If Then

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

Jill Lepore (Liveright, 2020)

The Simulmatics Corporation existed for only eleven years, from 1959 to 1970; it absorbed large amounts of money from the Democratic Party and the Defense Department, but at the end, its 'automatic simulation' business went abruptly out of fashion, and it dissolved in bankruptcy. Yet this shoestring operation was involved, or implicated, in several of the most significant developments of the decade. "It's as if Simulmatics had left behind not a narrative of the decade but a box of punch cards waiting to be decoded, a cryptic chronicle of the unmaking of American politics."

The computer image is perfectly apt, because the first big project the corporation undertook was to build a computer model of the American electorate, for purposes of testing out Democratic positions for the 1960 election. Using Gallup and Roper polls from the preceding decade, they sorted the voters into 480 types, by gender, race, religion, party, and economic circumstance; these types could then be correlated with voting results from the same years. They made their first report to the Adlai Stevenson campaign, emphasizing the importance of black voters in the election, and suggesting that the party "could succeed in winning back black voters who'd defected to the GOP only by taking a stronger position on civil rights. It might not have seemed to require a team of behavioral scientists, an IBM 704, and $65,000 to make this case, but, arguably, it had."

The Democrats were in transition from the age of Adlai Stevenson, a reluctant candidate who could be nominated only in a party convention, to the age of Kennedy, whose advantage came from aggressive campaigning in the primaries. When Kennedy took the nomination, Simulmatics followed. They "recommended that Kennedy confront the religious issue head-on, not to avert criticism but to incite it." By making the issue salient, Kennedy could draw the sympathy of other religious minorities. Again, you might not have needed a simulation to see this, and there's no way to know what difference it really made.

It is hard to remember what a novelty this use of computers was. (Simulmatics didn't actually own a computer yet; they rented time on one of the few big IBM machines in New York City.) Was it cheating, in some way? Unethical, or just too clever by half? But from that day to this, the capacity to predict, and target, voter behavior has increased at the same dizzying rate as computer speed itself.

The Simulmatics Corporation was actually a group of men with widely varying personal assets: Ed Greenfield was an advertising man, handsome and charming–"and like all ad men, he sold nothing so well as himself." Eugene Burdick was a political theorist, with a successful career in fiction on the side; Ithiel de Sola Pool was a quantitative behavioral scientist who had worked in the Pentagon. There was a computer wizard, Alex Berstein, and a mathematical genius called Wild Bill McPhee. Lepore lets us into their backgrounds, their marriages, and the other places their work took them.

For Ithiel de Sola Pool, that was Vietnam. The Pentagon hired Simulmatics to try to quantify the winning of hearts and minds. Pool was a dedicated anti-communist, but the project was farcical from the start. The behavioral scientists were asking the wrong questions, by means of bewildered translators, of people who had no reason to trust them. Seldom has 'garbage in, garbage out' been a more appropriate image.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General William Westmoreland, assisted by the RAND corporation, had established a way of thinking based on numbers and more numbers. "Vietnam would be the test of McNamara's policy, and of RAND and Simulmatics' behavioral science: decision by numbers, knowledge without humanity, the future in figures. It would fail. It would also endure. In the twenty-first century, it would organize daily life, politics, war, commerce. Everything."

This book is not comforting, but it sure does explain a lot. It's bad news, but good information.