Hans Speier

Hans Speier (February 3, 1905 to February 17, 1990) was a German sociologist who emigrated in 1933, helped found the Graduate Faculty (the University in Exile) at the New School for Social Research, co-directed a Rockefeller-funded study of Nazi radio propaganda, and then moved through the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, the Office of War Information and the U.S. Department of State into the Rand Corporation, where he headed the Social Science Division from 1948 to 1960. He sat on the State Department's Project Troy panel in 1950 and 1951 and on the 1955 Quantico panel convened by Nelson Rockefeller, and he drafted the plan that became the Ford Foundation's Behavioral Sciences Program and Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.¹

Berlin and Heidelberg

Hans-Heinrich Adolf Ludwig Speier was born in Berlin to Adolf Speier, an insurance executive, and Anna Persson (spelled Person in one account). He sat the Abitur at the Helmholtz Realgymnasium in Friedenau, worked as a bank apprentice at Sachs, Warschauer and Company, and from 1926 studied economics and sociology at the University of Heidelberg under Emil Lederer and Karl Mannheim, becoming a founding member of the Mannheim circle there. Through Karl Jaspers, who advised him in philosophy, he knew Hannah Arendt and Dolf Sternberger; in 1925 he met the exchange student Talcott Parsons, who later vouched for him to the American government.²³

He took his doctorate under Mannheim on April 19, 1928, with a dissertation on the philosophy of history of Ferdinand Lassalle. Lederer placed him as an analyst in the Berlin office of Rudolf Hilferding, then finance minister, and he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928 or 1929. He married the pediatrician Luise (Lisa) Griesbach, who was Jewish, on August 30, 1929; she lost her post in Berlin's welfare office in 1933.⁴

From October 1928 he edited for the Ullstein Verlag in Berlin, and from 1931 he lectured in political sociology at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik under its director Ernst Jäckh. He also worked for Lederer as editor of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik and lectured to young Social Democrats on the history of the German parties. The Hochschule was financed in part by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, and colleagues there included Sigmund Neumann, Albert Salomon, Hans Simons and Franz Neumann.⁵⁶

The University in Exile

The Propaganda Ministry seized the Hochschule in April 1933 and dismissed Speier. That summer Lederer, then in London, wrote asking whether he would help create a University in Exile at the New School; Speier carried contracts between London and Berlin to prospective members, reached New York on September 15, 1933, and entered the United States as a non-quota academic immigrant.⁷ Alvin Johnson, the New School's president, had raised $120,000 from the philanthropist Hiram Halle to fund fifteen professorships of $4,000 each. The ten founding members were Karl Brandt, Gerhard Colm, Arthur Feiler, Eduard Heimann, Erich von Hornbostel, Herman Kantorowicz, Lederer, Speier, Max Wertheimer and Frieda Wunderlich.⁸

Speier was the first editor of the journal Social Research. With Alfred Kähler he edited the 1939 collection War in Our Time, and the Graduate Faculty produced the first English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1938 and 1939, the edition later used by the Office of Strategic Services and the OWI.⁹ He became a US citizen on April 20, 1940.¹⁰

Research Project on Totalitarian Communication

The Research Project on Totalitarian Communication began work on April 1, 1941, at the Graduate Faculty under the co-directorship of Speier and the Viennese psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, who had run an analysis unit on German broadcasts for the BBC in London. The preface to its 1944 book states that the project was "supported by one of the large foundations" and was assigned "to develop methods for the study of enemy propaganda and to train American social scientists for prospective government work in this field." It worked from the BBC Monitoring Service's restricted Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts and from documents obtained through John Salt, then deputy director of the BBC's New York office, and its research papers went "almost exclusively to government agencies in Washington, London, and Ottawa."¹¹

The Rockefeller Foundation granted the project $15,960 in March 1941 and a further $19,000 in 1942. Alvin Johnson housed the staff in rooms at the New School. The Rockefeller Foundation also funded Harold Graves's Princeton Shortwave Listening Center and Harold Lasswell's Experimental Division for the Study of Wartime Communications at the Library of Congress, and the project brought Speier into contact with Lasswell's division and with the Committee for National Morale. The proposal Speier and Kris submitted to the foundation in late 1940 described the project as a way to train "American social scientists for prospective government work in this field." Speier's own chronology describes the project as financed for two years "for training of Rockefeller Research Fellows and study of classified British materials." Kris's papers at the Library of Congress include a Rockefeller Foundation correspondence file for 1940 to 1952 and the project's research papers for 1941 to 1944. The project's roster of twenty-four named staff, its eight research papers and the 1944 book are set out on the project's own page.¹²¹³

