E20_McDermott_mixdown2
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[00:00:04.34] SARAH BALDWIN: Paranoia, narcissism, espionage-- this potentially dangerous combination might evoke the current leadership in North Korea or Russia. It might also call to mind America's 45th president. A new book takes a look at the human factor in past intelligence failures and successes with important lessons for some of today's high stakes situations. From Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, this is trending globally. I'm Sarah Baldwin.
[00:00:39.27] We're joined today by Rose McDermott, David and Mariana Fisher university professor of international relations at the Watson Institute. She is an expert on political psychology, emotion and decision making, American foreign policy, and the genetics of political behavior. She's the author of five books-- the most recent of which is Intelligence Success and Failure-- the Human Factor.
[00:01:02.58] Last November, Rose talked to Trending Globally about the role of gender in the US presidential election, and we're delighted to have her again today. Welcome back to the podcast, Rose. Thanks for coming.
[00:01:12.52] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Thanks for having me, Sarah.
[00:01:14.37] SARAH BALDWIN: Your book, which you co-authored with, Uri Bar-Joseph, examines several historical cases in which decision makers either failed or managed to accurately estimate a strategic threat. Rose, you've said that the originality of your approach is that when you take the question of why states fail to meet the challenge of a surprise attack, you study not only the failures, which we're all familiar with more or less, but the successes-- what made a response successful or how a failure was turned around. So what do you mean by that? What's original about that?
[00:01:47.62] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Well, when we originally started working on the vast majority of the literature really talks about failures and surprise attacks-- Pearl Harbor being an iconic one but 9/11 being a really recent example. And my co-author and I were at an American Political Science Association meeting, and my dissertation advisor Robert Jervis who is at Columbia University was on a panel on Intelligence Reform. And he sort of tossed out that the real problem is that we don't have a good comparison.
[00:02:19.51] So if you just concentrate on what doesn't work, you actually don't know what does. And without the comparison, every time you do reform or every time you try to change things, you may often be throwing out the baby with the bathwater and not even realizing it. And I think when he said that it clicked simultaneously in both of our minds that this was the right way to do it-- to actually do comparisons to look at what successes look like and what failures look like so that you can do a comparison version of the Sherlock Holmes thing of the dog that didn't bark in the night. What is it that actually works to try and explore the differences so that going forward in contemplating new kinds of revisions or reforms, we can keep what works and then just try and change or revise or throw out what doesn't work without wholesale recreating the problem over and over where you fix some problems but you recreate other ones. And so the problem continues going forward.
[00:03:19.00] SARAH BALDWIN: And when you say reform, do you mean, for example, reforming the intelligence community like after 9/11?
[00:03:25.35] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, exactly.
[00:03:26.16] SARAH BALDWIN: Oh, OK, yeah, so military reform--
[00:03:28.32] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Oh sorry, no, I don't mean military reform. I really mean like after 9/11 when you had this commission and there were lots of different things where they said, well, the FBI wasn't working in concert enough with the CIA and the information from the field offices that said there were these people taking these flying lessons where they only wanted to take off, and they didn't want to land. And that information didn't get back to where it needed to get back to.
[00:03:51.69] And gee, a lot of the computers are really outdated. And what do we need to do to upgrade our Homeland Security at airports and so on? Those kinds of reforms and revisions of the intelligence community is really what I'm referring to.
[00:04:04.80] SARAH BALDWIN: It's how we use intelligence, intelligently.
[00:04:07.86] ROSE MCDERMOTT: And how the organizations are structured, not just CIA but Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency and all the various intelligence agencies that work for different divisions in the government. And one of the problems, of course, being that oftentimes there's not great coordination between those divisions.
[00:04:25.15] SARAH BALDWIN: And I do have a question about that coming up. But first, I wanted to get to some of the psychopathologies that you describe in the book. But even before that, let's start with Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and how Stalin treated the intelligence that he received since we're talking about how we deal with intelligence. You argue that human error-- the mistake of one person or the mistakes of one person-- was responsible for the death of about 2.6 million Soviet soldiers between June and December of that year. So how does this case study, once you go into in great impressive detail in the book, how does that case study show the role of one individual psychopathology in determining what amounts to a major historical world event?
