3- Leader Personality Assessments in
Support of Government Policy
Jerrold M. PostThe provenance of the U.S. government effort to apply at-a-distance
leader personality assessment in support of policy can be traced to
the studies of Adolf Hitler. The very word studies (plural) will per-
plex most readers, since until recently the only notable, and pre-
sumed first, such study was that prepared by the psychoanalyst Wal-
ter Langer, brother of the noted historian William Langer (Langer
1972). Declassified in 1969, the study has been published under the
title The Mind of Adolf Hitler. Commissioned in the spring of 1943
by "Wild Bill" Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the
study was completed in December of that year.
But this was not the first study of Hitler commissioned by the
OSS. An earlier study, simply titled Adolf Hitler, the author or
authors of which are unspecified, was completed a year earlier, on
December 3, 1942. It was only recently declassified, on May 18,
2000, under the provisions of the War Crimes Disclosure Act of
2000.
In contrast to the later study, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, the first
study, Adolf Hitler, is for the most part descriptive and not analytic.
Indeed, it is rather incoherent, jumping back and forth from descrip-
tion to analysis, with no apparent rhyme or reason; it would not be
clear to a policy official what to make of this study or how to employ
it. That may be the reason for commissioning the later study by
Langer, who was apparently not aware of or privy to the earlier study.
Because Adolf Hitler has not previously been published, as a matter of
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