IF THEN

An in-depth history of “Cold War America’s Cambridge Analytica.”

A staff writer for the New Yorker and Harvard professor, Lepore knows how to spin out a winning historical study. Here, she dives deep into matters that have seldom attracted scholarly attention, delivering a story that hinges on the discovery, in the late 1950s, that computers and languages such as FORTRAN, based on an endless series of “IF/THEN” statements, “an infinity of outcomes,” could be used to gauge and influence voter preferences. The Simulmatics Corporation melded the worlds of Mad Men advertising and high-tech geekery of the UNIVAC set, leveraging what would eventually be called artificial intelligence to sway campaigns and elections. Among other achievements, the company “claimed credit for having gotten John F. Kennedy elected president.” Lepore’s narrative features some unlikely players, such as the novelist Eugene Burdick of The Ugly American fame, who began his professional life as a political scientist—though one who really wanted to be James Bond. The other principals of Simulmatics were cynical, hard-drinking men whose marriages dissolved with distressing regularity but who believed in the unerring power of numbers. Founded in 1959, Simulmatics went bankrupt just a decade later, as Lepore deftly shows, its faith in numbers led it to plot bombing runs and body counts in Vietnam, “waging a war by way of computer-run data analysis and modeling.” The company even attempted to do probabilistic forecasts of when and where race riots would occur. That was all heady stuff back in the age of Robert McNamara and the RAND Corporation, but it didn’t play well toward the end. Still, as Lepore also convincingly demonstrates, the work of Simulmatics paved the way for later manipulators of psychology and public opinion such as Facebook. As she writes of those heirs, the founders of Simulmatics “would have understood, even if they could only dream about its gargantuan quantity of data or the ability to run simulations in real time, dynamically.”

A fascinating, expertly guided exploration of a little-known corner of the recent past.