[00:05:11.15] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yeah, that was one of the most fascinating aspects of this book to me when we were writing it. And in many ways, it's really the story of the leader of the Soviet Union at the time, Stalin. And what's fascinating about the case or was fascinating about the case to me is that the intelligence professionals, the spies, the people that were getting him information actually had it right.
[00:05:32.87] I mean, they were telling him you need to be concerned about Hitler. Hitler's going to invade. We have all this information from front line troops in the field that Hitler is amassing troops. It looks like he's going to invade. And Stalin just wouldn't believe it.
[00:05:50.30] And so part of what's interesting is that all the lower level people had it right. But because he couldn't trust, assess, believe the information he was being given, he didn't act on it in appropriate ways. And because of that, he didn't take the defensive actions that needed to be taken that wouldn't have necessarily prevented the invasion, but could have definitely reduced the amount of devastation the invasion caused or how far Hitler got before he encountered resistance-- certainly, not all the way to Moscow.
[00:06:27.59] And what's interesting is what I think really caused that and the argument that we make is his paranoia that he actually believed that there was a dedicated campaign of misinformation being given to him basically by the British through these channels to make him afraid of Hitler so that he would not continue his alliance with Hitler. And he thought that Churchill was really the one running this campaign. So even though there was no evidence that that was true, there was tons of evidence that was false. He basically just made a decision based on his own paranoia that he was being misled by literally hundreds of people about something that was true and sort of all on his own believe something that was false. And so he was believing it really because of his own paranoia, which is ironic.
[00:07:19.13] I mean, if he had been normally paranoid, he would have been normally paranoid of Hitler invading him. But because. He was kind of hyperparanoid, he sort of went one level and said, well, it can't be as obvious as it appears. It has to be even worse than it appears and in so doing, really, really compromised the defense and safety of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Second World War.
[00:07:42.35] SARAH BALDWIN: So these leaders aren't just robotic hyperrational. They're all on equal footing, and they're all sort of just advancing in the way that is most logical for their country. They bring their own psychologies.
[00:07:57.72] ROSE MCDERMOTT: They bring their own biases. And in many ways, I feel like one of the real contributions of this piece-- and that's actually why we have the subtitle of the book-- is not just the piece about comparing success with failure or where success is the novel part of the investigation. But also previous studies have really pointed to structural and institutional and organizational factors-- the classic case being Roberta [? Wolstedter's ?] analysis of Pearl Harbor where she says what's really going wrong there is that people had a really difficult time extracting the signal from the noise. There was just so much information that it was really difficult to pick out the relevant pieces to say, oh, what's really going on here is that the Japanese are going to attack Pearl Harbor.
[00:08:42.66] And that was, in many ways, a lot of the story of 9/11 too-- that there was all this information. And so how do you pull out the signal from the noise? And part of what we're saying is that may be the case in some instances. And certainly, I think that that's probably a reasonable story about Pearl Harbor, although I have a slightly different take on it.
[00:09:01.59] But in many of the other cases that we look in this book-- certainly, the case of the Soviet Union with regard to Stalin-- we also look at the US involvement in the Korean War in the '50s and really look a lot at MacArthur's decision making. And there was also somebody in the Israeli case of Yom Kippur War. [INAUDIBLE] where these people as individuals had phenomenal influence over the actual outcomes-- in each of these cases, quite negative, often risking the entire state that they were responsible for.
[00:09:36.87] And these were not structural problems. They were not organizational problems. They were not institutional problems. They were really problems of individual person's psychology, biases, and not just misperceptions in a kind of cognitive nonemotional way but really involving paranoia, narcissism, psychopathology Machiavellianism-- all these kinds of emotionally driven misperceptions.
[00:10:06.36] SARAH BALDWIN: Well, let's pause a minute just to define what you mean when you say narcissism and paranoia and how these traits manifest in a leader. And I'm guessing that, in some ways, leadership somewhat selects for people with those traits, maybe?
