By ERROL MORRIS
MARCH 27, 2014
This is the third installment of a four-part series.
3. A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
Wikipedia
Rumsfeld’s life is bookended by two major historical events, two surprise attacks — the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 when he was 9 years old and 60 years later, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rumsfeld wrote in Known and Unknown:
But he was back testifying before Congress several months after that memo was written — not for a post-mortem assessment of what had happened, but to plead for more money from Congress following the 9/11 attacks.
I sometimes remarked that the only thing surprising is that we continue to be surprised when a surprise occurs. In 1962, Harvard economist Thomas Schelling wrote a foreword to a book on Pearl Harbor that captured this idea perfectly. “We were so busy thinking through some ‘obvious’ Japanese moves that we neglected to hedge against the choice that they actually made,” [Schelling] wrote. “There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable.” I was so taken with his piece that I sent a copy to President Bush during our first month in office as well as to many members of Congress.[2]
This book by Roberta Wohlstetter and the foreword to this book by Thomas Schelling had been on Donald Rumsfeld’s mind years before he became President Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense in 1975. In his papers, there is a memo from Jan. 10, 1974, asking an aide to find the book in the library. He was then President Richard Nixon’s ambassador to NATO. And in March, 2001, as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, he sent a memo with the attached Schelling introduction to the members of the Joint Chiefs and to Carl Levin and John Warner, ranking Democratic and Republican members of the Armed Services Committee. Other members of Congress received a similar memo on Sept. 12, 2001. And it was sent again to the president on July 27, 2004 (during the Democratic National Convention).
The Rumsfeld Papers
In my interviews for my film The Unknown Known, I asked Rumsfeld about Wohlstetter’s book, but particularly about Schelling’s foreword — why it was important to him and why he described Pearl Harbor as “a failure of imagination.”
DONALD RUMSFELD: We didn’t know we didn’t know that they could do what they did the way they did it. We had people working on breaking codes. We had people thinking through, what are the kinds of things they might do? And, lo and behold, the carriers were able to — on a Sunday morning — get very close to Hawaii, launch their planes, and impose enormous destruction.
ERROL MORRIS: Was it failure of imagination, or failure to look at the intelligence that was available?
DONALD RUMSFELD: They had thought through a great many more obvious possibilities. People were chasing the wrong rabbit. That one possibility was not something that they had imagined was likely.
A quibble with words? Why imagination? There was a glut of intelligence, but would a more active imagination have prevented Pearl Harbor? Or to put it crudely, was Pearl Harbor a failure to imagine Pearl Harbor? Or 9/11 a failure to imagine 9/11?
I talked to Thomas Schelling, the author of the foreword to Wohlstetter’s book. Schelling is a legendary figure — a Nobel laureate, a professor at Harvard for over 30 years, one of the founders of the Kennedy School at Harvard, a game theorist, and an inspiration for the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Kubrick actually came to Schelling’s office at Harvard to discuss Schelling’s essay “Meteors, Mischief and War,” written around the same time as his foreword to Wohlstetter’s book. The essay is about accidental nuclear war. Schelling argued, we need “strategic forces that do not have to go off like a match in a fireworks factory when the lights start flashing.”[3] He was concerned with the possibility of a nuclear war started on faulty evidence or systemic bureaucratic failure. Schelling worried about how imagination might lead to war rather than how it might prevent it.
Schelling, now in his 90s, is retired. He stopped consulting for the government after Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970.[4]
THOMAS SCHELLING: Way back — early in his reign at the Pentagon — I got a call from Donald Rumsfeld’s secretary asking whether I would have lunch with him, and I said, “Sure.” And so we made a date, and I called back and said, “Is it just me or is it a group? Is there a topic we are going to discuss?” And she let me talk to his military assistant, who said that he was so interested in my foreword to the Wohlstetter book that he wanted to meet me. It turned out that the day I was to have lunch with him, they had to call it off, because he’d been called up on the Hill or something. And then the next thing was that September 11th happened, and everything changed. I ended up never having lunch with him.
ERROL MORRIS: But it was clear that he was interested in the foreword —
THOMAS SCHELLING: I’ve told graduate students — if they want to get famous by planning to write a book, don’t bother. Find a good book and write a foreword to it. Save yourself a lot of trouble. Anyway, it doesn’t altogether surprise me that Rumsfeld remembers the foreword —
ERROL MORRIS: I believe he was intending to quote you directly: Pearl Harbor was “a failure of the imagination.” The only problem is the quote does not appear in your foreword. It represents an interpretation on his part of what you wrote —
THOMAS SCHELLING: What did I say that was close to that?
