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By Root 757 0

by preconceptions, by long-implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood. When President McKinley had to decide whether to annex the Philippines in 1898, he went down on his knees at midnight, according to his own account, and “prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” He was accordingly guided to conclude “that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace to do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ died.”

Actually, the main impulse at work was the pressure of the “manifest destiny” school for a steppingstone across the Pacific, but the mental baggage of a President in the 1890s required him to act in terms of Almighty God and the White Man’s Burden, just as the mental fix of his successors in our time has required them to react in terms of anti-communism. Closer observers than Almighty God could have informed McKinley that the Filipinos had no strong desire to be Christianized or civilized or exchange Spanish rule for American, but rather to gain their independence. This being overlooked, we soon found ourselves engaged not in civilizing but in a cruel and bloody war of repression, much to our embarrassment. Failure to take into account the nature of the other party often has an awkward result.

The same failure afflicted President Wilson, who had a mental fix opposite from McKinley’s, in favor of progressivism, reform, and the New Freedom. So fixed was his mind that when the reactionary General Huerta carried out a coup in Mexico in 1913, Wilson became obsessed by the idea that it devolved upon him to tear the usurper off the backs of the Mexican people so that Mexico might be ruled by the consent of the governed. “My passion is for the submerged eighty-five percent who are struggling to be free,” he said, but the reality was that the submerged eighty-five percent were cowering in their huts unable to distinguish a difference between Huerta and his rival Carranza. Wilson, however, sent in the Marines to seize Vera Cruz, an intervention that not only appalled him by costing American lives, but succeeded only in deepening the turmoil in Mexico and drawing the United States into further intervention two years later against that man of the people, Pancho Villa. Political passion is a good thing but even better if it is an informed passion.

Roosevelt’s bias too was in favor of the progressive. George Kennan has told how, when the Embassy staff in Moscow began reporting the facts of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, revealing a tyranny as terrible as the Czars’, the President discounted the reports as the product of what he considered typical State Department striped-pants mentality. It was not only inconvenient but disturbing to be in receipt of reports that would have required a change of attitude toward the Soviet Union (foreign policy obeys Newton’s law of inertia: It keeps on doing what it is doing unless acted on by an irresistible force). Rather than be discomfited by these disclosures, which Roosevelt’s own bias caused him to believe were biased, the Russian Division was closed down, its library scattered, and its chief reassigned. This desire not to listen to unhappy truths—“Don’t confuse me with facts”—is only human and widely shared by chiefs of state. Was not the bearer of bad news often killed by ancient kings? Chiang Kai-shek’s vindictive reaction to unpleasant news was such that his ministers gradually ceased to bring him any, with the result that he lived in a fantasy.

Your reports must also pass through a screen of psychological factors at the receiving end: temperament, or private ambitions, or the fear of not appearing masterful, or a ruler’s inner sense that his manhood is at stake. (This is a male problem that fortunately