[00:10:22.38] ROSE MCDERMOTT: A lot-- I think that happens a lot. And part of the reason I think that happens is that people who don't have a desire to be in the public space don't tend to enter the public space. So if you don't want a lot of attention on yourself, you're not going to say, gee, I think I'll run for Congress.
[00:10:38.67] I really want people to pay attention to me, and I want to be in front of the TV and whatever. And so I think people who are narcissistic and like a lot of public attention and a lot of public acclaim like to put themselves out there. Now that's not the only reason people put themselves out there. Of course, there's lots of people who are dedicated to public service.
[00:10:58.38] There's also, I think, lots of people who are extroverts, and they just like people. And that's different than being narcissistic, but I think as you get to higher levels of public campaigning, especially in the modern age where the media is basically doing public colonoscopies on people on the nightly news. You have to have a pretty thick skin and a pretty robust desire to be in the public scrutiny Yeah public eye in order to put yourself through it and it may sound like it's a contradiction to say that nurses have a thick skin but part of the reason is that they reject any rejection.
[00:11:36.15] So if somebody says anything hostile, it's that person's problem rather than actually stopping and saying, hmm, is there some aspect of this criticism that may actually be accurate? Can I use this feedback to make myself better, stronger, more responsive, more helpful, and healthy people try to do that with constructive criticism. But narcissists tend to reject it.
[00:11:59.24] SARAH BALDWIN: So in some ways that, puts a little bit of the responsibility-- well, a lot of the responsibility-- on electors to the voting public to cast a vote for a nonnarcissistic leader who might be receptive to criticism and more sort of mentally nimble. Should we go to the voting booths looking for that?
[00:12:21.86] ROSE MCDERMOTT: I think it's a really good point and a really good question. I think that that matters in democracies. The problem is people like Stalin or Hitler or other people who have-- well, Hitler was actually democratically elected.
[00:12:33.47] But now people like Stalin, who are authoritarian leaders, they're not getting elected, and that's a different series of calculations. Or we're concerned currently with the leader of North Korea-- again, not a democratically elected leader, and so the people can't really have a say in that. But I definitely feel that in democracies it should be incumbent on citizens to think seriously about the personality characteristics of the leaders they elect. And sometimes that's seen as like an aside, oh well, what I really should care about is policies.
[00:13:03.23] And policies matter, but you should also really care about the character of the person because that will affect how they implement those policies or whether they implement those policies and how that comes into play. And so I think that that really is something people should pay attention to and care about when they vote, although again, it's not always the determinative thing. The other thing I'd say is if you are concerned about narcissistic leaders and you're in a democracy, think about running for office yourself. Think about really putting yourself out as somebody who wants certain outcomes or certain policies and who may not be as susceptible to flattery and other forms of manipulation.
[00:13:46.02] SARAH BALDWIN: Yeah, I guess it would be disingenuous of me to ask you with all this talk of paranoia and narcissism and conspiratorial turns of mind if anyone comes to mind because it's all sounding very familiar and not just coming from North Korea.
[00:14:02.82] ROSE MCDERMOTT: No, absolutely, and it's certainly been one of my big concerns about Trump since the beginning. I think that particular combination of narcissism and paranoia from our investigations in this book of many leaders-- that's the deadly combination. That's the combination where things just don't turn out well.
[00:14:22.86] SARAH BALDWIN: Did the timing of the publication of your book-- was it coordinated with--
[00:14:27.93] ROSE MCDERMOTT: In no way whatsoever-- that's what was so interesting about it. We started it really a number of years ago-- I'd say three or four years ago-- when there was no inkling of Trump being in the public space. And it just happened to be fortuitous that it came out right after the election.
[00:14:50.98] And we did not have Trump in mind when we wrote the book. The investigations that we did were really historical investigations of people that are essentially all long dead. And so we definitely wanted to draw lessons and extract lessons from history for leaders going forward.
[00:15:10.56] But it was not designed in any way, shape, or form for current leaders in the world environment, not just Trump. But I mean, you can think about the election in France with Marie Le Pen. There's these other people that-- certainly, Kim Jong-un, this particular combination that we discovered and we now really believe is very strongly associated with negative outcomes-- this combination of narcissism and paranoia.