ERROL MORRIS: The last sentence. You had provided an extraordinary laundry list —
Here is part of Schelling’s list. “Surprise, when it happens to a government, is likely to be a complicated, diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility, but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost. It includes gaps in intelligence, but also intelligence that, like a string of pearls too precious to wear, is too sensitive to give to those who need it. It includes the alarm that fails to work, but also the alarm that has gone off so often it has been disconnected …. finally, as at Pearl Harbor surprise may include some measure of genuine novelty introduced by the enemy, and possibly some sheer bad luck.” But Schelling’s foreword and Wohlstetter’s book are less about the failure of imagination, than something very different — systemic bureaucratic confusion, ordinary human distractions, and an overwhelming glut of information with no clear idea of what anyone should be looking for.[5] Blame isn’t heaped in any one place. Wohlstetter scrutinizes what seems to be the entirety of the public record and recounts and reconstructs failings at every level of the military and government.
THOMAS SCHELLING: I’ve actually got the foreword in front of me now. “The failure to anticipate effectively.” The U.S. very greatly anticipated a Japanese attack. I take what they failed to recognize was that the Japanese may have felt that bombing the U.S. fleet was a prerequisite to beating us in a war. And we didn’t anticipate that they could do something dramatic like destroying the battle fleet.
ERROL MORRIS: We also didn’t believe that they would do it —
THOMAS SCHELLING: My brother was a naval officer at the time. I asked him, if we had expected an attack on Pearl Harbor, would we have had the fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor? He thought about it and said, “Well, I don’t know what we would have done with it. We probably would have been more alert to the possibility of an attack, and moved the fleet out, if we saw carriers approaching, or something.” But whether this was a failure of imagination, I’m not sure. What happened on 9/11 was sufficiently implausible, but I won’t blame a lack of imagination. It demonstrated a capacity for disciplined planning, secrecy and working out how to commandeer some airplanes and what targets to aim them at, trusting that the fuel on board would make them a pretty effective firebomb.
ERROL MORRIS: And the analogy to Pearl Harbor —
THOMAS SCHELLING: As I read Roberta Wohlstetter’s book — I don’t think 9/11 is analogous to Pearl Harbor. The U.S. was very conscious of the likelihood of a Japanese attack. The only question was, had they thought about an attack on the U.S. fleet? I don’t think they credited the Japanese with being able to get aircraft close enough to catch us by surprise.
ERROL MORRIS: But her analysis inspired the foreword?
THOMAS SCHELLING: Roberta wrote the book as a RAND employee. RAND had to submit everything to the Air Force before outside publication. And when her manuscript was submitted to the Air Force, it was essentially confiscated. It was claimed that she didn’t have the clearance to possess her own book.
ERROL MORRIS: Really?
THOMAS SCHELLING: It was only after [President John F.] Kennedy was elected and a bunch of RAND people — including Charles Hitch, Kennedy’s assistant secretary of defense, former head of economics at RAND and Wohlstetter’s boss — got the Air Force to spring loose her manuscript, so she could publish it.[6] Then she asked me if I would write a foreword. I’d spent a whole year at RAND — the year ’58-59. And Roberta and I had become very close friends.
ERROL MORRIS: Do you remember what impressed you most about the book when you read it?
THOMAS SCHELLING: I remember a couple of things, like a notion that some intelligence is so highly classified that the people who need it can’t have access to it.
ERROL MORRIS: Well, it becomes a metaphor — if that’s the right term — for Roberta Wohlstetter’s book itself — a book so secret that she, the writer, was not allowed to be in possession of it.
Our attention was focused elsewhere. And we were not predisposed to believe that such an attack was possible. An early statement of this theme comes with Wohlstetter’s analysis of the radar evidence on the Sunday morning of Dec. 7, 1941. The radar was turned on. The Opana radar station was manned by two privates. At 7:02 a.m. “something completely out of the ordinary” appeared on the screen. They called the switchboard at the information center. The switchboard operator picked up the phone. Eventually a lieutenant (and officer in training) was notified, but there were no procedures in place to relay the information to higher authorities, and the inexperienced lieutenant explained away the radar event as likely caused by incoming American planes. Ultimately, the intelligence was ignored..[7] Ultimately, the intelligence was ignored.
This is one of my favorite themes. Believing is seeing. We see what we are prepared to see. The problem was not an absence of evidence. There was a glut of evidence. The problem was how to interpret it, how to see it.
ERROL MORRIS: Rumsfeld has many expressions that he’s fond of. He’s a source of endless aphorisms and apothegms. He says that weakness is provocative. And that’s another oddly suggestive expression. I wanted to ask you your thoughts about it as a game theorist.