The Graduate Faculty as a whole supplied more than twenty-five government-associated projects. The National Defense Commission asked the New School in the winter of 1939 to 1940 for analyses of the Nazi victories, and Washington organizations used intermediaries at the Rockefeller Foundation to assign projects to Graduate Faculty members who were still foreign nationals. The Board of Economic Warfare, the Foreign Economic Administration and the Social Science Research Council's Public Administration Committee made use of its research, the OSS regarded the New School as the best collection of German left-leaning intellectuals in the United States, and more than two hundred of its former students worked for the government during the war.¹⁴

Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service

A week after Pearl Harbor Speier sent the project's first report to the FBIS, the civilian unit of the Federal Communications Commission that monitored foreign radio. Harold Graves, the FBIS senior administrator since March 1941, had directed the Princeton Listening Center, which was launched in November 1939 with Rockefeller Foundation funding and which the service absorbed in June 1941; Graves forwarded Speier's reports and asked for more, and Lloyd Free, the director of the service, and Goodwin Watson, head of its Analysis Division, read his work "with the greatest of interest." Watson offered him the post of Senior Political Analyst, head of the Central European Section, in February 1942. On July 29, 1942, Nelson Rockefeller, then Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, wrote to the FCC chairman James Fly asking for a greater volume of verbatim transcripts from the service's Kingsville bureau for use in propaganda promoting hemispheric solidarity.¹⁵¹⁶

The FBI delayed his appointment for months. According to Speier's own letter to Kurt Riezler, investigators suspected him of "having been a dangerously subversive character" because he had published on Marx in Germany and "was not a Jew and yet left Germany in 1933"; a neighbor wrongly told them he travelled often to Germany. The Civil Service Commission informed him on May 26, 1942, two months after he entered the Analysis Division, that he had been rated eligible. His wife Lisa was Jewish.¹⁷ The Central European Section analyzed all broadcasts from Greater Germany, Scandinavia, Hungary and the Netherlands, and Speier personally examined every German-language broadcast. His section included Alexander George, Nathan Leites and the psychologist Henry Kellermann; George and Leites later followed him to RAND. In November 1942 Speier became Principal Political Analyst, which made him a vice president of the Analysis Division. Watson wrote of him on November 13, 1943: "I know of nobody in the United States whom I would willingly trade for him." Watson also praised his "extraordinarily good job of analysis" and "uncanny memory," and in July 1943 Speier declined an offer to join the Office of War Information.¹⁸¹⁹

On October 29, 1943, Speier wrote a memorandum predicting the content of Hitler's speech for the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch; seventeen of twenty-five predictions proved correct, and an OWI contact, Mark Abrams, passed the memorandum to Representative Joseph Martin and Senator Alexander Wiley, who delivered a radio broadcast taking most of its content from it. In May 1943 Watson sent FBIS director Robert Leigh a list of recruits for the section, all but one of them German exiles, among them Sigmund Neumann, Hans Simons and Arnold Wolfers; Leigh replied that he wanted "scholar[s] trained in American Universities."²⁰²¹

Dies and Cox

Representative Martin Dies, first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, accused three FBIS employees of "un-American beliefs": Watson, the Soviet specialist Frederick Schuman of Speier's section, and William E. Dodd Jr. of the Report Section. The CIA's staff historian Stephen Mercado writes that Dies may have been provoked by FBIS reports that his statements were being praised in Nazi Germany, which had drawn a public rebuke from Vice President Henry Wallace. In 1943 Congress, by a rider (Section 304) to the Urgent Deficiency Appropriation Act of 1943, halted the pay of Watson, Dodd and a third employee, Robert Morss Lovett, after a special subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee under John H. Kerr reported; the Supreme Court held the measure unconstitutional in United States v. Lovett (1946).²² Separately, Representative Eugene Cox of Georgia opened hearings against the FCC in January 1943 and charged that FBIS was "a glorified news agency that provided nothing of value to the military"; the Cox-Lea Committee submitted its final report on January 2, 1945, after concluding that the United States could not conduct an intelligent program for counteracting enemy propaganda without accurate knowledge of that propaganda. Schuman, who had joined FBIS from Williams College in October 1942, had resigned and returned to Williams before the 1943 cutoff. Watson and Dodd resigned a few days after the cutoff date of November 15, 1943, and Speier replaced Watson as Acting Chief Analyst, overseeing thirty people.²³ A National Archives records description of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service gives November 15, 1943 as the day Theodore Newcomb succeeded Watson as Director of the Analysis Division.²⁴ Bessner's note cites a letter from Newcomb to Colonel S. A. Greenwell of December 4, 1943 for Speier's replacing Watson as Acting Chief Analyst.²⁵