[00:15:36.62] SARAH BALDWIN: So it would behoove a lot of people in office to read your book?
[00:15:39.77] ROSE MCDERMOTT: I would hope so.
[00:15:40.97] SARAH BALDWIN: Yeah, like what are the policy implications of your findings just in the world we live in?
[00:15:48.20] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Well, I think there's a number of different ones. Some of them are actually structural and organizational. So one of the things we talk about is how important it is to not just rely on technological information but to actually have human spies on the ground in other countries.
[00:16:06.54] So America, in particular, tends to rely very much on signals, intelligence, or telecommunications. We're always looking at metadata from phone calls or trying to get a hold of emails. And we think that that's really 100% of the information that we need to have. But as we all know from the case of bin Laden, when people are smart, they can circumvent that quite easily by using couriers and actually doing this really old school thing, which is talking to people in person, god forbid, and not everything gets mediated through your phone unlike kind of regular people in America. And so having signals intelligence may be useful but by no means should we deceive ourselves that that captures the entirety of what's going on in the world.
[00:16:53.11] And so countries that have spies-- the Israelis, the Russians, whatever-- often have a real advantage over the United States in terms of intelligence because we don't have the same kind of people on the ground. So that's one series of sort of policy reforms that we've put forward. The other is the point that you raised earlier Sarah, which is really encouraging people in democracy to think seriously about who they're voting for and why but it's not just, oh, this person agrees with me on health care. But do I really think this person is stable? Do I think they're going to be impulsive? Do I think that they're going to be much more concerned with their own personal appearance than with safety and security of their country? Are they more obsessed with their own status than they are with the safety and security of their country? I mean, you can think about that.
[00:17:39.40] The other thing which I've advocated for quite a while in an earlier book I did on presidential illness is that I think it's a good idea to have medical vetting of candidates prior to elections, and there's been some talk about back and forth about medical screening, especially around the time that Paul Tsongas ran for president, and he had cancer.
[00:18:03.09] And the idea was well, if he got elected, would he die in office? It's very difficult to think through the specific implementation of how do you pick the doctors and how many doctors should there be and should they be partisan in one way or another? But the other part of it, which I've advocated for a long time, is not just physical medical assessment but psychological assessment. Particular kinds of batteries-- it doesn't have to be everything, but there's a really good narcissistic battery out there.
[00:18:33.85] And when I've done experiments and I've administered these batteries, they're very funny. They're these forced choice things where you have to choose between items like, no one will care when I die, or autobiographies will fight for the right to tell the story of my life. And I look at these, and I think nobody is going to endorse any of these items. And then people do.
[00:18:56.22] And so you think, wow, OK, there's real variance out there in terms of how narcissistic people are, and you can find it out in ways where people kind of tell you. And paranoia maybe a little bit less straightforward, but you can still have it assessed in ways. And I really think that that's important. And to have standards where you say, OK, if this person who wants to run for president or senator or other high level office doesn't pass an x threshold, then they can't run.
[00:19:27.45] And to make those decisions not around any particular election, not around any particular president or candidate, but just objectively, OK, here's our standards. And anybody who doesn't meet it, they can't run. I doubt that I could get Congress to support something like that, particularly in the current environment.
[00:19:47.47] But I think it's actually self-protective because people like this can be very dangerous. They can start wars for not good reasons, and equally important, they can fail to protect the country when it's clear that there are indicators that certain defensive actions need to be taken I want to go back to just briefly the point you were making about human spies versus--
[00:20:15.49] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[00:20:17.11] SARAH BALDWIN: You also make the point in your book, which I hadn't really thought about before, which is that the American intelligence community has not been very good at being interested in understanding deeply other cultures, non-Anglo-Saxon cultures. Like you say, we have a lot of intelligence about Australia and Britain, but the rest--
[00:20:38.93] ROSE MCDERMOTT: They're not our biggest threats.
