Note 46 — APPENDIX Military PsyWar Operations, 1950-53

New insights into the nature of the Soviet antagonist were presented by three related monographs originally prepared inside RAND Corporation, the research facility which often works with the U.S. Air Force. Nathan Leites, The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York, 1951), digests Soviet fundamentals of international behavior. Margaret Mead's Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (New York, 1951) applies anthropological and psychiatric methods of analysis; this book, to the military or general reader, should be prefaced by reading her distinguished work, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, which is now available in an inexpensive, paper-bound reprint (Mentor Books, New York, 1952). Philip Selznick makes the point that organization is itself a Communist power-achieving instrument in his The Organizational Weapon (New York, 1952), the third of the RAND group. Lt. Col. William R. Kintner, a Regular Army officer, prepared the challenging study of the specific military content of Communist thinking in The Front is Everywhere (Norman, Oklahoma, 1950). Among the many good recent books about the Communist challenge, R.N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism (New York, 1951), is outstanding for its dispassionateness while James Burnham's The Coming Defeat of Communism (New York, 1951) is a ringing appeal to our side to meet the challenge. Stefan T. Possony, in A Century of Conflict (Chicago, 1953), presents the most coldly damning and most far-ranging critique of Communist operations which this writer has seen. Willmoore Kendall rendered Americans a service with his careful translation, editing and introduction of A. Rossi, A Communist Party in Action (New Haven, 1949), while Bob Darke, in a British counterpart, gives a less intellectual and much abbreviated description of the British Communist set-up and operations in The Communist Technique in Britain (London, 1952). Communist revelations of "capitalist" conspiracies which tell more about the haunted, anxious, nasty minds of the Communists than about our own operations are, among others, L. Natarajan, American Shadow Over India (Bombay, 1952), and Jean Cathala, They are Betraying Peace (Moscow, 1951).