In February 1944 the appropriations committee cut 30 percent of the FBIS budget. Leigh's newsletter attributed the cut to Cox's opposition to the FCC and to the Dodd-Watson case, and William L. Langer of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch intervened for the service without result. By April 1944 most analysts had left the Central European Section, George and Kellermann going to the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, and Speier was left with "four inexperienced assistants." Leigh resigned in the summer of 1944.²⁶

Office of War Information

Speier transferred from FBIS to the OWI's Overseas Operations Branch on May 22, 1944, under Wallace Carroll, as head of the German Committee of Area One, and in December 1944 became Propaganda Policy Adviser for Germany, responsible for planning psychological warfare against Germany and long-range propaganda to be used inside it after defeat. He sat on the interdepartmental German Propaganda Policy Committee, attended the Overseas Planning Board and belonged to the Review Board, and worked with British officials in Washington. In April 1943 the Analysis Division and the OWI's Bureau of Research and Analysis of the Overseas Operations Branch had agreed that the OWI would use the division for analysis of radio broadcasts, and in May 1943 the division moved to OWI headquarters with Watson as its director, in offices contiguous with the branch Speier later joined. Bessner reports that Speier wrote many of the directives for broadcasts to Germany over the Voice of America, which Carroll signed. A central directive of July 1944, as quoted by Winkler, stated that "our propaganda offensive will run boldly in advance of our military offensive" and that "We shall proceed on the implicit assumption that the German will to resist can be broken and will be broken by next December."²⁷

Division for Occupied Areas

After the OWI closed, Speier acted as liaison between State and General Robert McClure's Information Control Division of the US military government, and visited Germany in October 1945. At Bad Homburg a weather delay put him in conversation with Assistant Secretary of State William Benton; an OWI cable of November 20, 1945, relayed Benton's view that Speier was "the best man OWI ever sent to Germany." State offered him a place on the planned Policy Planning Staff; he declined and instead became Acting Deputy Chief of the Division for Occupied Areas in January 1946, and from January 1947 its Associate (Acting) Chief, supervising about twenty-five staff. His paper on licensing political newspapers in the US zone was rejected by General Lucius Clay. He returned to the New School in September 1947, declining an offer to coordinate all information media for the military government in Berlin.²⁸

Return to the New School

Back at the New School for 1947 and 1948 he was elected to found a Division of International Studies. In October 1943 Albert Salomon asked him to join the council of the Institute of World Affairs. He told Salomon and Adolph Lowe that he "would like to be helpful, if I am wanted," and after "repeated inquiries" never received an answer about his duties.²⁹ In February 1944 he withdrew his declaration to serve on the council "in principle" pending further information.²⁹ Daniel Bessner describes the Institute as "a research center funded by Doris Duke," the Institute's funding note names Independent Aid among its donors, and the Duke University guide to the Independent Aid records states that Duke had "limited direct involvement" with that foundation.³⁰ Bessner states that he came to believe he was being "used as a pawn in ridiculous faculty politics."³¹ The Graduate Faculty extended his leave of absence in 1948, 1949, 1950 and 1951 after he joined RAND.³¹

