially delicate. Instilling a clear national identity was understood to be the source of legitimacy for political institutions and elites. Patriotic
service to the state during war had, after all, been the origin of their own power, and they assumed it was equally essential to stabilizing shaky Third World political systems. Analysts suggested that providing new states with assistance in building national self-identity was a task of political socialization equivalent to the family's manufacture of personal self-identity.[74] True, it occurred on the level of international relations rather than interpersonal relations, but the difference was more one of location than of kind.
Even with these new and important intellectual developments, many of the old themes of crowd psychology, which had informed psychologists' policy-oriented work during World War II and before, remained sturdy and largely unchanged, appearing at the center of behavioral schemes to understand and manipulate Third World revolution, including Camelot. In fact, Rex Hopper, the Brooklyn College sociologist who was eventually chosen to direct Project Camelot, took the crowd psychology tradition so seriously that he summarized its contributions to the literature on revolution in a 1950 article rifled "The Revolutionary Process: A Frame of Reference for the Study of Revolutionary Movements."[75]
Working squarely in the tradition of Le Bon and McDougall, as well as the more recent World War II-era analysts of race rioting, Hopper laid out a series of stages through which revolutionary movements passed: "the Preliminary Stage of Mass (Individual) Excitement, the Popular Stage of Crowd (Collective) Excitement and Unrest, the Formal Stage of Formulation of Issues and Formulation of Publics, and the Institutional Stage of Legalization and Societal Organization."[76] Each stage corresponded to a particular psychological mood, to which revolutionary elements (leaders, organizations, and ideologies) had to conform. As individuals were transformed into a "psychological crowd," and as that crowd eventually became a revolutionary public and the basis for a new society, people experienced the typically painful consequences of dramatic psychological change: wish repression, oppression psychoses, motivation disturbances, and general psychological exhaustion.
Although he was a Latin America specialist himself, Hopper's summary of the literature was purely theoretical and did not single out any particular national case, or even region of the world, for examination. Nor did Hopper give any indication that the effort to predict, guide, or prevent revolution might raise ethical questions for behavioral scientists. In all likelihood, his straightforward endorsement of the notion
that "a generalized description is a necessary prerequisite to any attempt to control" indicated that "the revolutionary process" he was describing was located safely on territory outside the industrialized west.[77] Years later, when he directed his attention toward dramatic shifts in the domestic social structure of the United States, his attitudes were far less neutral. With waves of cultural alienation and technologically induced unemployment becoming more frequent, "the probabilities are great that revolutionary changes will occur," he noted in dismay. "My own guess is that we shall move toward a militarized and cybernatized totalitarianism of the right."[78]
In the early 1960s, mainstream social and behavioral scientists were fully engaged with developing the kind of predictive indices that grew organically out of theoretical chronologies like Hopper's. Systematically identifying the constellation of factors that caused "internal war" was, at the time, a major effort. For example, the Princeton Symposium on Internal War, hosted in September 1961 by the Princeton Center for International Studies and funded by the Carnegie Corporation, brought together a small group of prominent social and behavioral scientists, including Gabriel Almond, Daniel Bell, Kenneth Boulding, Harold Lasswell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Talcott Parsons, Lucian Pye, and Sidney Verba.[79] For several days, they discussed the general pre-conditions of internal war and topics such as "The Commencement of Rebellions and the Art of Controlling Rebels." Although a purely theoretical effort on its face, the organizer of the symposium, Harry Eckstein of Princeton, presented his paper (titled "Introduction to the Study of Internal Wars: The Problem of Anticipation") to the Smithsonian Institution's Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences, charged with advising the DOD on the direction of military behavioral science, just a few months later.[80] Eventually, Eckstein became one of Camelot's consultants.
Edward Tiryakian, a sociologist from Duke University and another one of the participants in the Princeton symposium, later contributed his work on the prediction of Third World upheaval to a conference directly associated with the Camelot effort.[81] Tiryakian's predictive model assumed that revolutionary upheaval was necessarily destructive and endorsed political stability as the ideal state. (His hypothetical society, distinguished primarily by the absence of conflict, was called "utopia.") His "Model of Societal Change and Its Lead Indicators" developed an "index of revolutionary potential" complete with "advance warning signals" that measured increases in social pathology and insta-
bility via such indicators as the spread of sexual promiscuity and cults. Because these factors were located in the social unconscious (he called it the "social underground"), far removed from the superficial political and economic targets of revolutionary movements, they were, according to Tiryakian, by far the most reliable predictors of war's psychological preconditions.