[00:20:40.28] SARAH BALDWIN: Right, right. I thought that point was really interesting when you talk about the human factor for good or for ill. And the other thing I thought was very interesting was in terms of policy implications when you talk about creating a more cooperative culture among the agencies like encouraging cooperation within the FBI but also between the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security. And I don't know how that can be done. But it's an interesting proposition.
[00:21:16.28] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yes, and I think both those things are challenges. So the first issue you raise about we have lots of intelligence from places where it's easy to get intelligence-- open democracies that are our friends
[00:21:28.89] SARAH BALDWIN: Speak English?
[00:21:30.03] ROSE MCDERMOTT: That speak English but that's not our biggest threat. And some of that like I said, it's not just that we don't have spies, but we don't have language skills. I think when we had the Iranian crisis when the hostages were taken in 1979, we had something like four people in the US government who spoke Farsi. I mean, it wasn't exactly four, but it was kind of like four. So it was it was embarrassing, shocking, appalling, but also dangerous because you don't have an ability to then to accurately communicate with your adversary.
[00:22:05.25] And if you can't communicate, then it's a lot easier to start dropping bombs and having a particular kind of controversy. So we don't have good language training. We don't have good cultural training. So are you really going to go into an Islamic Middle Eastern country with female military officers who basically are wearing the kind of attire that we find normal, and that they may find offensive.
[00:22:29.82] And we can have all kinds of political reasons why we think it's important for us to be the way that we want to be, and we can support that. But we need to understand there may be blowback from the local cultures. And I think we've done a better job since Afghanistan and Iraq of understanding the importance of that, partly because we've suffered the consequences of not paying attention to that.
[00:22:52.14] But again it may be more specific to the places we're fighting than the places that we may need to necessarily have information on in the future. So putting more attention and effort into that, not just the places we're fighting like Iraq and Afghanistan, but move beyond it to what's parts of Africa or other parts of the Middle East where we have concerns. I think that's a reasonable way to think about investing additional resources, especially the language training.
[00:23:23.49] The other point that you raise about coordination-- both within agencies and across agencies-- I think that 9/11, the investigation into 9/11 made a lot of people sort of realize how bad it was for the first time. And I think a lot of the jockeying between, say, the FBI and the CIA and so on was really, I think it's a function of bureaucratic politics and budget allocation.
[00:23:50.31] So if this agency is seen as handling this, then that might mean less money for me. And so I don't want them to get credit for what I'm doing because I want the money for me. And so some of this is really driven, I think, by budgetary considerations. And there are laws you know the CIA is supposed to be concerned with foreign things and the FBI with domestic things. But as we've seen, it bleeds together increasingly in the age of domestic homegrown terrorists.
[00:24:16.68] And so how do you think about how to allocate that? And so I think a lot of those coordination issues really are driven by territorial politics, especially around money. That part seems harder to overcome than the piece about interagency coordination where I think a lot more can be done literally at the level of upgrading computers and things like that so that you have more ability to engage in chat and things that would allow people to have more efficient and secure communications within the agencies because, I mean, sure you can do it on your phone. But you shouldn't.
[00:24:59.43] SARAH BALDWIN: You described Stalin and his psychopathology, but his was slightly different from MacArthur's. The issues there were different. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:25:10.90] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Yes, so MacArthur in the Korean conflict was facilitated by a small group of soldiers and men who had supported him for a long time through the Second World War. They were called the baton boys, and they were the people who started serving under him in Baton during the Second World War. And the most important was this guy named Willoughby who was really a yes man.
[00:25:40.76] I mean he would sort of tell MacArthur whatever MacArthur wanted to hear. He would filter out people who might say things that MacArthur didn't want to hear and in that way, did a real disservice because important information about the Chinese in particular that MacArthur should have heard was filtered out. And then when it was given to him, it was given to him, and he also assessed it in ways that were biased through the filter of his desires about what he wanted to be true.
[00:26:10.94] And I think also through his own belief about what he could accomplish-- so given his own past and what he perceived as his accomplishments, what I think others might see in a different light. He thought he had greater capacities than other people did and that he could accomplish things that other people couldn't. And he certainly had events like that in his past, but he had also had epic failures that sort of never came to light in a meaningful way. And so in his case, it wasn't just him.