RAND and the Social Science Division

In September 1947 Project RAND held a Conference of Social Scientists in New York to find leaders for its planned Social Science and Economics divisions. A committee of Herbert Goldhamer, Olaf Helmer, Frederick Mosteller, Leo Rosten, W. Allen Wallis, Warren Weaver and Samuel Wilks had begun considering candidates in the summer of 1946. Speier came to RAND's attention through the screenwriter Leo Rosten, whom he had known at the OWI, where Rosten had been the liaison between Washington and Hollywood; he had not heard of RAND and asked State Department colleagues whether it was genuine. The thirty-five participants included RAND's Frank Collbohm, Olaf Helmer and John D. Williams, Charles Dollard of the Carnegie Corporation, Donald Young of the Social Science Research Council, Kris, Franz Neumann, Harold Lasswell, Bernard Brodie, Ruth Benedict, Pendleton Herring of the Carnegie Corporation, and Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation, who told the group that every piece of knowledge in sociology, economics and political science would be forged into "weapons" for the defense of democracy. Collbohm told the group that the Air Force "makes available to RAND information in other fields, intelligence, plans, etc." Speier told the conference that the "fundamental task of American foreign policy [is] to stem Communism anywhere without at the same time playing into the hands of Fascism." Speier consulted for RAND from May 1948 and directed the Social Science Division from July 1948. At his insistence it was based in Washington until 1957.³²

RAND became an independent corporation on May 14, 1948. H. Rowan Gaither and Frank Collbohm arranged the separation from Douglas Aircraft with a $100,000 interest-free loan and a $300,000 credit guarantee from Henry Ford II of the Ford Foundation, later raised to $1,000,000; the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were among RAND's other early financial supporters.³³ Speier hired former wartime colleagues, among them Alexander George, Nathan Leites and Phil Davison, recruited the nuclear strategists Bernard Brodie and William Kaufmann, and used Leon Gouré, John Herz and Otto Kirchheimer as consultants. Speier held a "Q" clearance, the highest nuclear clearance, and visited the North American Air Defense Command and Strategic Air Command headquarters. He opened a RAND office in Wiesbaden. In October 1960 RAND's five divisions were split into eleven departments; Herbert Goldhamer took over the social science side and Speier joined the Research Council, which he chaired in 1961 and 1962; from 1958 to 1962 he was also a consultant to the USAF Scientific Advisory Board.³⁴

Division publications under Speier included Nathan Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951) and RM-365, "The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare," by Jean M. Hungerford, dated April 14, 1950 (Bessner gives April 15), a Project RAND research memorandum marked as a working paper. It surveys superstition in wartime Germany (astrologers, fortune-tellers, crystal-gazers and chain letters, with a Security Service report of May 21, 1942 on chain letters translated in an appendix), in other belligerent countries and in the postwar Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and reports Hitler's and Goebbels's reliance on omens and fortune-tellers, Rudolf Hess's interest in the occult, and a file the FBI was said to have kept on wartime astrologers suspected of being Axis agents. Its section on deliberate manipulation records German agents posing as astrologers in France in 1940, Goebbels's 1942 diary entries on counter-horoscopes and on a plan by Berndt for occultist propaganda, the OSS black radio program Operation Hermit, which used astrology and fortune-telling in broadcasts beamed to Nanking, and British Army magicians in Italy. It concludes that attempts to manipulate superstition would probably be most successful against peasants, old people and the less educated workers of the Soviet Union and its satellites, proposes the use of astrology and fortune-telling to predict dire events likely to befall the enemy and of chain letters that would burden the enemy postal system, and lists questions on timing, on word-of-mouth rumors introduced by agents, and on boomerang effects. Its sources included the FCC's weekly reports on Nazi propaganda for 1943 and early 1944, the Central European Analysis reports of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, and Kris and Speier's German Radio Propaganda; it states that the files of "black" propagandists were not examined.³⁵ After the outbreak of the Korean War a group from the division including Goldhamer, George, Davison, Ewald Schnitzer and a Hungerford (Bessner writes "Jay Hungerford"; RM-365 is credited to Jean M. Hungerford, and records found do not establish whether they are the same person) visited Korea; from August 24, 1951, Goldhamer advised the American delegation at the Kaesong armistice talks and circulated Speier's memoranda and Leites's book to the negotiators. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy was reported to carry the Operational Code on helicopter trips to the conference site.³⁶

Speier also sat on the Human Relations and Morale subcommittee of the Defense Department's Research and Development Board's Committee on Human Resources, the body that influenced which communication studies were funded.³⁷

