The numbers in each matrix box reflect a set of values that each player holds. Even in the simple Prisoners’ Dilemma game, it is difficult for Player A to formulate strategy unless he knows the values of Player B. If B makes few distinctions between spending half his life in jail and all his life in jail, or if spending only a year or two in jail is practically as decent as being let free, then Player A would play a different strategy from the one played under the assumption that both sides had the same values.
In short, Williams realized that if game theory were to grow and have true relevance to economics problems or international conflict, and if RAND were to lead the way in this intellectual movement, then RAND would have to hire social scientists and economists who could study the “utility functions” of consumers and the actual behavior and values of various nations. The mathematicians, who certainly know nothing of such things, could then incorporate their findings into the matrixes of game theory.
So it was that John Williams—through the combination of Olaf Helmets suggestion and his own fascination with game theory—proposed that two new divisions that would broaden the range and scope of RAND be created, one for social science and the other for economics. At first, Collbohm failed to see much use in having such divisions, nor could many of the RAND scientists, especially the engineers, to whom the social sciences represented something soft and unscientific. But Williams was brilliant, no doubt about that, so Collbohm listened, became convinced and agreed to set up a meeting in Washington with RAND’s immediate Air Force boss, General Curtis LeMay. Attending the meeting were Williams, Larry Henderson, LeMay and one of his aides, General Tommy Power.
LeMay initially scoffed at the idea, but Williams patiently explained his idea and eventually won approval for his departments. The task now was to find someone who could staff them. Allen Wallis, a friend of Williams’ from Applied Math Panel days and now an economics professor at Stanford, suggested that he get in touch with a fellow named Leo Rosten.
Rosten was leading one of the most varied careers in America. He later acquired fame as the author of such books as The Joys of Yiddish, Captain Newman, M.D., and the best-selling novel The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Rosten had been trained in political science and economics, mainly under Jacob Viner, at the University of Chicago (where he and Wallis were classmates) and the London School of Economics. Shortly after graduating, he was awarded one of the first fellowships granted by the Social Science Research Council. After that, he moved to Beverly Hills and, under the name Leonard Ross, wrote screenplays for Hollywood studios.
When the war broke out, Rosten joined the Office of War Information and supervised analyses of public opinion, enemy morale, how to deal with enemy interrogation if captured, the sociology of Nazism and other aspects of psychological warfare. But his most important position, taken mostly at his own initiative, was key point of liaison between Washington and Hollywood, convincing the government to use the expressive medium of the movies to educate the public on what the war was all about, and persuading studio executives to join the effort as well. Dozens of talented screenwriters and cinematographers joined the Signal Corps’ film unit, making training films for soldiers and aircraft companies and shooting battle scenes of the war itself for documentary shorts.
Rosten also got Walt Disney to make animated propaganda and instructional films. Disney had refused all previous efforts to get him involved in government projects, but he liked Leo Rosten, the only intellectual he knew who had not criticized Disney for making movies that frightened small children. Disney’s grandest war film was Victory Through Air Power, an extraordinary display of Giulio Douhet’s theories of air power captured in animation. The climax was powerfuclass="underline" Japan becomes a monstrous octopus, its gigantic tentacles unfurled across the Pacific; American B-29 bombers turn into bold eagles, spitting out hundreds of bombs, sinking the octopus to the depths of the ocean floor.
Rosten seemed the perfect man to help coordinate the beginnings of a RAND social science division. He could write well, he had been trained in the social sciences, he had wartime experience, worked with propaganda and public opinion, knew civilian and military officials in Washington, and had contacts with the aircraft industry. Rosten agreed to come work for RAND part-time, joining the mathematics division until the social science unit was established.
By day, Leo Rosten was writing a screenplay called The Velvet Touch, a murder mystery slated to star Rosalind Russell. When night fell, Rosten worked on the psychological and political uses of an earth-circling satellite for Project RAND. Nobody in Hollywood knew anything about the nocturnal side of Rosten’s life—not his agent, not his studio, not the stars or producers or directors with whom he worked all day.
Meanwhile, along with a logician in the math division named Abraham Kaplan (who would later write one of the seminal books on logical exposition), Rosten was also drawing up a list of social scientists who might be invited to a conference that RAND was planning to hold. The conference was John Williams’ idea. The purpose was to gather together some of the nation’s most promising, if not already prominent, social scientists, to discuss how they might apply the techniques of social science to problems of national security.
In August 1947, Rosten and Williams traveled from Santa Monica to New York by train. (Williams, for all his derring-do as a road speedster and for all his futuristic visions of intercontinental missiles and interplanetary travel, was deathly afraid of airplanes.) For the next few days, bright young professors from Columbia, Princeton, Yale and other top-notch universities from around the area came to be interviewed by Leo Rosten about a social science department at some place most of them had never heard of before called Project RAND.
Rosten had already decided on whom he wanted as director of the social science division, a German refugee named Hans Speier. Rosten knew Speier from the Office of War Information, where Speier had worked in the overseas branch of the propaganda policy administration. Speier had come to the United States from Germany in 1933 and joined the sociology department at the New School for Social Research in New York, often called the “university in exile” because of all the German refugees who taught there. Speier worked on a Rockefeller Foundation project analyzing totalitarian propaganda and, during the war, published a widely read book on German radio propaganda. Speier was somewhat shy and self-effacing, but he matched Rosten’s conception of what kind of person should be leading the new division at RAND.
Meanwhile, John Williams was tracking down a few people himself. For the director of the new economics division, Williams was drawn to Charles Hitch. In 1947, Hitch was settled and comfortable teaching economics at Oxford, and was spending the summer at the University of São Paolo in Brazil, when Williams tracked him down and invited him to a RAND Conference of Social Scientists, to be held in New York from September 19 to 24.
Hitch was instinctively attracted to the idea. During the war, he had done OR work in an Anglo-American section of the OSS called Research and Experiments Department Number 8 (or RE-8, for short), under the direction of RAF Wing Commander Duncan Dewdney, who had been an oil engineer before the war broke out. Housed in wooden shacks in the small village of Princes Risborough, twenty miles east of Oxford and not far from RAF headquarters at High Wycombe, RE-8 was in the business of assessing the effects of the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. They were given photographs of roof damage taken from airplanes flying directly over the bomb targets after each raid. RE-8 analyzed the photos, used various statistical techniques to calculate the effects of the bombing on the German war economy, civilian casualties and enemy morale, and then filed reports to the RAF and the United States Eighth Air Force stationed in England.