Stardate 20040209.1529

(Captain's log): The majority of the email I receive responds to recent articles, but occasionally I get mail about far older posts. I find myself wondering why, for example, Theodore felt the need to send this:

Mars has as much 'Land area' as the continents of the earth combined. Your comparison is for the moon.

That seems to have been about this, an essay I wrote more than three years ago. It's not just that it is really old; even if I was wrong, it doesn't affect the argument I made. (If anything, it strengthens it.) Why does anyone feel the need to correct a minor point which isn't even germane?

I couldn't say, but I receive such nitpicking letters all the time, about new posts and old ones.

Ordinarily I don't respond to anything that dusty, but today I also received the following letter:

Who was Marshall to say that keeping our decryption of Japanese codes secret was more important for US national security than who won the Presidential election in 1944?  I have always felt that this incident was at best an example of abuse of power on Marhall's part, and, at worst, an attempt to keep the military brass and FDR from paying the price for the strategic failure (if that's what it was) at Pearl Harbor.

Similarly (and I las week gave Bush $20), I think that no military secret could possibly be as vital as the outcome of the Presidential election to our national security. We voters have to make the right decision, and no official should use military necessity to keep potentially vital information from us in making that decision. 

Intelligence successes, however brilliant, are minor compared to the strategic chocies made by elected leaders.

Michael S. Kochin
Visiting Associate Professor (2003-04)
Department of Political Science
Yale University

As with that other letter, my first reaction on reading this was, "What brought that up now?" Sometimes when I get letters like this I'm not even sure what on my site they're responding to, and quite often there's no way to determine how or why someone stumbled onto whatever old post it was that inspired comment.

But in this case I was able to figure it out from a secondary Instalanche in my referrer logs: Glenn Reynolds linked to this post by Ed Driscoll, which appeared just above another Driscoll post in the same archive, which included a link to this post of mine from last November, which apparently inspired Professor Kochin to write to me.

As I said above, I usually don't respond to such mail, but this particular one got the following reply:

>Who was Marshall to say that keeping our decryption of Japanese codes
>secret was more important for US national security than who won the
>Presidential election in 1944?

He was US Army Chief of Staff and effective leader of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He was held in the highest regard by members of both parties at the time, and there is no justification for any accusation that he was attempting to cover up a failure by the Roosevelt administration. Any accusations of that kind says far more about the accuser than it does about George Catlett Marshall.

I'm sorry, but I must be blunt. I consider your question and the general tone of your letter to betray gross ignorance regarding the facts. In the off-chance that you're interested in learning more, I recommend three books which should be available in Yale's library:

The CodeBreakers, by David Kahn
Bodyguard of Lies, by Anthony Cave Brown
American Magic: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan, by Ronald Lewin

Any idea you might have that American victory was inevitable and that revelation of that kind of information would have had negligible effect should be dispensed with.

>Intelligence successes, however brilliant, are minor compared to the
>strategic choices made by elected leaders.

Any student of military history would find that statement totally ludicrous. Kahn's book lists a myriad of cases where the course of history was changed -- or prevented from being changed -- by successful intelligence.

I considered listing a few relevant examples (e.g. the way that intelligence foiled an assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth I in the early years of her reign) but decided it was pointless.

We engineers have a saying: A man whose only tool is a hammer sees the entire world as nails needing to be pounded. I can't say that I'm surprised to see a professor of Political Science making the claim that the decisions of political leaders are exclusively responsible for establishing the course of history, and that nothing else mattered.

I'm deeply bothered by such a claim from