THOMAS SCHELLING: “Weakness is provocative?”
ERROL MORRIS: Yes.
THOMAS SCHELLING: Meaning, it invites bullying or attack or something?
ERROL MORRIS: Yes.
THOMAS SCHELLING: I would say it can be. Back in the 1960s, there was a certain amount of talk about pre-empting a Chinese nuclear capability — before they had a recognizable ability to strike back. That was a case of weakness provoking thoughts. But it’s a little like, the Franco-Prussian War broke out because the Germans had artillery technology that the French didn’t yet have. The Germans estimated that within 10 years, the French would have artillery that could fire equally long distances, and that they would be wise to attack now, before France had stronger artillery capability. Weakness that is likely to become strength may invite questioning just in case we think there ever might be war — “Let’s do it while they’re weak.”
ERROL MORRIS: There’s weakness, and also the perception of weakness. But when you hear the phrase “weakness is provocative,” is it a universal principle?
THOMAS SCHELLING: No, no. Weakness can also be reassuring.
ERROL MORRIS: How so?
THOMAS SCHELLING: If a panhandler accosts me on a sidewalk, late at night, and there’s nobody around, if it’s clear that he’s weak or crippled or something, I’m not the least bit afraid of him, because it looks like he wouldn’t dare to start anything. But if he’s a foot taller than I am, broad and husky-looking, and asks me for a dollar, I not only want to give him a dollar, I’m afraid if I withdraw my wallet from my pocket, he’ll take the whole thing. If he’s weak, he’s no threat. I think we never worry about Mexico invading the United States because Mexico just hasn’t any such capability.
ERROL MORRIS: But isn’t at least Rumsfeld’s idea that if we display any kind of weakness, it will be an invitation for people to attack us?
THOMAS SCHELLING: When he talks about weakness, does he mean “weak” in terms of lack of resolve, or does he mean military weakness?
ERROL MORRIS: My guess is that it would be military weakness. When he was secretary of defense in the Ford administration, he was a proponent of ramping up the defense budget, etc., etc., etc. His argument is — by the appearance of strength, or actual strength itself, that the country is safer from an attack. It certainly didn’t prevent Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
THOMAS SCHELLING: I remember going way back, during the so-called Berlin crises of the late 1950s. It used to be argued that if the Soviets began to bluster about taking Berlin under full party control, that the United States should ramp up the defense budget, as a kind of warning, a display. It never appealed to me much, but I remember it being talked about. Even somebody like Herman Kahn [a Cold War theorist who studied the survivability of thermonuclear war] said, “If you can’t think of anything else to do, raise the defense budget.”
[1] Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, Penguin, 2011, p. 334.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Thomas Schelling, “Meteors, Mischief and War.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. XVI, No. 7, Sept. 1960.
[4] Robert Dodge, “Game Changer.” Harvard Kennedy School Magazine, Summer 2012.
[5] I looked through the Wohlstetter book for a passage on the role of imagination. It was not in the foreword, but perhaps it was discussed in the main body of the text. This is one of the few passages I came up with (p. 354):
It is interesting to observe now that Japanese and American estimates of the risks to the Japanese were identical for the large-scale war they had planned, as well as for the individual operations. What we miscalculated was the ability and willingness of the Japanese to accept such risks. As Ambassador Grew had said, “National sanity would dictate against such an event, but Japanese sanity cannot be measured by our own standards of logic.”
Our own standards, as we have observed them in military and State Department documents, reckoned the risks to the Japanese as too large, and therefore not likely to be taken. They were too large. But they were going to be taken. And we missed this apparently illogical connection because we did not include in our reckoning any consideration of the alternative of “gradual exhaustion,” the danger of encirclement and defeat without having struck a single blow. Our own standards of logic pointed to the easier British and Dutch targets, but the Japanese regarded the American-British-Dutch alliance as a firm one, which committed us to war if the easier targets were attacked. Our own naval standards assumed no more than two carriers for a single seaborne air attack, because we were accustomed to thinking in terms of our own capabilities. Even in the congressional hearings, as late as 1945, with the evidence of six carriers before them, naval witnesses often refer to four carriers because it was beyond the reach of imagination [my emphasis] that any naval power would risk its entire heavy carrier strength in one operation. Even if we had played out a Japanese war game, we might not have been able to project the daring and ingenuity of the enemy.
[6] Pearl Harbor, Warning and Decision, and the foreword by Thomas Schelling were first published in 1962, but a previous classified version was written for RAND, Signals and Decisions at Pearl Harbor, R-331 in 1958.
[7] Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford University Press, 1962, pp. 11-12.
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