[00:26:40.41] I mean there was a really [? folio ?] going on with Willoughby about reinforcing each other's beliefs in how awesome MacArthur was. And so bad information-- information that was contrary to their beliefs-- were really submitted to enormous scrutiny. And you can always poke holes in something. But if it was consistent with your beliefs, then it was subjected to no scrutiny whatsoever.
[00:27:04.91] So you have this very classic case in social psychology. They call it belief perseverance or biased assimilation where you have information that if it agrees with you, you just accept it. And if it disagrees with you, you subjected to an entirely different standard of evidentiary evaluation.
[00:27:24.12] So you don't actually perceive information equally. I think with Stalin, he had the boys in that regard much more paranoid than MacArthur in terms of he didn't have a close associate in the way that Willoughby was for MacArthur. He sort of made his own decisions and decided what he was going to do. And I'm not saying he didn't get information from other people, but ultimately, he was the one who was the totalitarian dictator in that regard. And so I think they were both definitely narcissistic, but Stalin had more of the paranoid edge than MacArthur.
[00:28:02.33] SARAH BALDWIN: It raises the interesting point that it's not just that one individual, but it's who that individual surrounds himself with.
[00:28:09.56] ROSE MCDERMOTT: That's right and that when you have a lot of yes men or sometimes women. Although in our cases, they're not women. I mean, I just say women because I was just reading this piece about Ivanka Trump last night in the The New York Times. And I see that as very much she's supposed to soften his image, and we're supposed to believe that she's going to make him care about women and childcare and all these kinds of things.
[00:28:35.00] And I think the article of the times is great because they're like, oh, her life is so tough because sometimes she doesn't have time for a massage. And she was so busy during the campaign that she couldn't meditate every day. So I think that there's ways in which you can surround yourself with people who really facilitate aspects of your leadership that may not necessarily help optimize decision making.
[00:29:02.26] SARAH BALDWIN: And it's good to keep in mind. It's not just we can focus on the reader.
[00:29:06.33] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Who people picked and sometimes they don't always pick it. Sometimes it bubbles up through a series of who survives interdepartmental or interagency politics or who is driven to have that kind of power. Willoughby you had a very strong personal attachment to MacArthur and felt like he owed him his life in some ways.
[00:29:29.03] And so there was a different level of protection there than you might get in other kinds of people that are just appointed two a cabinet. I mean, it was really born out of the fire and steel of combat that led to this particular kind of attachment. And I do think you get that a lot in combat. That's not unusual between the two of them, but I think the way that it then played out in the Korean War had more negative outcomes than other kinds of attachments that are like that.
[00:29:58.44] SARAH BALDWIN: Well reading you and hearing you speak and I've seen you give talks-- I've wondered more than once, are you-- I mean, you're a political scientist.
[00:30:09.61] ROSE MCDERMOTT: That's my union card.
[00:30:10.81] SARAH BALDWIN: Right you're also a historian and a psychologist. Sometimes you're a geneticist. You're so much about the human brain. That seems to me unusual in your field if your field really is political science.
[00:30:27.52] ROSE MCDERMOTT: My PhD is in political science, but I've always been interested in psychology, and I've always been interested in the psychology and decision making of leaders and elite decision making. And I guess I've branched out from there. My original dissertation work was all presidential archival work, and my book on presidential leadership was all presidential archival work. Most of this was archival work, although it was really done not only by my co-author or Uri Bar-Joseph, but we had individual people who helped us get records from both the Soviet archives-- well, now Russian archives and Korean archives-- and helped us translate it, including [? Yu Bin, ?] who is somebody that we went to graduate school with who helped us with the Korean case and then one of Uri's colleagues and I think students who was able to get some of the Russian documents.
[00:31:19.22] So the archival work is something that I've done on and off my whole career. And then because I was trained in psychology, did a lot of experiments, and then that branched off in different things. And I think all of this work is just driven by what I see as one of my great failings, which is this kind of insatiable curiosity. So I just kind of go down a lot of different kinds of rabbit holes and sometimes pop up and sometimes don't.
