Sherman Kent

Imponderables is an interesting concept.

I think Sherman Kent was the one who proposed it in this book.

But we have others at that time who George Kennan also used that in a different context.

Imponderables refer to things that cannot be measured very well.

Yeah.

You know, from my standpoint as an intelligence professional, I've always been taught that going back to Sherman Kent, early pioneer of modern intelligence, post-World War II CIA guy, you know, he talked about words of estimated probability.

And to me, that goes back into, you know, Klaus has talked about war happens.

We're familiar with fog and friction, but he also talked about war happens in a kind of twilight where you're A commander still has to make a decision amidst uncertainty.

There was no introspection at the CIA.

The fact that people like Sherman Kent and Dick Hoyer's Fantastic intellects were nevertheless the only ones 50 years later that were being honored or being respected as leaders of the tradecraft.

That is not a good thing.

But that, you know, so I don't I don't I don't know how you could have made it go better.

You talk about a handful of scholars turned spies in Book and Dagger, and I wanted to zero in on two of them just for the purposes of this conversation.

So let's start with Sherman Kent.

How would you describe Kent as a person? And I would love if in your answer, you could share his experience of a certain natural disaster in New Haven, Connecticut.

So Sherman Kent is a wonderful character for this purpose.

If you're writing a movie, generally you need to have a hero who is the only person who can solve this particular problem.

And I do think that Sherman Kent was almost the only person who could solve the problem that faced the OSS, which is that the military had never worked with professors and librarians before.

And they just didn't think that the work these tweed-wearing scholars came up with could help them to win a war.

Sherman Kent, he was a historian at Yale before he joined the OSS, and he was actually the perfect man for his job, because his job entailed in part trying to convince the military to listen to what these Tweedy professors were saying.