Camelot's Organizational Background
The Smithsonian Institution's Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences
The long-term planning efforts of the Smithsonian Institution's Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences were the most immediate precursors of Camelot, although in significant ways this group merely updated the advice that Robert Yerkes had given to the defense establishment as early as 1944. The Smithsonian Group consisted of some of psychology's leading lights, most of whom had been deeply influenced by their experiences during World War II: Leonard Carmichael, Leonard Cottrell, Harry Harlow, Neal Miller, S. Smith Stevens, and Dael Wolfe, among others. The group's 1957 report tried to anticipate the kind of research that would be necessary to win the global struggle with the Soviet Union ten to twenty years in the future. They assumed that cold war would continue—mainly because human beings were not emotionally conditioned in such a way as to make peace very likely—and that its battleground would be primarily psychological. "The principal weapon of cold war," they asserted, "is persuasion—the persuasion of men. . . . It is assumed that persuasion is the major cold war weapon of importance in the future."[82] They concluded that "full realization of the potentialities of psychology and the social sciences in designing a fully operational Psychological Weapon System could not be expected unless that system were explicitly admitted to the arsenal of primary weapons systems of the nation."[83]
Breakthroughs in developing and countering "Psychological Weapons Systems," which the group confidently expected, would show that psychology was both militarily important and politically neutral. It could be the source of technologies devoted to manipulating motiva-
tion, designing blueprints for the "international persuasion of peoples," and gathering intelligence, techniques that could be used for good (in U.S. hands) or ill (in Communist hands). Although the Smithsonian Group predicted, with much satisfaction, that advances in these difficult areas would be realized, members also identified potential trouble spots. In particular, they noted that obstinate public opinion could be an obstacle to psychological research and development and admitted that "there will also be difficulty in finding solutions to these conflicts within the framework of democracy."[84]
Project Camelot, as it unfolded, would illustrate how accurate such anxieties were. Public perceptions and democratic institutions were, in the case of Camelot, big enough problems to cause the project's cancellation. They were not, however, big enough to stop, or even really slow, the forward momentum of Cold War psychology, based on the sturdy World War II worldview and two decades of military practice.
The 1962 Symposium on "The U.S. Army's Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research
A significant event, immediately preceding Camelot's launch, was a March 1962 conference, funded by the army's chief of research and development and hosted by SORO, which brought over three hundred social and behavioral scientists together in Washington, D.C. Never before had the armed forces "rolled out such a massive welcome mat for the professors."[85] There were many flattering mentions of psychological expertise and its military record, and generals and colonels repeatedly expressed much eagerness to be enlightened in the matter of counterinsurgency. "Recognition of the need for social science research within the military establishment," they assured their guests, "is quite widespread today."[86] Courses in military psychology, leadership, and human relations were, after all, on the required list at West Point; special warfare (a recently coined term for psychological warfare) had had its own school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, since 1952; and psychologically sensitive courses in counterinsurgency were being offered all over the world, in numerous languages, by the U.S. Army.
Military planners talked at great length, leaving little room for guesswork about what kind of ammunition they were looking for: "The kind of underlying knowledge required is the understanding and prediction
of human behavior at the individual, political and social group, and society levels. "[87] Prediction and "population control" were needs at the very heart of the counterinsurgency mission, and military planners took pains to make them explicit. Methods of controlling indigenous peoples, destroying Communist-inspired guerrilla movements, exploiting national psychological vulnerabilities, and predicting the potential for internal war (one of Camelot's goals) would be terribly useful. Methods of preventing insurgencies in the first place would be even better. Could experts manage to provide these sorts of technologies? For their part, the experts spent most of the conference listening and taking notes. Even the photographic record of the conference managed to exclude them.