Psychological Warfare Reconsidered

Truman announced the "Campaign of Truth" in April 1950, after the senator William Benton had called in March for a "Marshall Plan of Ideas." On April 10, 1950, Speier addressed the State Department's Foreign Service Institute on "Propaganda and Its Setting," warning against what he called "the democratic fallacy in propaganda," the belief that power always resides in the masses. In "Psychological Warfare Reconsidered" (RAND P-196, February 5, 1951, reissued in 1951 as a Foreign Service Institute pamphlet) he defined the aim of psychological warfare as "deviant, politically relevant behavior," meaning action that weakens the ability of elites to govern and command, wrote that the population at large "is no rewarding target of conversion propaganda from abroad," and wrote that political warfare "can therefore attack the cooperation among elite members," which depends on "a modicum of mutual trust." Deception, he wrote, is "aimed at creating erroneous estimates of enemy capabilities or intentions," and desertions of elite members, though rare, "provide great opportunities to political warfare"; he cited the defection of Rudolf Hess, which he wrote the British had not exploited. Bessner reads the first of these papers as a rejection of the Campaign of Truth. In a 1950 essay Speier wrote that "popular opinion should [not] govern the actions of governments" in a crisis.³⁸

Project Troy

Barrett, head of the State Department's public affairs office, organized a group of experts, Speier among them, in April 1950 to discuss psychological strategy, tactics and organization; Barrett later claimed that he had drawn on the conclusions of that symposium in helping to prepare Truman's Campaign of Truth speech. The State Department then convened Project Troy after RCA chairman David Sarnoff complained to President Harry Truman about the Voice of America; State's James Webb then approached MIT's president James Killian and dean John Burchard to host a study of Soviet jamming. Speier was among the roughly twenty participants, who met in Washington in October 1950 and in Cambridge, Massachusetts until January 1951 and included Lloyd Berkner, Jerome Bruner, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward Purcell, Merle Tuve, Jerome Wiesner and Robert Morison, a physician of the Rockefeller Foundation. The report to Secretary of State Dean Acheson is dated February 1, 1951, and Bessner records Acheson's receipt of it on February 15. A State Department progress report of March 1951 describes the project as MIT's assembly of "30 of the nation's top scientists and other experts to explore all means" of penetrating the Iron Curtain, conventional and unconventional. Robert Hooker of the Policy Planning Staff told Paul Nitze on March 26, 1951, that the report "deserves the most serious consideration" and recorded its recommendations to stimulate "mutual distrust" among Soviet leaders "by artificial means, bogus letters, etc." and to increase defection. The report was anonymous; Daniel Bessner infers from the similarity to Speier's writings that Speier was a primary author of its sections on psychological warfare against the Soviet Union.³⁹

The project was followed by CENIS, MIT's Center for International Studies, which began operating in the fall of 1951 and whose first director, from February 1952, was Max Millikan, an economist who had spent a year at the CIA.⁴⁰ A CIA historian's note of an interview with Millikan on March 5, 1952 records that Millikan "participated in a 'contract study,' State and MIT," identified in the note as the Troy Project, whose recommendation to the State Department "had considerable to do with the creation of the PSB."⁴¹ The Psychological Strategy Board's directive PSB D-31 of November 26, 1952, issued by a panel of State, Defense, CIA and PSB personnel (the board for which Speier would consult), called for increasing suspicion within the communist system "to the point of systematic removal or elimination of personnel in important and effective positions."⁴²

Bessner argues that the Troy report's Soviet chapters carried Speier's central question into the government's planning. The report began by asking "What is the nature of the people to whom the United States' messages are and ought to be directed?" and answered that "The immediate object of our political warfare is to reduce the Russian power or will to destroy. Control of the power is, today, concentrated in the hands of a little group of Soviet leaders."⁴³ Bessner says that the report's declarations on psychological warfare against the Soviet Union, read with Speier's own writings, make clear that he was "a primary author of these sections."⁴⁴ His ideas, Bessner writes, "came to influence the tactical directives of PSB D-31."⁴⁴ When Speier learned that Millikan was seeking Ford Foundation money for the Center for International Studies, he visited Millikan in February 1952 and "convinced him otherwise" about the center's direction, according to Bessner.⁴⁵

Psychological Warfare in Germany

At the request of Shepard Stone of the High Commission for Occupied Germany, Speier and Wallace Carroll visited Germany in autumn 1950 as State Department consultants and delivered on December 1, 1950, "Psychological Warfare in Germany," whose primary recommendation was to "destroy Soviet power in Germany." The report called for propaganda to create the belief that an East German resistance movement was ready to fight, and described later phases of "infiltration of selected Soviet zone organizations, ... sabotage, abduction, direct action against selected, high placed functionaries." After Stalin's note of March 1952 the Psychological Strategy Board's directive PSB D-21 (October 9, 1952) set out tasks including disaffection and defection in the Soviet Zone and non-attributable psychological, political and economic harassment; a later implementation report records financial assistance to a West Berlin publisher to distribute 50,000 fake copies of the East German labor paper Tribuene.⁴⁶