[00:31:43.21] But I think that it is as you very astutely identify a fascination with the human brain and how people think and perceive and how two people can see the exact same thing in fundamentally different ways. And then two really different people can see really different things in exactly the same way. And how is it that that possibility exists in the structure of a universal system like the brain that has infinite variety and trying to understand how that plays out, especially in social perception-- kind of never ceases to fascinate me. And there's a lot of crazy people out there. I
[00:32:28.18] SARAH BALDWIN: I think that's a quality, and I think it enriches the political science discussion. it humanizes it because we are talking about human beings. There wouldn't be political science without humans.
[00:32:39.46] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Well, but a lot of political science really likes to focus on institutions and organizations and really likes to exclude humans sort of sees these institutions and organizations as sufficiently constraining on humans. And sometimes in some domains it can be. But particularly when you have big wars and totalitarian leaders, there's a lot less constraint than we'd like to believe.
[00:33:01.66] And sometimes even if you are lacking constraint for half an hour, that's all it takes to launch a bunch of nuclear weapons. I mean, so you know there's a lot of issues that fascinate political science. Mostly its voting behavior. And I've always been fundamentally concerned with issues of violence and aggression and issues related to conflict. And that's been my primary concern.
[00:33:24.93] SARAH BALDWIN: And I haven't done so much-- I mean, I've done some but not so much on some of the institutional aspects of voting, for example. I just have one final question, and it's more about your personal history. You were born and raised in Hawaii, and your father was in the Navy.
[00:33:42.40] ROSE MCDERMOTT: That's right.
[00:33:43.81] SARAH BALDWIN: Was any of that in your mind as you're thinking about Pearl Harbor or is that part of why you became interested in conflict?
[00:33:52.57] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Oh, I'm sure it is. I mean, the book, in many ways, comes out of my experience with that. My father was stationed on a ship called the USS Snedden on December 7, 1941. So he was on a ship that was bombed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. He wasn't on the ship at the time.
[00:34:10.72] He was living up in [? Iaia. ?] But he definitely helped Fishman out of harbor for two days after the war. And I still have the telegram he sent to his family three days later saying he was still alive, and Pearl Harbor and Midway was in fact supposed to be the fourth case in this book.
[00:34:29.92] But because it was really less a story about individual failures and in many ways, a story of individual success about some of the cryptographers that made remarkable progress between Pearl Harbor and Midway and allowed the war to turn around in the Pacific. That ended up not being in the book and is a separate article in the Journal of Intelligence and National Security. So that case in there, which is also co-authored with Uri Bar-Joseph. But I think my interest in all things military came out of growing up in Hawaii and growing up with some with a father who had spent his career in the Navy and had been so profoundly affected by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and just understanding the profound impact it can have not just on individuals, but on entire communities and families and all those kinds of things.
[00:35:17.80] And I think we're seeing it in very enclaved ways in the current environment among the soldiers who have been affected by fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. And because we don't have a draft and it's a very, very restricted part of the American public, most of the American public is really sort of aware we're in a war but doesn't really pay the costs.
[00:35:39.10] And I mean, we pay the costs through our taxes, but we don't pay the personal costs. And the military families really do, and you know I think that we don't pay enough attention. And there's a lot of lip service to helping the veterans and so on. But I think that there's a lot less broad scale societal awareness of the consequences of war on individuals and their families.
[00:36:04.66] SARAH BALDWIN: Is your father alive?
[00:36:05.80] ROSE MCDERMOTT: No, no, he died in 1979. He died a long time ago.
[00:36:09.31] SARAH BALDWIN: I'm wondering what he would think of this book.
[00:36:12.37] ROSE MCDERMOTT: That's an interesting question. I never really thought about it partly because the part of it that I thought about him a lot was the chapter on Pearl Harbor, which isn't in the book. So in an odd way, I don't really think about it with regard to the book. The chapter that I wrote on Pearl Harbor, that one really was the hardest thing I've ever written because I had so many emotional issues around it. And I really got very stuck with it, and I had to call up my advisor in New York and say, how do you write something where you have a lot of emotional blockage? And he's like, you just do it. And I'm like, OK. But it was very hard because I had a lot of not just second guessing myself, but my father had an extremely strong lifelong belief that Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and that he allowed it to happen to bring the Americans into the war. And he held him personally responsible for a lot of his friends who died in the attack.