In spite of these indications that military planners regarded them more as dutiful technicians than as coequal partners, fervent desire to be of use was much in evidence among the behavioral scientists who attended the conference, as was the particular mood of the Smithsonian Group and its representative, Charles Bray. Conference discussion was limited to the fine points of technical assistance. No one ever questioned either the counterinsurgency mission or the appropriateness of involving social and psychological experts in it. Attendees agreed that it was their job to provide the military with an objective "technology. of human behavior" and leave their own political convictions at home. Nevertheless, they did make clear assumptions about the value of the military's Cold War mission and the positive social contributions of military institutions themselves.[88]
Communism was "a malignant organism that grows and thrives on human misery—which reaches out its long tendrils in every field of human endeavor, seeking to strangle and destroy," according to Lieutenant General Arthur G. Trudeau, chief of research and development for the army.[89] On the other hand, as numerous participants pointed out, militaries around the world could—with U.S. aid—become constructive, nation-building forces. Like the benevolent railroad-building soldiers in the U.S. historical imagination, foreign militaries could become tile leading edge of the modernization process in the Third World, steering new states toward the stability that U.S. national interests required. The U.S. military, it went practically without saying, was "a direct, positive instrument for human progress," and the U.S. national interest was synonymous with freedom, prosperity, and social justice all over the world.[90]
Such themes made the World War II imprint evident enough, and numerous explicit references were also made to its relevance, often by attendees—like Leonard Doob, Morris Janowitz, and Elmo Wilson—whose own experience bridged the gap between world war and cold war.[91] But the spirit of World War II expertise was also quite evident among younger scholars who came to Washington at the invitation of the military, and they had absorbed postwar trends in the analysis of development and revolution. One of them, Frederick T. C. Yu, presented a national character-type analysis of Asian identity and Chinese communism. Unlike the Germans or Japanese in 1940, Asian personality had not yet deteriorated, under the toxic influence of Communist ideology, to the point of causing global crisis. It was, however, in serious psychological trouble and needed prompt attention. "Like our young Americans in their late adolescent years," Yu analogized, "people in the developing countries [in Asia] do not really know what they want to be. They are in the process of growing up. They are searching frantically for a purpose in life and a reason in the things they do, believe, and want. But they do not really know what they should do or want, except that, in a very vague way, they want to be strong, successful, great, happy and prosperous. They are confused."[92] If psychological experts could imbue U.S. policy with therapeutic powers, then the United States could help Asian states help themselves develop clear national identifies to replace the uncertainty that was causing so many problems. All the while, new states would accumulate "human motivation capital" that would be on our side in the event a counterinsurgency campaign became necessary.[93] Like wise and caring parents, "our responsibility is to help them grow, help them see and understand the meaning of things they wonder about. In short, to help them discover themselves."[94] The best therapy was a strong military. Armies represented "a sense of self-respect and self-assurance" to people who had long chafed under colonial rule and whose struggles to form independent states clearly required a psychological foundation of self-esteem.[95] The axiom that nation building was a unique military responsibility was a cornerstone of SORO director Theodore Vallance's thought as well and a position he championed long after the 1962 symposium. He always maintained that the Cold War had altered the DOD mission to the point that "the U.S. military establishment has a new functional emphasis: mediating changes in foreign cultures."[96] What could have spotlighted the importance of behavioral expertise more successfully
than the translation of military conflict into an endless series of opportunities for cultural design and mediation?
Each of the factors described in this chapter contributed something essential to the progress of psychological expertise and to the willingness of government officials to take psychology into account when it came to the design of U.S. foreign and military policy in the early Cold War era. That psychological researchers found a welcome home in the military establishment, winning financial support through the efforts of proponents like the Smithsonian Group, was important. That psychological and political theorists had something convincing to say about why Third World personalities were socialized into emotional and political states of underdevelopment, and how those flaws could be corrected to produce "developing" people, was also important. That the Cold War itself was so vulnerable to interpretation as a terrifying struggle for human emotional and intellectual loyalties—to be won or lost on the battlefield of the mind—was perhaps most important of all.
Each one of these historical threads is evident in the fascinating story of Project Camelot, which is described and analyzed in the next chapter. In Camelot's aftermath, psychology's political progress and its political consequences were clearer than ever.