In a particularly Viner-esque passage, Brodie responded: “If change is to be effected to correct an injustice, or to rectify disequilibrium, it necessarily follows that states will find themselves called upon to make material concessions without receiving any material compensation, which they cannot be expected to do willingly…. Are we to expect the state yielding its territories to be entirely appeased by the proud contemplation of the generosity of its contribution to world order? These are questions which cannot be glossed over. If the problems they entail cannot be satisfactorily solved, we need concern ourselves no further with the idea of peaceful change.”
Brodie absorbed from the University of Chicago two great lessons: that political change in international relations is likely and, therefore, so is war; that there are ways to reduce the chance of war, but short of drastic and unprecedented changes in the distribution of global power, a world government is destined to remain a feckless and ephemeral vehicle. These were new lessons in the study of politics in America, and their impact would be deeply felt when, a few years later, Brodie began to ponder the consequences of the atomic bomb.
It was 1939, Brodie was a star student, but he did have a wife to support (he’d married Fawn three years earlier, before entering graduate school). He was writing a dissertation about the impact of naval technology on nineteenth-century diplomacy and it would no doubt be lauded by his professors. But then what? Hardly any universities in the United States had room for a teacher with this peculiar specialization.
On September 1, 1939, fortune struck, in a sense. Hitler’s invasion of Poland marked the beginning of a world war unprecedented in scope, destruction, horror and conflagration; but it also launched the career of Bernard Brodie. The job market would now be considerably brighter for a smart young scholar who knew a great deal about the nature and the machinery of warfare.
A year later, his doctoral dissertation complete, Brodie wrote to his mentor, Quincy Wright: “As you already know, the skies have finally opened for me, and both my wife and myself are thrilled no end at our unexpected good luck.” Wright had strongly urged his old friend Edward Mead Earle of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to take Brodie on for a year as a research fellow. Earle read Brodie’s dissertation, was impressed, arranged for Brodie to win a Carnegie Corporation fellowship of $1,800, and suggested that the Princeton University Press might publish the dissertation if Brodie were to write an additional chapter on naval inventions of the early twentieth century for topicality.
Brodie felt very much at home in Princeton, especially with his sponsor, Ed Earle. Like Quincy Wright, Earle involved himself in the study of war. More like Brodie, he was mainly interested in strategy and military history. Earle was just beginning to organize a project on the evolution of strategic thinking. The result, published in 1943, was Makers of Modern Strategy, a collection of twenty-one essays by various scholars on “Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler,” the standard textbook in the field for the next fifteen years.
From Earle, Brodie learned that strategy is “not merely a concept of wartime but an inseparable element in statecraft at all times,” that military policy must be firmly linked with national politics and foreign policy. “The truth of the matter,” wrote Earle in a 1940 article that Brodie marked up with underlinings, brackets and check marks, “is that, in a democratic society, it is imperative that we have the widest possible discussion of military problems, conducted on the highest possible plane.” Most important was “a long-term program of research and, ultimately, of teaching which will enable the United States in times of peace as well as in times of crisis and war to build up a body of knowledge, and a corps of scholarly experts who can help in the formulation of public policy and who can contribute to an understanding of the military problems and the military power of the nation.” Brodie would draw inspiration from that passage for years.
Brodie made a fine impression at Princeton. The Ford Foundation awarded him $200 to do research on the sociological consequences of peacetime military inventions. And Nathan Leites, a scholar at Princeton with whom Brodie would become close later in life, urged him to write a paper for the “Public Policy Pamphlet” series on the strategic consequences to the United States of a German victory over Britain. Brodie was following Wright’s footsteps in his work on the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.
Brodie was also checking over the galleys of his revised-dissertation-turned-book, to be called Sea Power in the Machine Age. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought America into the war—and created a fair demand for books about sea power that the Navy could store on board its ships. Sea Power in the Machine Age was just rolling off the presses, and the Navy instantly snatched up 1,600 copies—in those days, a best seller by most university-press standards.
By this time, thanks largely to recommendations from Ed Earle, Brodie was teaching in the political science department at Dartmouth College. He titled his first course “Modern War Strategy and National Policies,” the outline for which took several leads from his training at Chicago. The topics of the lectures included: ‘The politics of power,” “Pressures short of war,” “War as a continuation of policy,” “Ubiquity of war in the modern state system,” “The causes of war,” “The meaning of war,” “The quest for ‘national security,’” “The diplomacy and legalisms of war,” “Economic warfare.” As Brodie wrote in a letter to Wright, he was trying to integrate in such a course the disciplines of anthropology, geography and economics—precisely the Chicago approach.
Meanwhile, the Princeton Press was so thrilled by the success of Brodie’s book that it commissioned him to write another, A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy. By the time it appeared in 1942, thousands of students were pouring into the U.S. Navy’s revitalized Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. In early October, the Navy ordered 15,000 copies of the book for its ROTC courses. Bernard Brodie, who had never seen an ocean much less been on a battleship, was coming into a sort of fame as one of the very few American civilians making a name for himself in the realm of contemporary strategy.
Brodie’s appointment at Dartmouth was coming up for review in the spring of 1943, and the political science department—much more in the stodgy American tradition than Brodie had been accustomed to at Chicago or Princeton—chose not to renew. College dean E. Gordon Bill wrote Brodie: ‘There is a rather unanimous feeling in the Department of Political Science that you are too much of a specialist and, in fact, too big a man in your field to fit into any future plans of the Department… as they are now being envisioned.”
Even before receiving this rejection slip, Brodie had taken a leave of absence from Dartmouth to enlist in ordnance school at the Navy Yard in Washington, and by March gained a job at the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance. That fall he was promoted to full lieutenant, and in November got transferred to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, where he wrote “Combat Narratives,” short books distributed as confidential documents to all fleet officers describing various campaigns in the war. He served also as chief ghostwriter of the King Report, the biannual statement of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J. King.
Good writers were hard to come by, so the Navy also assigned Brodie tasks in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Together with a wild Hungarian named Ladislas Farago, who would later author several popular war biographies and adventures, Brodie wrote propaganda tracts that were broadcast to German U-boats in an effort to get their crews to surrender or be less aggressive. Some were effective. One of the first requests that many captured U-boat crewmen made upon surrender was whether they could meet “Captain Norden,” the name used by the man reading the Brodie-Farago scripts.