[00:37:08.47] SARAH BALDWIN: Forever?
[00:37:09.12] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Forever-- his whole life. And when they dedicated the Arizona Memorial in Hawaii, he went out when it was first dedicated. And he looked at the list, and he said, I knew him.
[00:37:22.46] SARAH BALDWIN: I knew him. I knew him. I knew him. And he never went back again.
[00:37:25.60] ROSE MCDERMOTT: So we had all these relatives who would come in and friends, and my mother would take everybody out to visit because he would never go back. And at the 50th anniversary of the Navy, actually, they had these coins that they press to give you like to honor and because he was dead at that time, I got it.
[00:37:42.45] And it was one of these things about honoring participation in the attack and so on. And it has a particular kind of legacy. But he really, really believed that this was something that was consciously done by the American government. And when I was going through the documents and I read all the documents-- and I read all the telegrams and everything-- I spent a really long time doing it.
[00:38:09.05] And I just don't think that's right. I think Roosevelt knew that there'd be an attack, and I think he knew pretty close when it was going to happen. He just didn't know where it was going to happen. And I think it's pretty clear that the information did not exist, so it wasn't even a signal-to-noise problem like [? Roberta Wolstedter ?] said. It wasn't that they had the information they couldn't extract it.
[00:38:28.60] It actually wasn't in the information that they had. So there were seven telegrams that if you had passed them together, you might have been able to figure out where it was, but it never said Pearl Harbor. It was just like shallow heart. There were lots of other places it could have been. And so it actually was not clear that you could have extracted the information. There's no way he could have known.
[00:38:56.49] SARAH BALDWIN: Do you wish you could tell him that?
[00:38:59.43] ROSE MCDERMOTT: I'm not sure he'd believe me. This is a pretty strong belief. It was just very difficult to come to a conclusion that he was wrong. No, but I do think he was wrong.
[00:39:13.17] SARAH BALDWIN: Rose, just to back up for a minute, how did you and your co-author Uri Bar-Joseph know each other?
[00:39:19.60] ROSE MCDERMOTT: We were in graduate school together. So we both went to graduate school in political science at Stanford. And we were taking a class-- not taking a class. We were both assigned to TA a class that Chip Lacker and Condi Rice were doing on US and Soviet national security policy.
[00:39:37.38] And we met each other in that class. He was one or two classes ahead of me at Stanford, but we became friends in that class and then sort of fell out of touch for probably a decade or so. And then he approached me at one of these American Political Science Association meetings and he had some ideas about some work that he wanted to do on intelligence that involve some psychological aspects. And he remembered and knew that I do political psychology.
[00:40:05.43] So we did a couple of sort of one-off articles. And then when we happen to be at this other American Political Science Association meeting where Bob Jarvis was on this panel, and we were both in the audience. And when he said that, we sort of looked at each other and thought, yeah, this is a project that we should do together as a more in-depth study. So we have done three or four additional articles on various aspects of intelligence and Intelligence Reform, a piece on Yom Kippur War for the Journal of Conflict Resolution, a piece on how to think about improving the vetting for intelligence analysts for foreign policy analysis, and then did this piece out of which came this book and an additional article in the Journal of Intelligence and Counter-intelligence on Pearl Harbor and Midway.
[00:40:48.87] SARAH BALDWIN: And where is he now?
[00:40:49.90] ROSE MCDERMOTT: He's at the University of Haifa.
[00:40:51.45] SARAH BALDWIN: OK, thanks. Ross, it's been so interesting to talk to you today. I do hope people in power will read your book and take appropriate lessons from it. And I hope you'll come back and talk to us again.
[00:41:02.62] ROSE MCDERMOTT: Thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.
[00:41:04.75] SARAH BALDWIN: Thank you.
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