The Ford Foundation and the Behavioral Sciences Center

Gaither, who chaired the Ford Foundation study committee of 1949 and had arranged RAND's Ford loan, asked Speier and Donald Marquis in late 1950 for advice on the foundation's Program Five. Speier recommended Bernard Berelson as its director; with Marquis and Berelson he presented in December 1951 a plan proposing an institute for advanced training in the behavioral sciences, a research center on international communication and a study of the stability of totalitarian governments. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences opened at Stanford in September 1954 under Ralph Tyler. Speier spent 1956 and 1957 there as a fellow.⁴⁷

For the MIT program, Speier visited Millikan in February 1952, and in the spring of 1952 Ford trustees granted CENIS $875,000 for a research program in international communication. Speier chaired the planning committee (Bruner, Carroll, Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Shils, Ithiel de Sola Pool), whose June 1953 report recommended study of "communications to and from the wielders of power and influence"; Pool became the program's research director after Speier declined the position.⁴⁸

Quantico I

Nelson Rockefeller, then Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Cold War Planning, invited Speier on May 25, 1955. The Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel met at the Marine Corps Schools from June 5 to 10, 1955, with Henry Kissinger and members of the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, the Operations Coordinating Board and the National Security Council attending some sessions. Its report lists Speier as of the RAND Corporation. Its chairman was Walt Rostow of MIT, whom the editorial note in the Foreign Relations volume designates "the panel chairman";⁴⁹ the other members were Frederick Dunn, C. D. Jackson, Ellis Johnson, Paul Linebarger, Max Millikan, Philip Mosely, George Pettee, Stefan Possony, Speier and Charles A. H. Thomson. On June 13, 1955, Rockefeller sent Allen Dulles a copy (Copy No. 42), thanking him for the participation of members of his agency in the panel discussions; on July 25, 1955, Richard Bissell, Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence for Planning and Coordination, sent the Assistant Director for National Estimates a memorandum drawing attention to Ellis Johnson's supporting paper on the requirements for the United States and NATO to win the arms race. Its report, stamped Secret, recommends proposals including "a proposed agreement for mutual inspection of military installations, forces, and armaments" and a convention on the right of aircraft to fly over any country. Speier's memorandum for the panel held that the Soviets would use the Geneva summit for advantage in "the international struggle for power" and that the United States should "force them to retreat." Rockefeller handed Eisenhower a note recommending mutual aerial inspection on July 6 and sent him a memorandum, "Psychological Strategy at Geneva," on July 11. On July 21, 1955, Eisenhower proposed Open Skies, and Rockefeller cabled panel members that they "should be reading newspapers tonight with great pride and satisfaction." Speier did not attend Quantico II (September 25 to 29, 1955), because he was in Germany for RAND; Kissinger attended in his place, and Rockefeller became Kissinger's patron. According to Bessner, Speier never again consulted for the executive branch.⁵⁰

The Political Game

With Herbert Goldhamer, Speier developed a free-form political simulation, played four times at RAND in 1955 and 1956 and presented to the Social Science Research Council, the Army War College and West Point. Players took national roles, wrote justifications for each move and met random events refereed by staff; State Department officials joined the fourth game. In 1960 CENIS held the game POLEX II, the Joint War Games Agency adopted it, and in September and October 1961 two Berlin crisis games directed by Thomas Schelling were played by officials including McGeorge Bundy, Alain Enthoven, Carl Kaysen, Henry Kissinger, Robert Komer and John McNaughton's aide Henry Rowen. Kaysen briefed President Kennedy on the results.⁵¹

Later Career

Speier remained in RAND's Research Council until 1968, wrote on West Germany and Berlin (Divided Berlin, 1961), held a Senior Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1964 at the request of John J. McCloy, and left for a professorship in sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1969. He later edited with Lasswell and Daniel Lerner the three-volume Propaganda and Communication in World History (1979 to 1980), and was named professor emeritus of the New School's Graduate Faculty. He died in Sarasota, Florida.⁵²